MEDIA WATCH | NEW YORK POST PAGE 6

In Wake of Tragedy, New York Post Flaunts Bigotry

As our entire nation pauses to declare “enough is enough” when it comes to bigotry, the New York Post proudly flaunts it while a family grieves.

July 15, 2020

Stephen Lynch
Editor-in-Chief

New York Post

slynch@nypost.com

Dear Mr. Lynch,

A young man dies a tragic death and, while his family and friends are still reeling, you allow that tragedy to be used to spread hate. And you do it on the very next day.

In other words, as our entire nation pauses to declare “enough is enough” when it comes to bigotry, the New York Post proudly flaunts it while a family grieves.

How dare you.

Can you imagine your “Editor at Large” Sara Nolan writing about “how f----d up kids get in Judaism” after the tragic loss of a Jewish mother’s son? Or “how f----d up kids get in Islam” after the sudden death of a Muslim father’s second child?

Your insensitivity is repulsive. Your ignorance boggles the mind.

In giving a platform to a professional anti-Scientologist the New York Post permits him to push hate speech offensive to millions of Scientologists and to any and every religious person. You allow a career bigot to hijack a tragedy to spread propaganda against minorities across the globe.

Tony Ortega is well-known for one thing: being a child sex-trafficking promoter. He championed Backpage.com, the largest sex-trafficking site in the world before the FBI confiscated it in 2018. Minors trafficked on the site include a teenager who tells of being gang-raped, choked and forced to perform sexual acts at gunpoint. Another was stabbed to death and another murdered in 2017, with her corpse burned. Ortega boasted that he worked for those “smart enough to start Backpage.com.” That you would allow Backpage’s defender to say one word in the pages of the New York Post about families, children, the loss of a loved one or any religion is abhorrent in the extreme.

STAND will be sure to inform your advertisers of the values you stand for—they deserve to know—if you do not at once remove from your article language intended to incite hate.

Edward Parkin
International Director
STAND

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