A few months ago, a handful of reporters were shown a video that allegedly showed Toronto Mayor Rob Ford hanging out with drug dealers and smoking crack. Ford has denied the allegations. The individuals who owned this video told the reporters that they would sell them copies of it for the price of $200,000. In a guerilla journalism, crowd-sourcing experiment, Gawker then asked its readers to donate the funds needed to obtain and release the tape, in what they dubbed the ‘Crackstarter’ campaign.
As it turns out, people who own videos of politicians using drugs and conversing with dangerous drug dealers are evidently not all that reliable. The individuals who owned the tape weren’t very happy about the unexpected international media attention and revoked the offer, informing Gawker the tape was now “gone.” So, what’s Gawker going to do with the nearly $200,000 in cash it raised to bring down Rob Ford? They’re taking suggestions on which Canadian nonprofit benefiting “people suffering from addiction and its consequences” they should give it to. The existence of the video itself is still a mystery, though Anonymous now claims to have it in their “crosshairs” …
