'Conspiracy' book review: The fall of a media empire

Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue

Author: Ryan Holiday

Profile Books

Pages 319; Rs 499

For anyone associated with or interested in journalism, it is a moving experience to watch The Post. The movie has the hallmarks of its maker, Steven Spielberg, as it shows a group of men, and a woman, standing up for what is right against a larger, considerably more powerful adversary. The Post, starring Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee, the fabled executive editor of The Washington Post, and Meryl Streep as the newspaper’s owner, Katharine Graham, brings back the glory days of journalism. It has a remarkable last scene, showing a flash-light wielding Frank Willis.

Mr Willis was the security guard who owns the first, largely forgotten, act in the unearthing of the Watergate scandal of 1972 that eventually led to the resignation of a United States president. By bringing Mr Willis in its last scene, The Post establishes itself as the prequel to the 1976 movie by Alan J Pakula, All the President’s Men, which shows how The Washington Post exposed the Watergate scandal. In an interview with The Guardian, Mr Spielberg called the 1976 movie “arguably the greatest newspaper movie ever made”. It certainly captures arguably the greatest feat of newspaper reporting.

One day, the book in my hand, Conspiracy, could well become a movie. However, it is unlikely to show the glory days of journalism. But that would make it no less gripping.

Why reading this book made me think of Watergate is because it uses that 70s show to set its context. After the burglary in the sixth-floor office of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex in Washington, The Washington Post carried a series of stories exposing what would become the biggest political scandal in the United States’ history. President Richard M Nixon could not suppress those stories, and could not subdue Ms Graham.

That illustrates how invincible, indestructible, and irrepressible the media could be. 

No longer. Conspiracy is the story of how the modern media can be subdued. And that is ironical.

Today, the media has many more tools at its command, handed to it by the advancement of technology. The Post shows a reporter scurrying out of his office to call a source from a payphone. Before he dials the number, he checks his pockets to see if he has enough coins.

There are about a dozen better, faster, simpler, and more encrypted ways now to suss out a source. But the media is no longer as invincible. Of that, the most telling proof was provided by Peter Thiel, when he brought down Gawker Media.

At Mr Thiel’s prompting and with his backing, Terry Bollea and his attorney, Charles Harder, sued Gawker Media, the gossip and entertainment website, and its founder and editor, Nick Denton, for invasion of privacy, emotional distress, and other things that sadden people these days. Gawker had published tapes of Bollea, better known as show wrestler Hulk Hogan, having sex with his best friend’s wife. In 2016, a jury found Gawker guilty and asked it to pay $140 million in damages. That drove Gawker to declare bankruptcy and brought its media empire down.

The victory for Mr Hogan was sweet revenge earned by nine years of planning by Mr Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor who is a bona fide legend for his role in Facebook and PayPal. In 2007, a blog post owned by Gawker had “outed” Mr Thiel as gay.

In writing this book, Ryan Holiday has lived the dream of all non-fiction writers. He did not merely have to rely on the reams and megabytes of coverage the case generated. He got considerable access to both protagonists: Mr Thiel and Mr Denton. Both seem to have opened their hearts out to him, as well as the doors of their New York apartments. And yet, Mr Holiday, in his writing, does not seem unduly beholden to either, and has come out with an authoritative and balanced book that is gripping. More importantly, it does not indulge in hero worship — the pitfall of many a work of non-fiction that depends on a particular person for its source material.

Interestingly, Mr Holiday presents a picture in which both Mr Denton and Mr Thiel are, in many ways, similar and could have gotten along famously had their paths crossed in a different setting. “Both foreign born, both immigrants who chased the American dream. Both gay men with elite educations. Both free-market libertarians who distrust the ‘system’. Both builders-entrepreneurs. These are two men who get pitched the same deals, who have money in the same banks, who occupy the same rarefied air of the 1 per cent.”

This is a story befitting the world we live in, one in which the big media battles are about things very different from what All the President’s Men and The Post fought. Another highlight of this world is that the media is no longer an impregnable fortress. And somehow you are left wondering whether the first — the battles the media chooses to fight and the ways in which it fights those – is somehow connected to its vulnerability.