The parent company of New York City’s famed entertainment venue Madison Square Garden is suing technology publication Wired and three of its journalists over a news article that misrepresented thousands of customer records that were stolen by hackers.
In a court filing on Thursday, Madison Square Garden Entertainment Company charged Wired’s parent company Conde Nast and three journalists — senior reporter Maddy Varner and editors Noah Shachtman and Katie Drummond — used thousands of stolen customer records for a news story that wrongfully implied the company targeted gay and lesbian celebrities and customers.
The reporting was based on more than 40,000 customer records that hackers leaked on the Internet after attempting to extort Madison Square Garden, the company said. While the records did include gay and lesbian labels attributed to some customers, Madison Square Garden said those records were intended to invite those customers to certain events specifically for the LGBTQ community, but Wired’s report implied that the company used them to target customers for unscrupulous reasons.
Portions of Wired’s report claimed other customers in the database were part of a “hot list” that Madison Square Garden used to refuse entry to celebrities and others identified as problematic. Those customers were assigned a “risk score,” which ranged from “low risk” to “do not host,” according to Wired’s reporting.
Madison Square Garden does not dispute it assigned some celebrities a risk assessment, but said LGBTQ customers were not targeted for refusal. The company also said it did not contain a list of specific customers who identify as LGBTQ, though Wired’s headline claimed the opposite. Instead, the list was created “by the reporters themselves through their own manipulation of raw data,” Madison Square Garden said.
The entertainment giant said Wired’s reporters engaged in “unethical and inflammatory” practices in order to create a story that was disconnected from the truth and “with the intent to cause maximal public impact.”
In a statement, Shachtman said the publication stands by its reporting, and he promoted the story on his personal social media account Thursday afternoon.
Shachtman was the subject of a Columbia Journalism Review profile earlier this year, which described him as an “aggressive” editor who often started with a theory, then looked for supporting evidence to prove that theory when pursuing a news story. As editor, he often encouraged his subordinates to do the same, the Columbia Journalism Review reported.
“Multiple people who have worked with him told me he has an intense, occasionally unwarranted sense of urgency and tends to approach stories with a fixed point of view,” Susie Banikarim, the writer of the Columbia Journalism Review article, said in the story. “One said that once he’s decided what a story is, it’s very difficult to change his mind, even when others push back or the level of certainty is unwarranted.”
Shachtman became a contributing editor at Wired two years ago, and joined the New York Times as a contributing writer earlier this year. Prior to his time at Wired, Shachtman worked for Rolling Stone, where he interfered in the development of a story on the arrest of former ABC News journalist James Meek, who was a friend.
Rolling Stone began to investigate a law enforcement raid of Meek’s home soon after learning about it. The publication soon learned that prosecutors were looking into Meek on allegations that he downloaded child pornography. Rolling Stone did not publish that information after Shachtman ordered it to be removed from a story.
The interference came to light after NPR’s David Folkenflik published a story about the matter. Shachtman was not disciplined or fired, even though Penske Media, the owner of Rolling Stone, found he committed “egregious errors, including failing to recuse himself and editing the story after publication,” the Columbia Journalism Review reported.
Meek was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison. Rolling Stone did not follow up on the case.
When Shachtman was awarded a columnist role at the New York Times, some colleagues expressed reservations about his ability to publish opinion pieces with practically no oversight, the Columbia Journalism Review reported.
“In an opinion-writing position, Shachtman’s work will lack the rigorous oversight that typically accompanies reporting,” Banikarim said.
Shachtman’s contributions to Wired are supposed to be different — his work is expected to be subject to numerous checks and rigorous oversight. It isn’t clear if that process was followed, but Madison Square Garden is now weaponizing his numerous, very public ethical misgivings as proof of an ulterior motive with respect to the Wired article.
“This is not the first time Wired or Shachtman have shaped their ‘reporting’ to fit a predetermined narrative,” the attorneys wrote. “Defendants have crossed the line separating protected journalism from actionable defamation, and this action seeks to hold them accountable for that choice.”
