New York Times Slams Gawker For Hunting Down Shepard Smith's Boyfriend

David Carr writes at the New York Times:

What if Gawker tried to out an anchor at Fox News and no one cared? Cue the innuendo, the salacious follow-ups and the specter of mainstream media outlets picking up the item with a pair of tweezers. Except after the post was published, there was nothing but crickets, other than a piece in Slate wondering aloud why Gawker had bothered. Otherwise, there was no significant pickup, and no broad expression of outrage. We know why: The culture has moved on. People see other people who happen to be gay at their workplaces, in their schools and on their televisions. Somewhere along the way, what was once a scarlet letter became just another consonant in the personal résumé. And now that gay marriage is a fact of life, a person’s sexual orientation is not only not news, it’s not very interesting.

Carr continues:

The frisson of the Gawker tidbit was supposed to derive from the contextual equation — Fox News + gay = hypocrisy — but the channel has hardly been of one voice on the issue and there is no indication that it has any special obsession with sexual orientation, like, say, Gawker. From what I can tell, Fox News has done a decent job of representing the broad range of conservative views on same-sex marriage and seems to have, along with the rest of the country, evolved. Bill O’Reilly, who once suggested that gay marriage could lead to nuptials between humans and turtles, has come around to the point that in March, he said he had been convinced that the government should not decide who should marry.

While Carr is correct in that Gawker's piece has generated relatively little attention in the teabag-o-sphere, I'd chalk that up to those sites providing cover for their holy news channel. And Fox's "decent job" of covering same-sex marriage usually involves giving air time to vile hate group leaders. (Something CNN is guilty of as well, not incidentally.) Otherwise, I agree that I can't see the point in hounding some kid who has done nothing worse than taking a low level job at Fox News.