XPost: alt.politics.homosexuality, sac.politics, alt.journalism
XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
The keyboard and the damage done. Earlier this week, Nico Hines,
an editor for The Daily Beast who is stationed in Rio de Janeiro
for the 2016 Summer Olympics, did a very stupid and malevolent
thing: He endangered the careers and/or lives of innocent men
for the purpose of a worthless piece of journalism, if we should
even call it that.
If you have not yet read the details—The Daily Beast has since
scrubbed the piece and inserted an apology in its place—Hines
got access to the Olympic Village, then went on Grindr, the gay
dating app, and lured male athletes in search of companionship
into either contacting him or meeting him.
Hines, whose physical features fall far short of a bronze medal,
boasted that he was able to land three dates. He never expressly
named anyone, but provided heights, weights and home countries
of these men. Mark Joseph Stern, a writer at Slate, noted that
“after several minutes of Googling, I surmised the identities of
five of the gay athletes Hines described.”
That is extremely dangerous, because some of these athletes may
have represented countries where homosexuality is illegal. There
are actually nations that marched in last Friday’s opening
ceremony, such as Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, where it is
punishable by death. None of these facts appeared to deter
Hines, who is heterosexual; he is married and has a child.
Whether any of the athletes that Hines exposed will suffer dire
consequences as the result of his shitty and overtly homophobic
(“No prizes for guessing that Grindr proved more of an instant
hookup success than Bumble or Tinder”) story is beside the
point. First of all, that heterosexual or homosexual Olympic
athletes—who on their worst bad hair day are exponentially more
attractive than most humans will ever be—are sexually active has
never been breaking news.
Second, Hines pursued his story in an aggressively unethical
manner. By going on Grindr, he was posing as a man who wanted to
hook up for gay sex. That he absolves himself by writing that he
never claimed to be gay—and by stating that if anyone asked who
he was (a question likely inspired by his un-Olympian physique),
he told them that he’s a journalist—is disingenuous at best.
Hines, a grown man, appears to believe that the only lies are
the ones you tell.
Journalists do not automatically stick up for one another. At
the center of many controversial issues, ones that assume
greater import than whether incredibly attractive humans are
attracted to one another, is the question of loyalty versus
integrity. It’s the question that many Republican politicians
find themselves grappling with right now in regards to endorsing
Donald Trump, for example. Journalists—those worth reading,
anyway—always place integrity above loyalty in their hierarchy
of values.
For that reason, it’s incumbent upon journalists to expose the
mendacity and depravity rooted in Hines’s insidious, smug and
condescending effort. It smells worse than Guanabara Bay on a
humid, 95-degree day. It’s important for the journalistic
village to condemn Hines’s attack on the Olympic Village, for
that is exactly what it was. Who Nico Hines is to his wife and
child is something I cannot know. As a journalist, however, he
has outed himself as scum.
Ahem, ALL leftwingers are scum.
http://www.newsweek.com/daily-beasts-exposure-gay-olympic- athletes-rio-wasnt-just-unethical-it-was-489905
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