Tony Ortega
We’ve written a lot here on the blog about the article Tony Ortega published in the Village Voice attempting to smear New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof after his in-depth exposé the Backpage sex trafficking syndicate. Like many media watchers we don’t hold a very high opinion of Tony Ortega’s so-called ‘reporting’ and we hold an even lower opinion of his ethical standards.
But sometimes the most damning indictments don’t come from outside observers, they come from your own readers.
We’ve been reporting over the past few days on the blistering condemnation Tony Ortega was hit by (from his own readers!) following his rabid, specious, and poorly articulated attack on New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof.
Operating from his position as Editor-At-Large for the Village Voice, Tony was responsible for making the public defense of Backpage in the midst of the scandal surrounding their now-infamous human sex trafficking ring. In this capacity, it was Ortega’s role to amplify the noise surrounding the issue.
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In our last installment we began to make the case that Tony Ortega’s role as Editor-At-Large at the Village Voice made him the final word on what was published in that paper concerning the defense of Backpage. As we concluded then, the words he published he bears responsibility for, whether he was the original author or not.
It seems that Tony Ortega’s readership agreed with us, as was evidenced by the outrage in the form of angry letters addressed to Ortega after he had the gall to publish an unhinged attack on Nicholas Kristof.
We’ve exposed the extent to which Tony Ortega was willing to go as former Editor-in-Chief of the Village Voice in providing cover for his pimp pals at Backpage. We’ve seen Tony Ortega lie, misdirect, and purposefully muddy the waters in order to confuse the public about the Backpage human trafficking empire which victimized countless young women and underage girls.
For a while Tony Ortega’s dog and pony show seemed to be working.
When we last looked in on Backpage, ads for underage “escorts” and “ exotic body-rubs” were providing millions in monthly profit for Village Voice Media, the company signing Tony Ortega’s paychecks.
Perhaps this is why Tony and his bosses were so desperate to change what was quickly becoming the national topic of conversation — the alarming fact that human sex trafficking was being supported by private corporations in the United States.
When last we saw the Village Voice, they had just received a letter of complaint signed by three dozen religious leaders making an urgent impassioned call for an end to Backpage.
This was, of course, merely the tip of an already mammoth iceberg.
More than fifty Attorneys General had sent Village Voice Media a similar letter some months earlier, demanding that Backpage demonstrate exactly how and to what extent it was working to prevent children from being bought and sold on its online marketplace, the way Tony Ortega had falsely declared it did.
This past week we’ve been examining Tony Ortega’s response to the numerous instances of protest aimed at him for his participation in the Backpage child sex trafficking scheme he so ardently defended while on their payroll.
We’ve seen how angry protestors fed up with Ortega’s two-faced ‘human-trafficking-as-First-Amendment-right’ defense of Backpage flocked to his offices to make their opposition to him felt in numbers too great to ignore.
We’ve seen how students from Tony Ortega’s own college raised their voices in defiance of his dogged insistence on protecting online perverts from anti-sex slavery advocates campaigning against the Backpage’s business model which commodified the sexual abuse of minors.
Tony Ortega is probably best known as the propaganda minister for the role he played as chief defender of the notorious illicit prostitution and child sex trafficking website, Backpage during its debauched heyday as the world’s most infamous online brothel.
Readers of this blog will remember how Backpage was raided and forcibly shut down by Federal Authorities for its sexual exploitation of marginalized women and young children.
What rarely gets spoken about however, is how unethical, unscrupulous bottom feeders like Tony Ortega took full advantage of the avalanche of cash generated by Backpage’s blackmarket human trafficking.
“I helped turn a weekly newspaper with a website into a digital enterprise.” – Tony Ortega
The above quote came from Tony Ortega while, with his typical braggadocios self-importance, hw was spouting off to the New York Times on just what an important player he was in the empire Backpage built.
With all the legal scrutiny which has fallen on those associated with the infamous child sex selling operation it’s little wonder that Tony Ortega has tamped down the full-throated praise he used to offer to anyone foolish enough to ask his opinion on the topic.
Look back over the regrettable career of Tony Ortega and you will find it is littered with trashy, fabricated stories aimed chiefly toward uneducated readers of free alt weekly newspapers and online gossip blogs.
Tony Ortega’s inventions have ranged from fake stories about fake people, to wackadoo claims designed to smear and defame. It’s all in a day’s work for Tony Ortega and his #PayAttentionToME journalism.
As an amateur blogger, Tony Ortega never really had a talent for writing articles himself.
