Covering Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker changed the course of Maria Bustillos’ journalism career.
Back in 2016, Bustillos was in the Tampa courtroom on assignment for the former news site Death & Taxes when a jury awarded Hogan a $140 million judgement against the site. Hogan, a former professional wrestler who passed away last month, sued the digital gossip rag for publishing a sex tape of him and his friend’s wife — a verdict that would ultimately lead to Gawker’s bankruptcy and dissolution.
“There were all these journalists there, and none of us actually realized what we were looking at, because we didn't realize that Peter Thiel had been paying for it,” Bustillos said. Weeks later, it emerged that Thiel, the billionaire tech mogul, had funded the lawsuit to the tune of millions — a seeming act of retribution against Gawker for publishing articles that were critical of him.
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It was a formative moment for Bustillos, bringing into focus just how precarious American media was. Whether targeted by right-wing ideologues by Thiel, or struggling to find sustainable business models in the digital age, media is subject to the mismanagement of corporate owners who are often more concerned with maximizing profits than doing good journalism. In the following years, she watched news outlet after news outlet shutter and tens of thousands of her fellow journalists get laid off. Moreover, the style of early-internet anti-establishment writing she once gleefully devoured on The Awl and Gawker began to disappear.
So in 2023 Bustillos and a cooperative of 60 writers launched Flaming Hydra, “a new publication for all kinds of people who like to read and write whatever we want … like the old internet used to be.” The site promised to have no editor in chief and to be worker-owned without any investors or advertisers, or any other “malign forces” that could control what was published.
In this edition of Depth Perception, we speak with Bustillos, a lead editor at Flaming Hydra, about what makes the site work, about the pitfalls of “objectivity” in journalism, and how a free internet is worth fighting for. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. —Christopher Mathias
Can you talk a little bit about the name Flaming Hydra, and how you arrived at that name?
A Hydra is hard to kill… It’s a many-headed beast and we're all breathing fire. So that was our first sort of tagline “on fire and hard to kill.”
Something I noticed on Flaming Hydra’s “About” section — you mention wanting it to feel like the old internet. Can you talk a little bit about what the old internet felt like?
Everything was very DIY to start. Anybody could start a blog, and a lot of the most popular blogs to start with were just one person having lunch, or raising a child, and it wasn't edited. It was this very immediate and human and not flattened out or corporatized or overly sanitized. People were rude and they said things that weren’t necessarily stuff you'd say in polite company, or at a dinner party. It was personal…and that's the feeling that sort of disappeared later with corporatized ad tech. The internet stopped having individual voices of actual people who were discernibly human, and now in the age of AI, that's like 1,000 times worse.
I feel one of the most valuable things that worker-owned media organizations like ours is that we're all starving to death. Nobody has enough money to actually do this, but it's kind of like we don't care. We just keep going.
I've heard you use the term “people to people” model before. Can you just elaborate on what you mean by “people to people”?
In earlier mass media movements — like when radio came on the scene, or when television came on the scene — these were magical, groundbreaking moments, how people were able to join together and understand the world. I remember reading about when “I Love Lucy” was a hugely popular TV show, when she gave birth…the entire nation was watching this thing, and they all went and used the bathroom at once. And so there were all these water shortages, allegedly.
When the internet came, it was like that, but then multiplied into a new dimension. Because not only was everybody watching the same thing, everybody could respond to the same things together… All of us could watch a hamster dance or something, and we would all talk about it at once…it became evident that the world could talk together at once.
As the corporatization of the internet strangled that and encroached on it, there became fewer and fewer places where an individual person could just come and talk to other individual people who are all looking at and responding to the same sort of phenomena. Like on Facebook you can be in your little bubble with your friends at Facebook, but as soon as they start to control an algorithmic feed, you don't control what you see.
The whole concept of being able to look at something and then be able to reach out into the world — and this is the really great thing that Twitter was and that BlueSky is becoming — you can find anybody. You can reach out into the world and say, “What is happening in Tokyo right now?” And somebody will look out the window and freaking tell you. I mean that's insane, that's incredible.
