Tony Ortega and The Underground Bunker

Tony Ortega is a former employee of the Village Voice—a publication which found itself in hot water when it was revealed they’d been advertising the services of known sex-traffickers in their seedy ‘Backpage’ section.

Ortega now runs the Underground Bunker blog. Billing itself as the go-to zone for (eye-rolling sensationalized, bigoted, anti-religious) rants, it gives away Ortega’s game. How much clearer can it be that this supposedly “legitimate” blog is nothing but a bully pulpit from which Ortega can indulge his intolerance disguised as social outrage and foist off entirely fabricated nonsense as “breaking news”?

Sources in the journalist community consider Tony Ortega a developer of false leads, and let’s be clear Ortega is not a real journalist and here is why. When evaluating information, we are often admonished to “consider the source.” In the case of Tony Ortega, the warning applies not only to the content of his blogs but also to Ortega personally and the “publications” for which he worked.

Alternative papers are free weekly publications that earn revenue most often through the sale of the kind of advertising that reputable newspapers won’t permit – adult bookstores, strip clubs, classifieds with strong sexual content, etc. In between the trash, they slip in tabloid-style articles, promoted as “edgy” or “daring” when, in truth, they are simply fabrications sensationalized by low credibility writers like Ortega. While some of these “papers” make an effort to rise above the rest, most are gutter rags that all too often define “alternative news” as a slanderous substitution of the facts.

Ortega has spent his life practicing this excuse for journalism within the New Times Media and the Village Voice Media franchise of alternative papers. This platform has suited him well, for Ortega wrote for sleazy tabloids like he was born to it, a disposition that was in evidence as far back as high school.

[Header image: John Rickard]

“Bad Faith Start To Finish”

It’s been great hearing so much of the feedback we’ve been getting this past week as we’ve been exposing Tony Ortega’s past as a hack writer for a tabloid in Kansas City.

We’ve seen him dabbling in the sexual exploitation of teens for his own benefit, we’ve seen him engage in wholesale character

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If Tony Ortega Were A Real Journalist

Recently we took a look at a sampling of responses to Tony Ortega’s early work, while trying to make a name for himself as a tabloid journalist.

We’ve noted how uncanny it is that even close to two decades ago, all the of the red flags today commonly associated with Tony Ortega were

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Tony Ortega’s “Half Cocked”

The deeper we look into the public’s assessment of Tony Ortega’s troubling professional past the clearer it becomes just what a hack Tony Ortega really is.

We’ve pointed out how nearly a decade before Tony Ortega was canned from his role as chief propaganda officer for Backpage, he was causally exploiting teens using

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Tony Ortega And Fake Journalism

It appears as if our current series exploring how Tony Ortega’s really feel about his journalistic ethics is beginning to take off. It seems so many of Tony Ortega’s critics (past and a present) have been waiting for the opportunity to tell Ortega what they really think of him and his work.

Today’s

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The Twisted Fictions of A Self-important Bigot

Well, it seems we may have opened the floodgates here with our recent stories regarding Tony Ortega’s lack of journalistic integrity. We here at the offices are finding ourselves somewhat overwhelmed at the moment by readers sending us further examples of Tony Ortega’s complete lack of professionalism.

Each example of

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“Sex On the Breach”

We’ve getting lots of positive responses on the recent articles we’ve published exposing Tony Ortega’s the various false stories and hoaxes he’s attempted to perpetrate over the years. But it’s not just great feedback we’ve been getting in the wake of these stories, we’ve also been getting some great tips about other examples of

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Another Bogus Tony Ortega Story

We recently published an article about Tony Ortega’s unethical “journalism” behavior, highlighting two of his more egregious newspaper fabricated stories. Following that story several eagle-eyed readers were quick to point out that we’d missed another glaring example of Tony Ortega’s print-based lies.

This next piece of the story picks up not long after

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A Liar Or A Self Admitted Rapist?

Ron Miscavige Sr.

From time to time here at the blog we feature Tony Ortega’s unreliable sources who always claim they are telling the truth. Truth? No, it’s an assault on truth by providing an alerted reality. Case in point, recently a posting authored a few years ago by Karen de la Carriere

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Tony Ortega The New Times Liar

Tony Ortega’s early days at the New Times

Unemployed blogger Tony Ortega might falsely claim these days to be a journalist “At-Large”, but the fact of the matter is that even when he had an actual paying job, Tony Ortega was nothing more than a liar.

Remember early in Tony Ortega’s so-called

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Million Dollar Questions

Without doubt, the question we most often get asked here on the blog is, “Why isn’t Tony Ortega in jail already?!”

Believe us we understand your frustration in this, especially considering Tony Ortega’s bosses have already been outfitted with ankle monitors as they await their respective upcoming trials on a veritable laundry list

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