Despicable, homophobic Daily Beast article put Olympians’ lives on the line

Nico Hines is a heterosexual writer for The Daily Beast, a website that pretends to be a serious news outlet. Hines, for some reason, decided to create an account on Grindr (an app that connects gay men) to look for gay Olympians who want to meet up. Hines didn’t do this for a hookup or to grab coffee with a new friend or even interview a gay Olympian; we’re not entirely sure why he did this other than to say he was able to find gay Olympians on the app.

And he found some. Quite a few.

In his Daily Beast article, he posted details of these online encounters. Unfortunately, he used details about the athletes that anyone with an Internet connection would be able to use to find their identity. Why is that problematic? At least one comes from a “notoriously homophobic” country. And not to mention this violates the privacy of a whole bunch of gay athletes who were entrapped into a conversation with someone they wouldn’t have otherwise opened up to.

There was no reason to publish what he published. Now, you don’t need a reason to publish stupid things. Bloggers and journalists do it all the time. But this was arguably homophobic and it put people’s lives on the line. To that point, openly gay Olympian Amini Fonua, tweeted out a very clear message to Hines.

Shame this inhumane CREEP who thought it’d be funny to endanger people’s lives in the village ?????? @NicoHines pic.twitter.com/5TTom3i9c6

— Amini Fonua (@AminiFonua) August 11, 2016

After initially editing out the personally identifiable details from the piece, the editors at the Daily Beast pulled the article entirely and issued an apology. They wrote:

As a newsroom, we succeed together and we fail together, and this was a failure on The Daily Beast as a whole, not a single individual. The article was not intended to do harm or degrade members of the LGBT community, but intent doesn’t matter, impact does. Our hope is that removing an article that is in conflict with both our values and what we aspire to as journalists will demonstrate how seriously we take our error.

We were wrong. We will do better.

I’m not sure this is good enough. What should be the punishment? A Change.org petition says both Hines and the Daily Beast should have their passes revoked. I disagree. We shouldn’t punish news outlets for content, even if the content is deplorable.

But what we deserve is a clear answer to a very basic question: what was the point of this article and how did it get approved and published? Without a meaningful response, I’m pretty sure the punishment is clear: you stop reading them and they fold.

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