I had never heard of Newsball until I read a sneering account of Cole Baritomo’s “news blog” in the Daily Beast, titled “He Bullies Kids and Calls It News,” by DB reporter Brandy Zadrozny. She caught me at a bad time, because I was still gagging from reading an outrageous, incompetent, slanted and useless Daily Beast account of the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling striking down a Massachusetts law establishing anti-protest “buffer zones” around abortion clinics as a First Amendment violation. Nobody reading this mess could possibly figure out what the ruling was about, what it was, and the distinctions it drew. There were no quotes from the opinion, no discussion of the important disagreements among the justices, not even a clear description of what a buffer zone is, or what the law that was struck down said. The reporter, however, quoted Plannned Parenthood three times—yes, they are certainly the most unbiased analysts of this issue. Then the screed masquerading as news reporting ended with this:

“While undoubtedly this ruling will lead to much more litigation in lower courts to determine the exact implications of the Supreme Court’s ruling, it looks like states can still take steps needed to protect women seeking abortions, including passing buffer zone laws as long as they don’t explicitly include public streets and sidewalks. Which is too bad, because extremist and aggressive anti-abortion protesters don’t seem to recognize any boundaries in their harassment and violent intimidation.”

Huh?  What does a buffer zone do if it doesn’t include streets and sidewalks?  Is she suggesting that a law will be more Constitutional if it is less “explicit” (which is nonsense)? What is “too bad”? Are there editors at the Daily Beast? (You can read a useful analysis of the SCOTUS decision here.)

After reading this amateurish, useless drivel, I wondered how the same website could dare criticize any other online news source, including one authored  by Ms. Hendrickson’s Fifth Grade class at Centurion Elementary in Peoria, on any basis whatsoever. The Daily Beast and its ilk, and there are a lot of ilk, have lowered professional journalistic standards to subterranean depths. They are the reason sloppy, illiterate, ethics-free sites like Newsball exist…that, and the fact that the professional news sources censor the facts, based on no consistent standards whatsoever. Newsball doesn’t.

What Newsball does do is publish photos and names of newsmakers that the mainstream news media deems inappropriate to publish—gory photos of celebrity corpses, the names of alleged rape victims and accusers, minors charged with serious crimes. Since the policies used by various outlets on such matters are wildly arbitrary and inconsistent, and those enforcing the policies often lacking in basic reasoning skills, Newsball’s solution is reasonable: print everything the news organizations know. There is no reason to trust or emulate the news judgment CBS, ABC and CNN—who have made the editorial decision that Lois Lerner’s lost IRS e-mails don’t matter—much less the Daily Beast. There is no reason to trust Cole Baritomo either, but at least he goes out of his way to flag his untrustworthiness with awful grammar, terrible proof-reading (if I say proof-reading is bad, you know how bad it must be) and over-the-top tabloid characterizations (“How much blame do we put on our military for enlisting a mentally impaired, Juarezaffiliated, unloyal to the U.S., spanish speaking psycho?”) that would embarrass the National Enquirer.

[Speaking of being English-challenged, and I’m referring to Baritomo, not “the psycho,” how is revealing the names of children who have been charged with serious crimes “bullying,” Ms.Zadrozny?]

For the most part, Newsball is tasteless,  vulgar, and designed for creeps, but it has an audience only because the supposedly respectable media abused its monopoly. If Newsball has one name or piece of information that I’m interested in knowing and is being withheld because the equivalent of a thousand Brandy Zadroznys, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that they get to know it but I don’t, I’ll tolerate its other transgressions, which are too many to count.
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Sources: Daily Beast 1, 2