One of our favorite newspaper stories is about the editor of the Washington Times, Smith Hempstone, who was asked what it was like to work for the Times’s proprietor, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Supposedly said Hempstone: “It’s not the first time I’ve worked for a publisher who thought he was God.”
The story may — or may not — be apocryphal. We thought of it when the jury found against Gawker and its founder, Nick Denton, in the case in which they were sued for airing a tape of the wrestler Hulk Hogan in an act of fornication. Mr. Hogan’s lawyer accused Gawker’s Mr. Denton of “playing God with other people’s lives.”
This strikes us as a serious moment in the evolution of journalism onto the World Wide Web.
Read the whole thing.