By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2012
In July 2012 FishbowlLA refereed a pointed dispute between two media operations — The Hollywood Reporter’s legal desk and Dan Abrams’s Mediaite — over how a story about a lawsuit had been reported.
Then
The trigger was a Hollywood Reporter item by Eriq Gardner headlined around a fashion photographer suing Mediaite over photographs of Kate Moss’s sister. Dan Abrams, who owned Mediaite and its sister site Styleite, answered with a combative post of his own.
Abrams’s central complaint was about sequencing. He said Gardner had published the story while still seeking comment — an email request arriving roughly half an hour before the piece went live, with more detailed correspondence following half an hour after. Confronted about it, Abrams wrote, Gardner said his ‘team’ had ‘thrown up an early version of the story.’
Abrams used his post to lay out the rebuttal he said he would have given: that the disputed pictures had never appeared on Mediaite, that links had only ever come down rather than gone up, and that Styleite had removed images and even a sourcing link as soon as lawyers raised copyright claims. FishbowlLA noted the two had since continued the argument in its own comment thread.
Now
The publish-then-ask-for-comment problem at the heart of the spat never went away — it intensified as the speed of digital publishing increased. The expectation that an outlet should hold a story for genuine response, rather than post first and update later, became a recurring fault line in media criticism.
Eriq Gardner, the legal reporter on the receiving end, went on to a notable second act: in 2021 he was among the founding partners of Puck, the journalist-owned outlet covering the power centers of media, Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street, where he continued his specialty in entertainment-law coverage.
Dan Abrams kept building his media holdings, with Mediaite remaining a fixture of the media-news beat, and broadened his on-air profile as an anchor — including the program Dan Abrams Live on NewsNation. The 2012 squabble reads now as an early skirmish in the still-unsettled etiquette of fast digital reporting.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.