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 theVillage 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.
Tony Ortega
It was early in the spring of 2007 when the Village Voice made a huge miscalculation. That was when they installed Tony Ortega as Editor-in-Chief of the alt-weekly rag. The entire paper would fold shortly thereafter — coming as a surprise to absolutely no one familiar with Tony Ortega’s work.
Of course the paper had been struggling financially well before Tony Ortega was put in charge, but few in the industry would dispute that anything could have hastened its demise faster.
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.
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.
The more one examines Tony Ortega’s involvement as Editor-in-Chief of his former rag, the Village Voice, and how he defended their attempts to make money off of sex trafficking the sicker one gets.
We know have incontrovertible proof in the form of first-hand, corroborated accounts (as described in affidavits to the Court by victims and witnesses alike) that it involved child sex slaves. This disturbing fact is something which Ortega has continuously downplayed, in a desperate attempt to minimize it away.
Former Village Voice editor, Tony Ortega, went down in New York history as the man who hammered the final nails into the coffin of the once venerable alternative weekly.
And, as the man who used “junk science” from vested interest groups to make the sex trafficking of underage girls something much less than the national epidemic it is. All in defense of the sex ads on the Village Voice Media classified ad website Backpage dot com, the platform that props up the Phoenix-based company.
