A new film reveals that our free press is under seri­ous threat

What is ini­tial­ly pre­sent­ed as an insight into the high-pro­file law­suit filed against Gawk­er by Ter­ry Bol­lea (aka Hulk Hogan) becomes a ral­ly­ing cry for the preser­va­tion of inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism in Bri­an Knappenberger’s Nobody Speak: Tri­als of the Free Press. The film gives a voice to jour­nal­ists and its mes­sage is clear: the First Amend­ment to the US Con­sti­tu­tion is being com­pro­mised, now more than ever, by busi­ness lead­ers whose pow­er ren­ders them invul­ner­a­ble and whose wealth can bring about the destruc­tion of free­dom of speech.

Pri­vate footage of Bollea’s inti­mate rela­tions with the wife of his best friend, Bub­ba the Love Sponge, as filmed by said friend, were post­ed on the Amer­i­can gos­sip blog in 2006. As Gawk­er founder Nick Den­ton admits on cam­era, the site was infa­mous for their ruth­less por­tray­al of celebri­ties and their propen­si­ty to insult and offend in search of a scoop, some­thing that Den­ton and oth­er for­mer Gawk­er jour­nal­ists jus­ti­fy as get­ting to the truth that no oth­er pub­li­ca­tion dared tell.

“There are ques­tions of where lines are drawn for pri­va­cy in an age of imme­di­ate broad­cast,” says media cor­re­spon­dent David Folken­flik of the Bol­lea vs Gawk­er case, and indeed this case brings to ques­tion the ethics of com­pro­mis­ing a person’s pri­va­cy in the name of free­dom of the press. The doc­u­men­tary only reveals its true focus, how­ev­er, when it comes to light that Bollea’s case was being covert­ly fund­ed by a bil­lion­aire whose wealth and wiles could, and would, take down Gawk­er entirely.

Knappenberger’s doc­u­men­tary is con­cerned with the future of jour­nal­ism and presents this land­mark case as the cat­a­lyst for a sig­nif­i­cant shift in the nature of the free press. As the film asserts, this is far more than just a sex tape scan­dal; it is one of the most impor­tant First Amend­ment cas­es in US legal his­to­ry. Ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Peter Thiel pumped mon­ey into Bollea’s case and inter­view footage reveals that Thiel found Gawk­er to be a ​“socio­path­ic bul­ly”. Soon the sex tapes, the all-Amer­i­can wrestler’s pub­lic image and Thiel’s per­son­al gripes with Gawk­er fade into the back­ground. All of that is not what’s real­ly impor­tant here, Knap­pen­berg­er is say­ing. What is sig­nif­i­cant is that, in back­ing a case against an inde­pen­dent pub­li­ca­tion, Thiel legit­imised the destruc­tion of a media out­let using vast sums of money.

The upshot of this is that Sil­i­con Val­ley now pos­es a seri­ous threat to the free press. Nobody Speak cements its pro-press posi­tion in the case stud­ies that fol­low, exam­in­ing the usurpa­tion of inde­pen­dent pub­li­ca­tions by entre­pre­neurs and cor­po­ra­tions. Using exam­ples that are far less con­tro­ver­sial on the part of the jour­nal­ists than Gawk­er, the film stress­es the dis­con­cert­ing pow­er of Sil­i­con Val­ley over the frag­ment­ed media indus­try. It is not a fair fight, it argues.

Take the wor­ry­ing exam­ple of the secret pur­chase of the Las Vegas Review-Jour­nal news­pa­per by the afflu­ent Adel­son fam­i­ly. When John L Smith, writer for the Review-Jour­nal, pub­lished his book ​‘Sharks in the Desert’ on the cor­po­rate fig­ures behind the city of sin, he referred to Shel­don Adel­son in pass­ing. His on-screen defence is that it would be impos­si­ble to write a book about the his­to­ry of Las Vegas with­out allud­ing to Adelson’s role. What result­ed was a threat from Adel­son to sue him for libel unless Smith accept­ed hush mon­ey that would cov­er his crit­i­cal­ly ill daughter’s med­ical bills and, in return, admit­ted to defama­tion of char­ac­ter in court. As Smith and the doc­u­men­tary itself make clear, bul­lies do not pick on peo­ple their own size.

By the end of the film, such con­cerns land on Don­ald Trump’s doorstep. With the Hulk Hogan case hav­ing played out against a back­drop of dis­trust of the media, whipped up by Trump on his pres­i­den­tial cam­paign trail, Knap­pen­berg­er address­es the hatred exhib­it­ed by the Pres­i­dent towards the nation’s jour­nal­ists. With pow­er­ful fig­ures like Thiel and Trump want­i­ng to open up libel laws, the very basis of democ­ra­cy is under threat from the essen­tial­ly untouch­able com­mer­cial tycoons who have the finan­cial means to take down any pub­li­ca­tion they wish.

Our right to a free press must be pro­tect­ed from the mer­cy of the one per cent – as John L Smith poignant­ly states in the film, ​“We need to be able to dig with­out get­ting caught in the rubble.”

Nobody Speak is released on Net­flix on 23 June.