The Daily Fail
The Daily Beast ran an article today, by
a hack named Nico Hines, where Mr Hines condescendingly wrote about how he, a straight man, married with one child, wandered around the Olympic Village in Rio, on gay and heterosexual dating apps, to see if the rumours are true and that athletes do have a lot of sex. After not getting too many hits on Tinder, Mr Hines decided to go on Grindr, the gay dating app (along with several others), to see how many would respond.
Titling his article "I Got Three Grindr Dates in an Hour in The Olympic Village", Mr Hines then proceeded to mock the gay athletes who responded. He did not advise on Grindr that he was a journalist, and advised he was very open once the gay athletes contacted him and then met him... By which I mean that he did not out himself immediately as being a heterosexual journalist who is married with a child, unless the gay men who met him asked when meeting him.
If that was not bad enough, Mr Hines then proceeded to out the gay athletes who responded and met him. Not by name mind you, but by giving descriptions, their height, weight, what sport they competed in, facial description and the countries they represented. As anyone and everyone who read the article noted, it was distinctly easy to find out who these athletes actually are.
Amazingly enough, this disgusting human being was not done...
Some of the athletes he outed in his article are from countries where homosexuality is illegal and deemed criminal acts.
Because Hines is not gay, you might find his use of Grindr a bit dishonest. But not to worry: “For the record,” Hines writes, “I didn’t lie to anyone or pretend to be someone I wasn’t—unless you count being on Grindr in the first place—since I’m straight, with a wife and child.” This sentence reflects a stunning amount of ignorance, because, in Hines’ situation, of course being on Grindr in the first place is a lie.Grindr is an app for men who wish to hook up with other men. That is its purpose! To be on Grindr when you do nothave that goal, and when you could not possibly have that goal because you are straight, is itself a mendacious deception.
This misrepresentation might be excusable had Hines noted in his profile that he was a journalist on assignment. But naturally, he did not. Instead, he “confessed to being a journalist as soon as anyone asked who I was.” As soon as anyone asked who he was? Who asks that on Grindr? At the Olympics? In the Olympic Village? Hines seems to expect his marks to immediately divine that he is a straight journalist, and if they don’t, too bad for them. He also believes his targets have a fair chance of catching wise because he “used my own picture.” (“[J]ust of my face…” he adds coyly.)
With his dubious premise established, Hines proceeds to out athlete after athlete, providing enough information about each Olympian he encounters for anyone with basic Google skills to uncover their identities. (After several minutes of Googling, I surmised the identities of five of the gay athletes Hines described.) I’m not going to repeat his descriptions, because—as Hines himself acknowledges!—some of them live in “notoriously homophobic” countries and remain closeted at home. Yes, the Daily Beast updated the article a few hours after publication to remove personally identifiable information (while insisting that outing gay athletes was “never our reporter’s intention.”) But really: Anyone who has heard of Grindr has also heard of the Wayback Machine. Nothing on the internet can be reliably deleted.
Shortly after Hines’ article published, openly gay Olympian Gus Kenworthy tweeted that the author “basically just outed a bunch of athletes in his quest to write a shitty [Daily Beast] article where he admitted to entrapment.” That is correct, but it’s worth exploring why Hines embarked upon this weird, sleazy quest in the first place. I count two reasons. The first is that Hines simply enjoys tittering with condescension at all the gay athletes who take the bait and engage with him—a straight dude, as Hines emphatically reminds us.Why else zero in on Grindr? The second reason is more repulsive: Hines appears to take pleasure in luring in these Olympians then outing them to all the world.
But the offensive purpose of Hines’ article is really the least of its problems. Far worse is the actual damage it will likely cause to real, live human beings—inevitable consequences that Hines blithely ignored. Several athletes who are closeted at home (and possibly to their own teammates) will wake up on Thursday morning to the news that the Daily Beast has outed them. Their teammates could ostracize and alienate them; their families could disown them; their countries could imprison them. And for what? A homophobic article about how a straight guy conned gay Olympians from anti-gay countries into hitting on him through Grindr? Hines’ article is a dangerous disaster, a wildly unethical train wreck that should be taken down immediately for the sake of its duped subjects. Hines may view his Grindr-baiting as all fun and games. For the victims of his unprincipled journalism, however, his nasty little piece has the power to ruin lives.
It is hard to put into words, just how god damn fucking stupid and dangerous Nico Hines' article happens to be. I am trying to wrap my head around the malicious intent behind his stunt and article.
While everyone is correctly angry at Mr Hines and his literally luring gay athletes in the Olympic Village, the one place they should have felt safe in, The Daily Beast, in choosing to publish his piece of malicious filth, are equally to blame.
Once the flood of protests threatened to flood The Daily Beast for their abhorrent article, they then set about attempting to alter it, to remove some of the parts that clearly identified who Hines was talking about and outing after what can only be deemed to be entrapment. In doing so, The Daily Beast refused to acknowledge just how terrible and awful this was and most importantly, how they had endangered the lives of athletes who were outed by Hines after being lied to and lured by him in his zeal to get his gossip. As
Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon notes:
As of Thursday morning, The Daily Beast was quietly altering the piece without initially making any acknowledgment it was doing so. It changed the title of the story to “The Other Olympic Sport in Rio: Swiping.” It changed two lines that identified the home country, physical description and language of a “friendly gentleman” — a man from a country that has been cited by Human Rights Watch for its “homophobic” treatment of the LGBT community. It also altered the height and weight specifics of one black and one white athlete.
Then, in an editor’s note posted later Thursday morning, John Avlon writes:
“We take such complaints seriously because a central part of The Daily Beast’s mission is to fight for full equality and equal treatment for LGBT people around the world. Publishing an article that in any way could be seen as homophobic is contrary to our mission…. The concept for the piece was to see how dating and hook-up apps were being used in Rio by athletes. It just so happened that Nico had many more responses on Grindr than apps that cater mostly to straight people, and so he wrote about that. Had he received straight invitations, he would have written about those…. Some readers have read Nico as mocking or sex-shaming those on Grindr. We do not feel he did this in any way. However, The Daily Beast understands that others may have interpreted the piece differently. Accordingly, we have made some editorial changes to the article, responding to readers’ concerns, and are again sorry for any upset the original version of this piece inspired.”
Seriously? So you ran a piece by a self-identified straight writer that’s entirely about gay hookups, that included identifying details about male athletes from “notoriously homophobic” nations, and you’re saying some people “may have interpreted” it as “mocking or sex-shaming?” You sent a guy to write a jokey piece about a community he claims he doesn’t belong to, a community whose safety and dignity and human rights are under attack every day, in every country, and you’re sorry if it “upset” anybody? For the Beast to run it in the first place was awful — but to stand by it in such a way is delusional, ignorant, and unbelievably cynical.
She left out unethical, malicious, dangerous, lacking in any integrity (journalist or othrwise)..
The Daily Beast have been forced to remove the offensive article, after dragging their feet and making excuses for several hours. How this got past, how they allowed this to be published, remains to be seen. But this was and is an absolute failure by The Daily Beast. A dangerous one at that.