In The Tabloid War On Objective Reality, Truth Is The First Causality

Tony Ortega

Whenever we speak about the scourge of tabloid journalism, without fail reasonable and rational people inevitably raise the question, “Who spends their time reading tabloid garbage?” We, however, would like to pose our own question: How can dishonest, self-described tabloid “journalists” live with themselves?

As we’ve seen again and again, the answer is that tabloid hacks aren’t looking for the truth, they are only interested in a concocting a sleazy “story” that will attract eyeballs. Everything else is up for grabs.

Many have sardonically come to call our current moment in media history the ‘post truth Internet age’. It’s a time where any blogger can post anything he wants – no matter how outlandish, how patently false – with practical anonymity and little to no critical push back.

It’s also a time in which washed up hacks who’ve spent the bulk of their ‘careers’ failing or getting fired from backwater ‘alternative newspapers’ (unable to even to give away their papers for free) are sensing the opportunity to earn a quick buck in this new seemingly ‘fact free’ era.

Case in point Tony Ortega, disgraced former minister of propaganda for the Backpage child sex trafficking cabal.

Tony Ortega has played the role of an imagined journalist his whole life, at least that is what he would have you believe. In reality, Ortega’s ‘career’ can more accurately be described as a calculated gamble – a misguided bet that readers would care about fabricated scandal and sleazy rumor mongering than actual reality based reportage.

It didn’t matter to Ortega whether what he was saying was true, only that it furthered his agenda to sow chaos and spread intolerance.

Infamously, Tony Ortega served as Backpage’s chief defender, using the pages in Village Voice to attack journalists at CNN and The New York Times who exposed the Backpage human trafficking scandal.

And it was in this capacity, having completely sold himself out to his greedy corporate handlers and being given free rein to lie and deceive the public that Tony Ortega developed a taste for subverting truth on a mass scale.

We would remind our readers that Tony Ortega is someone who, unprompted, once bragged: “the people I work for were smart enough to start Backpage.com.”

Of course, this was but one of his many public endorsements for the criminal enterprise which laundered money even as it enabled the sex trafficking of underage girls by pimps across the United States and beyond.

What does it say when a ‘reporter’ gives up every shred of journalistic integrity in order to become an apologist for criminals?

In short, it says that they will stop at nothing to advance their sick agenda of personal aggrandizement, no matter the cost. No matter who gets hurt in the process.

Tony Ortega has positioned himself on the front lines of the battle of sleaze against substance. And in this tabloid war on objective reality, truth is the first causality.