Last week, The Daily Beast walked a fine line when they published (then removed) a controversial article that outed Olympians in Rio.
Writer Nico Hines lured gay Olympians through Grindr, a popular dating app in the gay community, to write his controversial piece originally titled, “I Got Three Grindr Dates in an Hour in the Olympic Village” (it was later changed to “The Other Olympic Sport In Rio: Swiping,” before the article was removed from the site entirely). He outed Olympians with descriptions that made them easy to identify, and not to mention some of them haven’t even come out yet. Even worse, a few Olympians are from countries where you can be executed for being homosexual.
The article was published on Wednesday, and The Daily Beast made an effort to remedy the controversy by removing the identifying information and noting that the article was a trend piece about sex. However, they finally took down the article and issued an apology:
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.
Hines has since been recalled from Rio.
What do you think about the article? Weigh in on the comments below.
xx, The FabFitFun Team
