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 Hive Mentality

On this blog we’ve seen how people like Tony Ortega, Mike Rinder, Karen de la Carriere, Jeffrey Augustine and Rod Keller attempt to control and manipulate the flow of information.

Time and time again we’ve seen evidence of Ortega censoring comments on his blog or in his Twitter feed that run contrary to his self-imposed

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Tony Ortega’s Red Meat Diet

Why do people put up with Tony Ortega’s extreme bias? Clearly Ortega has a long track record of saying things that are false or exaggerated. Often he will take these exaggerated claims and mix them with just enough things that are occasionally true to make his ‘reporting’ feel like journalism. With his selected ‘facts’ Ortega

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Tony Ortega’s Crusade of Intolerance Makes Him His Own Worst Enemy

Simply put, Tony Ortega’s crusade of intolerance against religious belief of any stripe needs a particular type of environment in order to survive. There can be no free exchange of ideas or challenging of deep rooted assumptions. There can be no rigorous debates on merits of differing points of view. And under no circumstance can

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Silverstein’s Mysterious Real Estate Purchases

Recently we explained how Tony Ortega has jumped from wife to wife eventually landing on his third and most recent, Arielle Silverstein.

We will be taking a more in-depth look at her this week, but we felt it might be helpful to offer a quick overview first.

Arielle Silverstein (aka Arielle Silberstein) is an attorney

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Tony Ortega’s Guide to Being a Serial Cheater

Sixteen years ago this fall, Tony Ortega married his second ex-wife, Fatimah Suryono. Fatimah was an immigrant from Jakarta, Indonesia who came to America with dreams of a better life and plans to study Communications and Public Relations at the University of Wisconsin.

Upon graduating, Fatimah moved across country to the Mecca of public

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Tony Ortega: The End of Credibility

The staff at the Village Voice, working under Tony Ortega, had a reputation in New York City for ruthless retaliation on people that poked their nose into its classifieds section, Backpage. Readers of this blog will recognize Backpage as the human trafficking site which tried to cloak itself under the First Amendment’s “Freedom of

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Tony Ortega’s Raw Deal

Way back when Tony Ortega’s bosses in Phoenix were dreaming about shredding and burning all the evidence implicating them in the global sex-for-profit scandal that was starting to spiral so out of control they were once again at risk of going to prison, a deal was struck.

Tony Ortega was promised that as

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Tony Ortega Publicly Pillorying an Innocent Man

On December 12th 2016 Amy Scobee tweeted out a photo of a white vehicle. She claimed that the person filmed her as she walked by. In her tweet she suggested the person in this vehicle must be a Scientologist.

Given how little validating evidence there was for the claim, naturally it wouldn’t take long for

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The Power of Protest

All the sit-ins and sign-waving on the news lately in the wake of the Senate’s confirmation of the Court’s newest Justice, Brett Kavanaugh, have gotten us thinking about the power of protest.

Sometimes even the littlest gestures can have big impacts. Take for instance the time 15 protesters stood outside the Golleher Alumni House

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A Watershed Moment

The vast majority of women who are raped or sexually assaulted do not report the crime to police, as surveys in light of allegations facing Supreme Court hopeful Brett Kavanaugh suggests. Tragically, this is so because in many cases because the victims have little confidence that their attacker will ever be brought to justice.

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