MEDIA & ETHICS | SEPTEMBER 20, 2024

I’m a Silicon Valley Business Founder. If You Are, Too, Don’t Advertise with the Bigoted Mercury News.

They show reckless hate toward my religion, and an attack on one religion is an attack on them all.

I was about five or six years old when my dad taught me how to “put up the dukes” and fight.

That was because we were a Jewish family living in a predominantly gentile neighborhood in which I was often picked on by other kids simply because I was a Jew.

Where did that hate come from? It must have been something they learned from their parents, older siblings, other family members, other kids or the media. Bigotry is a contagious disease.

As an adult, I started several businesses, all of them headquartered in Silicon Valley, our prestigious, beautiful region of northern California. In business I fought with my fair share of bullies—and many were bigots, too. There were unscrupulous lawyers, bankers, creditors, competitors, government employees and members of the press. When I did encounter bullies, the worst sort were the cowards who attacked someone by seeking to influence others to hate that person’s particular religion, race, gender, etc.

As a Bay Area business founder, I can tell you that I never do business with bullies or bigots like that.

Sadly, these bigots can be found in the employ of the Bay Area News Group: Mercury News executive editor Frank Pine and features writer Martha Ross. Martha, a so-called reporter, has written numerous stories that attack folks of one religion specifically: Scientology. Frank apparently encourages her to do it, despite his own publication’s policy that “inclusiveness is at the heart of thinking and acting as journalists.” To write her anti-Scientology stories, Martha Ross has been known to call on her fellow bigots and discredited sources—sources like Tony Ortega, a hate blogger who attacks Christians, Latter-day Saints and Scientologists, and who has the distinction of serving as the top defender of the child sex trafficking website Backpage.com before it was seized by the FBI in 2018, with its executives convicted. Those executives were just sentenced to prison on August 28.

As a Bay Area business founder, I can tell you that I never do business with bullies or bigots like that. I put my dukes up, figuratively, and vote with my dollar and speak out with my voice.

The same goes for thousands of my fellow Scientologists in the Bay Area—many of them businesspeople—who likewise refuse to advertise with, subscribe to, or read the Mercury News.

So if, like me, you started a business here or are a proud Bay Area business owner, don’t pay the Mercury News to attack your own customers. Don’t advertise, don’t subscribe, and don’t even glance at the paper until it issues a public apology to the citizens it targets with hate in its own community.

And if, like me, you are also a person of faith, regardless of what faith, let’s stick together and deny any person or group the chance to single out any one of us and attack us with bigotry.

Stand with me for Bay Area businesses.

Stand with me for people of faith.

Stand with me against the bigoted Mercury News.

KEYWORDS