There will be other leaders of Flaming Hydra eventually, but for myself now, that's a key issue: to honor and expand on that idea that anybody can talk, anybody can be in it. I hope to create that same feeling where anybody in the world that wants to come and read and respond will do so and create a community that expands way beyond what's actually published.
A now-and-then look at people of Japanese descent who were detained in the United States during World War II. Colorphotos by Morgan Lieberman, black-and-white snapshots courtesy of the survivors.
In 1942, under the shadow of World War II, the U.S. government invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify the forced removal and incarceration of more than 125,000 people of Japanese descent — most of whom were American citizens. The orders from White House uprooted and split families, causing them to abandon their homes, businesses, and communities.
In "The Age of Incarceration," photojournalist Morgan Lieberman captures the testimony and experiences of nine of the last survivors of Japanese American incarceration, 80 years after the war ended and these people were released. Reflecting on their experience of a childhood spent in detention, this series of portraits and interviews shares stories not just of injustice, but of resilience, documenting what they endured, what they’ve carried with them the rest of their lives, and what about America’s past their country still hasn’t reckoned with. Read it today at age-of-incarceration.longlead.com.
You mentioned being at the Hulk Hogan-Gawker trial, and learning afterwards about Peter Thiel’s involvement. Obviously that trial was a long time ago now, but when you see how powerful Peter Thiel is now in our politics, what is it like to see his name in the news all the time?
It's both harrowing and I feel like justice is being served, because this is a clusterfuck that these people are responsible for. And you could see it coming from there — I mean the whole idea that a single person would be so venal as to conceal his involvement in bringing down a publication that had written things he didn't like is so anti-democratic and so contemptible to me, and watching the wheels fall off now feels like it was inevitable.
This guy's values [are] not the values of the United States. Most of the people in this country do not want a couple of rich guys to be deciding how we're all going to live and what we can read, and who gets to speak and who doesn't. Say what you like about Gawker — maybe they didn't always have the best news judgment and I can imagine certain decisions I might have made differently myself — but for the most part, you had people that were not afraid to tell the truth as they saw it. And you know, we're all free to denounce that or to praise it however we want, but to actually try to shut it down, to shut down the reading of millions of people and the livelihoods of hundreds was a really depressing state of affairs, and it wasn't going to end well. And as you can see, it's not ending well.
Okay, now it’s time to answer some of our go-to questions, also known as the tough ones. First, What is a widely accepted journalistic rule or norm that you hate?
Both sides-ism. Objectivity, I guess, would be a better way of putting it. I subscribe to the idea that point of view is essential.You should know who's talking to you and why they're telling you what they're telling you. And the idea that it would be some kind of a virtue to omit that information is really foolish to me.
It’s what Pauline Kael called “saphead objectivity” versus giving clear coordinates upfront. There's a specific reason for this: You owe your reader a full and complete argument from stem to stern, so you have to define the starting point and then chart the course through to the end. Kael herself, for all her defects, was a master of this, a real friend to readers, and one of the people who led me to want to try it out for myself.
Anybody who pretends they can erase themselves from an argument has lost all sense of direction. An argument proceeds from a beginning to an end. No starting point, no argument. And that I think explains a lot of what has gone wrong in what remains of modern journalism.
And what makes you hopeful for the future of journalism?
I’m just so grateful to be able to publish this thing every day. There are all kinds of people who are able to tell the truth and to tell it beautifully and well, and all kinds of people that , even on the shoestring budget that we have and no advertising and no investors and not beholden to nobody, we're able to make a publication that is of the absolute most extremely high quality and reach a ton of people and have it be completely human and honest. That makes me feel great. I really feel like if we can do this … I can imagine a future where it will be obvious and evident that this is the way we should proceed; to just tell each other the truth as best we can and share it.
Maria is aces! Thanks for the interview, I certainly appreciate it and — obviously — Maria.