Fact Checking Part II: A Fatal Dose of Disinfectant Sunshine

In Fact Checking Part I we began an exploration into exposing Tony Ortega’s many lies on the subject of the Backpage underage sex trafficking debacle with a frank and honest discussion of the need for vigilant fact checking.

While the vital necessity of verifying ‘truth claims’ made by real journalists remains an important concern, it is never more crucial than when it comes to unethical tabloid journalists like Tony Ortega.

In our last post, we fact-checked claims by the present Administration regarding the demise of Backpage and concluded that their claims to have shuttered the infamous human trafficking website while true, required context in order to square with the facts.

We thought today would be a good opportunity to see if contemporary reporting supported the specious claims Tony Ortega was making at the time about his Backpage bosses and the ‘sex-with-kids-for-cash’ business model they had conspired to concoct.

Tony Ortega infamously and — it should be added, deceitfully— claimed that accusations of ‘child sex trafficking’ were nothing but contrived hysteria from religious zealots and social justice worry-warts with too much time on their hands.

Ortega brazenly claimed that Backpage was engaged in doing nothing more than innocently providing a platform for ‘two consenting adults to meet each other.’ After which, according to notoriously untruthful Backpage-insider Tony Ortega, he ‘really couldn’t tell you what happens’.

Really, Tony? Or was this just another in the long list of fraudulent claims you made about the men you bragged you helped build Backpage.

Or maybe you’d already forgotten how you first tried to project your suffocating sense of self to the New York Times on September 24, 2012 when you arrogantly boasted to them:“ I helped turn a weekly newspaper with a website into a digital enterprise.”

Fact checkers don’t forget Tony Ortega. And that is why we are here.

In fact, records show it wasn’t long after Tony Ortega asserted his alleged ignorance  of ‘what happens next on Backpage’ that the New York Times ran a piece which was to put the lie to Tony’s amateurish attempt to spin his false narrative. The above-the-fold headline alone must have sent Ortega into a cold sweat.

With damning clarity it read bluntly:

“ C.E.O. of Backpage.com, Known for Escort Ads, Is Charged with Pimping a Minor”.

Tony Ortega was about to find his lies on the receiving end of a thorough-going ‘fact-check’ by professional, ethical journalists and it wasn’t going go be pretty.

There’s a reason the New York Times is known within the print journalism industry as ‘paper of record’. And Tony Ortega was about to find his cowardly record of misdirection and straw-man counterattacks subject to a fatal dose of disinfectant sunshine.