One of our favorite newspaper stories is about the editor of the Washington Times, Smith Hempstone, who was asked what it was like to work for the Times’s proprietor, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Supposedly said Hempstone: “It’s not the first time I’ve worked for a publisher who thought he was God.”

The story may — or may not — be apocryphal. We thought of it when the jury found against Gawker and its founder, Nick Denton, in the case in which they were sued for airing a tape of the wrestler Hulk Hogan in an act of fornication. Mr. Hogan’s lawyer accused Gawker’s Mr. Denton of “playing God with other people’s lives.”

This strikes us as a serious moment in the evolution of journalism onto the World Wide Web. Not only did the jury find against Gawker. It also awarded Mr. Hogan $115 million, and, according to reports, that figure could escalate when proceedings turn to punitive damages. It also could, if the courts are sane, get radically reduced on appeal.

It is not, in any event, just journalism that’s in the dock. For Mr. Hogan is not the only famous figure to ask a court to award damages for being shamed on the Internet. There is also the sportscaster Erin Andrews, who was filmed by a peeping Tom, who peered at her with a camera through the security lens in her hotel door.

Miss Andrews’ case did not raise journalism questions. She was the victim of a crime, for which a culprit was caught, tried, convicted, and sent to prison. Miss Andrews also brought a tort-law claim against not only the perpetrator but also the Marriott Hotel where the crime took place. She won $55 million.

No criminal charges were brought in the airing of the tape of Mr. Hogan, whose real name is Terry Gene Bollea. The similarity in the two cases, in our view, is that they both evolved into what might be called tort-law primal screams against the capacity of the Internet to impose excruciating shame even on even those individuals who are public persons.

It’s hard to reckon which was more dramatic — Miss Andrews, testifying to her panic when she realized that a tape of her unclothed in her hotel room was being viewed by millions on the internet or the wrestler describing how after Gawker’s story he felt an “aura around me” that left him so exposed that he was unable to “say the right things.”

The New York Sun and its redaktzia like to think of ourselves as First Amendment absolutists. Save for the exigencies of war, we can’t recall a restriction on the press that we’ve countenanced. The New York Times is reporting this morning that the case touches on “hazily defined boundaries of constitutional law in the Internet era” — including “what is newsworthy?”

Yet the only constitutionally protected decider of newsworthiness in this case is, in our opinion, Gawker, flawed an institution though it might be. The real significance of this case is it’s a reminder of the importance of what happened at Eden, where man and woman first encountered shame —the one censor beyond the reach of even humans playing God.