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Perez Hilton on the Gawker Scandal: 'Aspire Higher'

Perez Hilton on the Gawker Scandal: 'Aspire Higher'

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Once the king of outing celebs, gay blogger Perez Hilton tells The Advocate he agrees that Gawker needed to pull its recent story outing a media executive.

The editor in chief and executive editor of Gawker both turned in letters of resignation Monday to protest CEO Nick Denton's decision to remove a lurid story that outed an executive who was allegedly being extorted by a male escort and gay porn star.

Out blogger Perez Hilton believes Denton made the right call. Hilton shot to fame in the 2000s with his celebrity-skewering blog that outed celebrities like Neil Patrick Harris, but has since changed course and now works to promote more positive messages on his sites. He expounded on the Gawker controversy in the short op-ed below:

Aspire higher. That's a motto I repeat daily.

In the wake of the recent Gawker Media scandal, the company's founder, Nick Denton, said that he wanted to raise the ethical bar for his websites. And he was met with two employees quitting and several others protesting his decision to delete the article outing a media professional, which sparked this whole controversy.

There is so much here that is all sorts of wrong, but one of the things I feel like people haven't really addressed is the disgusting elitism and snobbery of the Gawker editorial staff.

There is no other job I'm aware of where employees think they should be above their bosses.

Wake up! That's not how business works!

And, I am here to challenge us to take Nick Denton at face value. Sure, he may have ulterior motives, but people accused me of the same back in 2010, when I decided to stop outing celebrities and focus on being less of a douche.

It's not easy. I make mistakes. Gawker will continue to make mistakes as well.

But they are striving for better.

Like Maya Angelou used to say, "When you know better, you do better."

I hope they stick to this new mission statement and inspire others to do the same!

Being mean and hurtful is so early 2000s!

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