Report: Gawker Media Staff Considering Walkout Following Article Deletions

Gawker Media employees at sites such as Deadspin and Jezebel are reportedly unhappy with their new owners, Univision, who have deleted several articles involved in ongoing litigation cases.

According to Mediaite, six older articles have been removed from Gawker Media sites by Univision, an act that has resulted in multiple Gawker Media employees threatening a walkout. The vote to remove these posts was passed last Friday.

Gawker Media executive John Cook complained, “Disappearing true posts about public figures simply because they have been targeted by a lawyer who conspired with a vindictive billionaire to destroy this company is an affront to the very editorial ethos that has made us successful enough to be worth acquiring.”

The posts that were removed were:

1. The Inventor of Email Did Not Invent Email? (Gizmodo)

2. Corruption, Lies, and Death Threats: The Crazy Story of the Man Who Pretended To Invent Email (Gizmodo)

3. Man Acquitted of Sexual Assault Sues Blog for Calling Him Serial Rapist(Jezebel)

4. Wait, Did Clowntroll Blogger Chuck Johnson Shit On The Floor One Time?(Deadspin)

5. Mitch Williams Ejected from Child’s Baseball Game for Arguing, Cursing(Deadspin)

6. Witnesses: Mitch Williams Called Child ‘A Pussy,’ Ordered Beanball(Deadspin)

All of these articles are currently the focus of legal battles, in some cases in relation to claims of defamation and in others claims of copyright infringement. On Monday the Gawker Media Editorial Union released a lengthy piece on Gizmodo decrying the deletions.

“We condemn this action by Univision’s executives in the strongest possible terms. It sets an alarming precedent both for our relationship with our new owners and for the business of journalism as a whole. It is unacceptable for a publisher to delete legitimate and true news stories for business reasons,” said the editorial team.

Mediate claims that an anonymous source from within Gawker Media has told them that an emergency union meeting was held to discuss the organisation and planning of a walkout ahead of a meeting with Isaac Lee, a Univision Executive. They have also apparently considered going into “safe mode” in which they would only write “weak or friendly articles about the world.”

Lucas Nolan is a conservative who regularly contributes articles on censorship and free speech to Breitbart. Follow him on Twitter@LucasNolan_ or email him at lucas@yiannopoulos.net