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Aww, really? The leftwing Daily Beast's exposure of gay Olympic athletes in Rio wasn't just unethical-it was dangerous.

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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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Aww, really? The leftwing Daily Beast's exposure of gay Olympic athletes in Rio wasn't just unethical-it was dangerous. "Bill Cockburn" <bcockburn@cogeco.ca> - 2016-08-21 03:03 +0000

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