Tony Ortega’s ‘Journalism’ Summed Up in 3 Words: “Vilify, Vilify, Vilify”

Tony Ortega

Reporting on hacks like Tony Ortega can almost become something of an abstraction after a while. By this point, we are all well aware of what an arrogant, self-serving fabulist Tony Ortega is as ‘journalist’. Not being confronted daily by the actual words and ideas as expressed in Ortega’s unhinged blog screeds, however, one can easily lose sense of exactly how predictable his writing style is.

Today we’d thought we’d go back to the archives to remind us all of the caliber of unprofessionalism we are talking about when we discuss the so-called career of Tony Ortega.

Back in 2012 while working at the Village Voice Tony Ortega took a break from the ‘conspiracy of misinformation’ he’d been selling the public on behalf of his Backpage overlords and wrote a hit-piece on a book written 11 years earlier, which absolutely no one was talking about.

Why did he do this?

Well, if you’ve been paying attention to the kind of person Tony Ortega constantly reveals himself to be, you’d know that he loves striking easy targets.

Tony Ortega hates doing the actual work involved in investigating and/or reporting out robust stories. Given his track record, Tony Ortega much prefers find an easy scapegoat, take cheap shots from the safe remove of his laptop, and vilify, vilify, vilify.

Consider the opening few lines of Tony’s 2012 ‘review’ of a book written by a crackpot with a theory so outlandish (namely, that OJ didn’t commit the murders he was charged with; his teenage son did.)

See if you can spot the classic Ortega technique of punching down against an imagined enemy he has chosen to highlight in order to make himself look like the ‘hero’

Tony Ortega writes:

“Here’s the big difference between 2012 and 2001. Back in 2001, a private eye with a history of inserting himself into high-profile cases put out a self-published book with the really strange title of O.J. Is Guilty But Not of Murder. I read the book, interviewed the author, spent some time observing his methods, and then, in a 7,000-word story, tore him a new asshole over his reprehensible way of gathering information to make pure fantasy sound plausible.”

While the fake tough guy act is classic Ortega, it almost pales in comparison to the way Tony Ortega projects his own modus operandi onto a fellow hack writer, calling his information gathering ‘reprehensible’ for trying to make ‘pure fantasy sound plausible’.

Sounds a lot like Tony Ortega, doesn’t it?

Ortega continues:

“Few people took note of either his lame book or my takedown.”

Then why are bringing it up at all? Could it be because Ortega wants a whipping boy to help distract from all the sex trafficking he has been working to justify for his Backpage bosses?

Ortega then writes:

“But now it’s 2012, and [the author] has repackaged the same horseshit he was peddling eleven years ago.”

On this final point we must acknowledge and defer to Tony Ortega’s true expertise. Indeed, no one in the business is as practiced a connoisseur of ‘peddling repackaged horseshit’ as Tony Ortega.