What Thiel and the Silicon Valley power players who have sided with him get wrong is that Valleywag was never fundamentally about bullying, though it may have seemed so to those who found their names in its headlines. To bully is to push around those weaker than you. Valleywag, with occasional exceptions, saw itself as punching up. Its scoops and gibes were intended not to intimidate but to puncture the valley’s utopian veneer. Its editorial philosophy was about tearing back the masks and capes in which Thiel and other members of Silicon Valley’s tech elite tend to cloak themselves. It was about calling out hypocrisy in a realm where it runs rampant. It was about regarding our tech and business overlords with the same skepticism we typically reserve for politicians, because Valleywag’s core insight was that they’re just as powerful (and just as petty and flawed).
[…]
It’s true that the tabloid media sometimes seem to enjoy the same sort of undeserved impunity that they deplore in the targets of their opprobrium. Thiel sees himself as attempting to remedy that. But by doing it in secret, in the most heavy-handed way possible, and by means available only to the very wealthiest, he has demonstrated that the impunity he and his cohorts enjoy by dint of their personal fortunes is both greater and more dangerous than anything Valleywag could write.
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Will Oremus, Silicon Valley Needs a Valleywag. Peter Thiel Just Proved It.
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/145098890132
