I actually meant to just refer to this specific whitelist request on the gawker/gizmodo sites, not whitelist demands in general. Edited my post to (hopefully) be more clear. From what I’ve seen, this particular one doesn’t seem to be very intrusive so far, though that could always change.
On my main system, I generally allow everything in noscript and then just specifically mark sites to block scripts on, which keeps things mostly hassle-free (occasionally YouTube videos will cause an XSS alert, but I don’t run into that often).
Then, on another system where I’m occasionally forced to load dubious or known threat sites, I keep it set the other way around and whitelist what’s known to be good. It’s not a foolproof method to block crap and does occasionally cause issues, but as part of a layered defense it’s definitely useful.