“W_hat the hell is this guy doing running the_Village Voice_?__”_That was a question on everyone’s lips the day Tony Ortega took over the role as Editor-in-Chief at the Village Voice. To see Tony Ortega stalking the same halls as Sidney Schanberg, Nat Hentoff, Robert Christegau, Jules Feiffer, and a lot of other eminent names in American letters, must have seemed at the time like a cruel joke.
Long gone were the Pulitzer, Guggenheim and the NEA prize winners who built The Village Voice name; by the time they wheeled Tony Ortega into his office the whole publication was on a countdown to implosion.
In the article Tony Ortega: Betrayal we started by examining the role Tony Ortega played in helping tank the Village Voice. Though the paper was failing financially, it’s clear on its face that their decision to install Tony Ortega as Editor-In-Chief was the nail in its coffin.
Tony Ortega desperately wants people to believe he was only responsible for the editorial side of the business, that the part he played in the Village Voice’s ruin was wholly disconnected from its advertising woes.
In a recent article we discussed how little, in fact, Tony Ortega has changed over the years. He has always been motivated by greed and pride. And he has always been an obsessive troll.
And it’s the subject of his obsessive nature that should be a major red flag to anyone who might be tempted to think of Tony Ortega was ever anything like a journalist, by anyone’s standard.
When Ortega was finally forced out of his cushy role as Editor-At-Large for The Village Voice, a former staffer at the _Voice_complained to the New York Observer that “[Ortega] was increasingly obsessed with Scientology and had neglected almost all of his editorial duties at the paper.
Tony Ortega
In our article “Tony Ortega’s Village Voice: A Backpage Front” we drew your attention to the grand scheme behind The Village Voice and Backpage, specifically how they were from the beginning planned to be separated in order to fully concentrate on the mega profits produced by Backpage in its lust to sell young women for sexual services.
It bears repeating, however, that this came as no surprise to Tony Ortega who from the beginning was in on the scam.
“Seven years ago, the people I [Tony Ortega] work for were smart enough to start Backpage.com, a competitor to Craigslist. While other newspapers were doing little more than publicly condemning Newmark for the way Craigslist has, for years, eaten into their classified ads revenue, we decided to fight back. That’s just how we operate.” – (The people Tony Ortega worked for were Michael Lacey and James Larkin).
“Backpage.com has since inherited some of the adult business that left Craigslist.
Frequent readers of this blog will know by now the sordid unprofessional history of Tony Ortega. Between 2011 and July 2012, Tony Ortega, then Editor-in-Chief of the Village Voice, launched a biased oppo-research campaign on organizations and individuals who attempted to report on sex trafficking in the United States.
Clearly Ortega was tasked by his employers, James Larking and Michael Lacey, to do damage control against the numerous accusations being levied against Backpage.
When Tony Ortega was dismissed from The Village Voice in September 2012, The New York Observer disclosed that he lost his job as Editor-in-Chief for neglecting his duties in favor of his personal daily rants against Scientology. It got so bad that one staffer at the Voice complained, “He was increasingly obsessed with Scientology and had neglected almost all of his editorial duties at the paper. Sometimes he wouldn’t even edit features.
Way back when Tony Ortega’s bosses in Phoenix were dreaming about shredding and burning all the evidence implicating them in the global sex-for-profit scandal that was starting to spiral so out of control they were once again at risk of going to prison, a deal was struck.
Tony Ortega was promised that as long as he toed the party line and played nice, he’d be rewarded with an executive assignment as chief editor at a far “more lucrative and prestigious” rag than the “lowly” Village__Voice.
All the sit-ins and sign-waving on the news lately in the wake of the Senate’s confirmation of the Court’s newest Justice, Brett Kavanaugh, have gotten us thinking about the power of protest.
Sometimes even the littlest gestures can have big impacts. Take for instance the time 15 protesters stood outside the Golleher Alumni House at California State University, Fullerton, chanting “No sex trafficking” in light of a speaker who was invited by two Cal State Fullerton alumni chapters.
For as much as we’ve talked about the dangers of Tony Ortega’s hate-blog and the work of his former employers at the sleazy sex selling site, Backpage, it could be helpful to take a moment to set each in its proper context.
For example, Tony Ortega’s ‘angry troll on the internet’ routine generates so little actual revenue that it really must be considered more hobby than ‘job’. For all the time Ortega seems to fritter away over his pet obsession, he must be making embarrassingly little money from it – what’s more embarrassing is that he is living off of his wife, Arielle Silverstein, salary.
