The Gawker article was on June 1st. The hash rate run up began in the beginning of May as clearly shown in the graph above. But even if the run up happened after the Gawker article, you still haven't proved cause and effect. Luckily we have a nice little time capsule here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1958.180From that we can see approximately what articles came out and when. We can see that the run up coincided with mentions in big places such as Forbes and NPR. Did the Gawker article contribute? Probably. Was it just one of many mainstream articles and mentions that came out about Bitcoin around May and June, all of which had an effect? More likely.