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]

Tony Ortega: Knowingly Misleading, Inaccurate

Tony Ortega is up to his old tricks again. In what seems to be his obsessive, ceaseless crusade to attack religion in any form, Tony Ortega this time set his sights on social scientists, stereotyping them as “religious studies types”.

One of the many problems with Tony Ortega’s narrow-minded approach is he

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Tony Ortega’s Third Rate Thug “Journalism”

This week we’ve been looking at how Tony Ortega intimates, browbeats and generally conducts his dishonest style of “journalism” like some third rate thug. Today a new exchange emerges, this time shared by one of our readers. This time Tony’s stunning unprofessionalism is exemplified in an email back and forth in the wake of

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An Open Letter to a Biased “Journalist”

The open letters continue to flow in regarding Tony Ortega and the bullying ‘journalistic’ tactics. This letter submitted by one of the countless ‘nameless’ sources victimized by Tony Ortega is a particularly damning one showing his deep and bigoted bias.

The letter reads:

Today I want to talk about

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Hate: The Fire that Fuels Tony Ortega Part II

To Ortega, it must have appeared as an ideal way to write and sell his book, maybe even get on TV or in the movies by leveraging his sources from within and without Scientology, for whom he had such contempt. He could interview former celebrity Scientologists to get scoops that no one else could

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Hate: The Fire that Fuels Tony Ortega Part I

One of Tony Ortega’s specialties is and has always been cherry-picking parts of Scientology, exaggerating and distorting them like a fun house mirror and then assigning those characteristics to all of Scientology and to all Scientologists.

It’s the subtext of almost everything he writes about Scientology. But now he is letting

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Disturbing news from San Marino

The Republic of San Marino is an enclaved microstate situated on the northeastern side of the Italian Apennine Mountains.

The country’s economy mainly relies on finance, industry, services and tourism.

A San Marino tipster, who recognized Arielle Silverstein and Tony Ortega, wrote to us stating that the couple left

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An Open Letter to a Coward

We’ve talked a lot about Tony Ortega’s bigoted brand of heavy-handed “journalism” but we haven’t really examined the unseen victims terrorized by his “journalistic” methods: his sources.

In December of last year, Nora Crest had enough. She addressed Ortega directly in an open letter, calling him out for the intimidating bully tactics and

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The Sleazy World of Paul Haggis and his Private Eyes

So it seems Paul Haggis hit a new low today after it was reported he hired a private investigator to dig through the trash of publicist Haleigh Breest after she filed a lawsuit against him claiming he raped her five years ago following an infamous movie premiere.

Haggis, it is said, began the process

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Atheist-at-Large

Last April, Tony Ortega decided to show the true colors of his absolute intolerance for all things religious by firing off a litany of intimidating tweets against Christians on Twitter:

That last Tweet is significant in understanding Tony Ortega’s mindset. He is on an anti-religious and anti-spiritual crusade against all religions and spiritual

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The Tony Ortega Fake News

Back at the start of the year, which feels like a decade ago by this point, an interesting controversy was brewing regarding crowd size. Remember that one? How the Trump administration asserted it had the largest inauguration crowd size ever recorded for an American president?

The press lost no time pushing back against the

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