The LA Times Only Cares About Women When it Helps Their Team

Adan Ortega
If you don’t look like him, he won’t represent you.

The hacks over at the Los Angeles Times are super concerned that Adan Ortega was removed from his non-paying gig as Fullerton’s representative to the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) because he’s a champion of the working classes or some shit. I don’t know, I lost interest in their most recent #MeToo story when I remembered that Fullerton City Council member Ahmad Zahra has been charged with battery against a woman of color and the LA Times has said precisely ZERO about the story.

Their interest in such topics tend to have a very partisan flavor and it’s both predictable and boring.

Because of course they did, the LAT omitted that Ortega is a racist because he’s the fashionable type of racist that the LAT employs and endorses. They also omitted that he’s a grifter who quite literally is a lobbyist in the municipal water industry and therefore is logically conflicted out of putting the residents of Fullerton first in his now former position on the MWD.

Gee, it’s almost like there were good reasons to replace Mr. Ortega outside of the claims being made by the local union hacks. I could point to his $5000/mo consulting gig over in 29 Palms (Page 70) or perhaps that MWD was even a client of his but that would be journalism.

Adan Ortega Conflicts
The list of conflicts goes on and on and on…

Sadly the press was too busy reprinting the talking points of Ortega’s allies to get into the details of a basic google search.

Because of their tedious brand of hackery, the press, largely, should not be taken seriously or at face value until they either admit their biases or start acting like honest reporters. A good place to start would be to report about the news as it relates to ALL elected officials as opposed to just those accused of wrongthink.

By way of example they could avoid talking, relentlessly, about Tito Ortiz not wearing a mask because of the dangers of Covid-19 while simultaneously ignoring that Ahmad Zahra violated social distancing guidelines in order to, allegedly, batter a women of color. Unless of course he allegedly battered her from 6 feet away.

Zahra-Busted
Why is this man smiling?

But of course this won’t happen because journalism is thinly veiled activism and almost nobody wants to agitate against their own allies. They don’t want to lose out on an invite to the socially distanced soirees.

This isn’t an issue isolated to the wasteland of Los Angeles either.

ALL of the other major outlets, both in print and on Tv, who couldn’t get enough of Tito are guilty of the same partisan hackery. The OC Register, to their credit, ran a puff piece talking about how stunning and brave and bravely stunning Zahra is in reference to his being charged with battery but the rest of the gang have been nowhere to be seen. I expected better from the Voice of OC but alas they too have fallen victim to this consensus of reporting conformity.

While City Hall continues to attack us in the courts and pretend we’re not journalists, I’d like you  to remember that we’re the ONLY local source willing to upset the status quo to tell you the truth whether you want to hear it or not.

Fullerton v FFFF in the News

OCR- Top of the Fold

Today we were Front Page, Above the Fold in the Sunday edition of the Orange County Register [HERE]. The article was good overall and addressed many of the issues surrounding the ludicrous case the City has lodged against us.

This comes on the heals of several articles which have been written by The Voice of OC [HERE], [HERE], [HERE], [HERE] & [HERE] as they have been on the ball and running hard with this story. The Voice is local, fact-based journalism at it’s finest.

We got some good coverage of the story over at ShadowProof [HERE] which itself was picked up by the paper the Florida Oracle [HERE].

The Orange Juice Blog brilliantly took the city to task for being not just incompetent but downright evil [HERE].

The FullertonRag showed their support for dropping this case [HERE] in a perfect example of understanding that we don’t all need to get along in this fine town on all things to align on principles of utmost importance.

Then of course we have the great write-up by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press [HERE]. It should be noted that this influential group also filed an amicus brief on our behalf in the appellate court supporting the striking down of the unconstitutional prior restraint issued against us by the trial court.

A lot has happened since the city took us to court a little over two weeks ago and it’s not over yet. Other reporting groups, First Amendment organizations and journalists have reached out for comment and we are fully expecting more news in the days to follow leading up the trial on 21 November.

Nearly all of those articles have been objective fact based or on our side for obvious reasons. However – If you’re concerned about having a Fair and Balanced view on this lawsuit you can check out the city’s side of things by heading over to the Fullerton Observer Pravda where they’re doing a bang up job reporting all the news that City Hall sees free to print.

We’ll keep you updated and post more stories both here and to Facebook as they appear so if we miss one please leave it in the comments or tag us on FB.

The Ponsi Scheme: One Good Theft Deserves Another

What me steal?

As The Orange County Register sinks deeper in economic distress I have to wonder what is taking so long for this rotten scow to go under.

Today a Register hackling named Lou Ponsi – who used to report Pop Warner football game scores – wrote a story about the Fullerton cop iPad theft story that FFFF broke the other day. This creep actually availed himself of documents that we posted to make it look like he had done some real reporting.

The funniest part is how Ponsi reports:

“She had seen the iPad in the bin and placed her bag of check in over it and walked away with it,” the report stated.

A bag of “check in?” What the Hell is that?!

Of course FFFF got no attribution from the Ponster since “real” reporters apparently believe they can rip off a blog and peddle what they harvest therein as their own work. That’s pretty shameful, especially when most of The Register city hall press release regurgitators like Ponsi wouldn’t know a real news story if it bit them in the ass.

We had a lot of traffic yesterday from The Register and clearly Ponsi visited our website and then was off and running – pretending that our work was his. And that puts him right at the bottom of the barrel he swims around in.

And what does Lou do during a slow news day? What to do? – rip off somebody else’s work or do public service announcements? And how does he determine what to cover? That’s easy, wait for someone else to do the story first!

Total Buzz Fail: The Shoe Fetish

Um, too much information?

Everybody knows that traditional print journalism is on the way out. Why? Lazy citizens? Sensory overload? More convenient access? All of the above?

Dying papers like the Orange County Register are fighting a rear-guard action by turning their print edition into a dumbed-down website-looking format with lots of pictures and human interest stories for us idiots. And of course they have gone on-line with stuff like their political gossip column “Total Buzz.” Which might be better termed “Total Schmooze.”

Rather than actually dedicate itself to reporting real, relevant news, the Register has decided to dedicate its employees’ talents toward the inane, and to the political flackery of Martin Wisckol and Frank Mickadeit. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the worthies than run the Register that Orange County is a market that is starved for local news and, coincidentally, that it is run by a group of political overseers who operate the place like their own private plantation. Seems like an opportunity to do real reporting, right?

But yesterday the Register hit a new low, even for them.

I just can't help myself.

Consider this, um, monument to  cutting edge journalism as Jennifer Muir shares the embarrassing shoe fetish of Brett Barbre with her breathlessly waiting readers.

Brett Barbre’s Shoe Fetish

Huh? FFFF has recently disclosed a series of embarrassing expenditures by the County Clerk, Tom Daly, including a $48,000 contract to the very same Brett Barbre to “study” an athletic hall of fame, and who then turned around and kicked back $1000 into Daly’s political campaign.

And what about the $1700 as month retainer that has been paid out by Daly for over five years to a Sacramento “consultant” to do – nothing. And how about the County spending $2,100,000 two years ago at Daly’s behest on a tear-down building that was supposed to house County’s archives? Of any interest to the intrepid journalists at the Register? Naw.

It's not just a girl thing...

Instead we get pictures of what shoes the political hacks are wearing at the Registrar of Voters Office. They think we want to look at pictures of people’s feet. Meanwhile a lowly blog is forced to actually do a newspaper’s job.

Well, we can take a certain perverse pleasure in knowing that the Register’s days are numbered and that soon its employees will be doing (paid) PR work, or will be blogging for food.

Still, it does seem shame that nobody in the business is willing to try to fill the void where local news used to be.