The Daily Beast has removed and apologised for an article which potentially “outed” several athletes in this year’s Rio 2016 Olympic games.
IMAGE: Grindr / FILE PHOTO
The news site, The Daily Beast, has been heavily criticised after an article appeared online in which a journalist, Nico Hines, was trying to go on some dates using the gay dating app, Grindr – however the article revealed potentially identifiable characteristics of some of the sportsmen – some of whom are not out.
German Lopez, who was covering the story for Vox.com said,
“On its face, the story may seem like yet another fluffy piece about sex in the Olympic village, and not much else. But it did do one potentially awful thing: It may have outed multiple gay athletes, including one from “a notoriously homophobic country,” potentially putting people in real danger.”
In a letter the Editorial team said that they were “wrong” and “sorry” for the article and took the decision to remove it from their site in an “unprecedented but necessary step”.
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The editors also apologised to the athletes who “may have been inadvertently compromised” by the story.
In the statement the Editors said,
“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.”
