The root of the problem, Part Four
Preface and editor’s note: As stated previously, AntiSocialMedia.net has issues with Gary Weiss, not his wife.
As is happens, one of the more startling examples of abuse of social media we’ve discovered anywhere – and the central theme of this, the fourth and final part of this series on the history of Gary Weiss's pathology – cannot be told without making reference to that relationship.
However, because her identity is ultimately not material to this situation, we shall only refer to her as “Mrs. Weiss” (though Weiss is not her real last name), and have set this site’s comment filter to immediately reject any comments that contain either her first or last name.
Also, all references to her are redacted from the document included in this post. The only circumstance under which that will change is if Gary Weiss (or his known surrogates) choose to call into question the document’s validity, or claim the redacted name is that of someone else.
Finally, Gary Weiss was invited to comment on the claims that follow, but ignored multiple requests to do so.
Background
Through parts one, two and three of this series, we established that in April of 2005, Gary Weiss created the Mediacrity blog, which from the beginning dedicated a substantial amount of space to attacking writer and former president of the United Nations Correspondents Association (UNCA), Ian Williams.We also established that in March of 2005, Mrs. Weiss, who for three years held UN media accreditation as a correspondent for The Pioneer of India newspaper, suddenly lost her media credentials.
Two months before the launch of Gary Weiss's Mediacrity blog, in February of 2005, a media criticism website ran suspiciously-timed stories attacking both Ian Williams and his wife, a BBC World Service reporter and native of Uzbekistan; the former for accepting media training assignments from UN agencies, and the latter over what were ultimately shown to be unfounded questions relating to her visa status in the US. At the time, Williams’s wife also held a paid position within UNCA, one to which those familiar with the situation confirm Mrs. Weiss aspired.
But as mentioned, not only did Mrs. Weiss not get that job, one month later she was permanently barred from the UN.
One month after that, Gary Weiss created Mediacrity, which, among other things, he used as a platform for casting further aspersions upon Williams’s wife, calling her an “obscure hack” and continuing the fruitless challenges to her immigration status.
When securing her own permanence in this country, Mrs. Weiss, an Indian national, requested then-UNCA President Tony Jenkins write a letter to the State Department verifying her employment as UN correspondent for the Pioneer of India newspaper, which Jenkins did.
Keep that in mind as you read this document (click to enlarge) in which it is revealed that Mrs. Weiss had no connection to the Pioneer of India whatsoever, and that the three years she spent acting like a reporter at the UN were all a sham.
These circumstances invoke myriad questions, but for now we’ll focus on those involving Gary Weiss; specifically, how could Gary justify attacking another on baseless immigration issues when his own wife’s residence had been founded at least in part on a shockingly brazen and possibly illegal misrepresentation?
Also, it’s generally understood by those I spoke with that Mrs. Weiss is not exactly “computer savvy.” If that’s true, what role did Gary Weiss have in the annual creation of forged documents that the Pioneer’s Chandan Mitra termed “computer generated?”
Gary will likely try to divert the issue, claiming this is an attack on his wife. Indeed great lengths have been taken to ensure that such is not the case. Instead, this is the culmination of a four-part series demonstrating the foundations of Gary’s unfortunate pattern of deception and abuse of social media for personal gain, which his come to permeate his professional and personal lives.
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postscript:
Expecting that claims of unfair attacks against Mrs. Weiss are inevitable, we wish to pre-emptively add some context to that discussion.
In November of 2005, former soc.culture.jewish Usenet newsgroup regular Ted Dichtler (shown here to be Gary Weiss) escalated his ongoing flame war with a particularly repulsive neo-Nazi by posting the man’s home and business addresses, in addition to his wife's full name.
Weiss then went on to add these personal details to Ted Dichtler's Usenet posting signature, meaning it was reproduced scores of times across the web.
Gary, for future reference, that’s what it means to unfairly attack your target's spouse.
Gary Weiss: The Root of the Problem, Part Three
Preface and editor’s note: AntiSocialMedia.net has issues with Gary Weiss, not his wife.
As is happens, one of the more startling examples of abuse of social media we’ve discovered anywhere – and the central theme of this, the third part of this series on Gary Weiss – cannot be told without making reference to that relationship.
However, because her identity is ultimately not material to this situation, we shall only refer to her as “Mrs. Weiss” (though Weiss is not her real last name) and have set this site’s comment filter to immediately reject any comments that contain either her first or last name. Comments containing any other personally identifying information belonging to Mrs. Weiss will be immediately deleted and the commenter barred from further use of this site.
Background: In parts one and two of this four part series, we established that Gary Weiss is the would-be anonymous writer of the blog dubbed Mediacrity, which considers itself “A media insider's occasional rants on goofs, bias and hypocrisy in the media.”Also, a prior post on this blog demonstrated Gary Weiss’s proclivity for creating fake Amazon.com book reviews for the purpose of boosting of his own books’ ratings while deflating the ratings of those authors with whom Gary has tangled in the past.You’ll need to keep both of those facts in mind as you read the following.
While researching links between Gary Weiss and the targets of his abusive Amazon.com book reviews, we hit a dead end when it came to understanding exactly what Gary had against author Ian Williams, whose two books were trashed by reviewers Ted Dichtler (reviews since deleted) and Raymond Stella in the spring of 2005. What made this instance so curious was the fact that soon after we announced the forthcoming investigation on the topic of Weiss's fabricated Amazon.com reviews, Gary Weiss (as Ted Dichtler) quietly deleted his one-star thrashing of Williams’ book, United Nations for Beginners, replacing it with a tepid review of another author’s book about the UN.
The Williams book review, which we captured prior to Gary’s replacement of it, read as follows:
Trash. A superficial book that offers a la-la land version of the UN, failing to mention entire areas in which the UN has failed miserably.
Also, since it was recently disclosed that Ian Williams has actually worked for the UN as a media trainer and pamphlet writer, it seems to me that the validity of this book is entirely questionable. He boasts about his UN work on his website. That only adds to the tastelessness of this rubbish. (Ted Dichtler)
Most would probably consider those sentiments a little harsh for an illustrated book aimed at school-aged kids.
While we did finally discover the reason for Gary’s acrimony toward Ian Williams, that knowledge arrived too late to be included in the Amazon.com review fabrication story.
Which is why we’re telling you about it now.
Two independent sources confirm that Gary Weiss’s wife was at one time credentialed as a reporter for the Pioneer of India newspaper, covering the United Nations. As a credentialed UN correspondent, Mrs. Weiss was eligible to join the United Nations Correspondents Association (UNCA), which she did. Subsequently she sought a paid position with UNCA, held at the time by Ian Williams's wife. Mrs. Weiss had apparently sought other paid positions within the UN proper as well. Williams, UN correspondent for The Nation, was former UNCA president.
For reasons that don’t matter now (but will explored in part four), in March of 2005, Mrs. Weiss lost her media credentials and was ordered never to set foot on UN property again. Obviously, she was also taken out of consideration for any position within the UN and UNCA that she had sought.
Those familiar with the situation feel Mrs. Weiss blamed Williams for the circumstances surrounding this unfortunate turn of fate.
A few days after this incident, Gary Weiss – through Amazon.com reviewer Ted Dichtler, called Ian Williams’ book “trash.”
Exactly 30 days after that, Weiss launched the Mediacrity blog, and with it, an attempt at a recurring series called, “Hypocrites on Parade,” focusing on Ian Williams.
Weiss's first examination of Williams in Mediacrity reads in part as follows:
…Williams is a fourth-rate hack. But fourth-rate hackdom has not prevented other ethics-deprived journos from being publicly pilloried. What is keeping Williams from the gallows?
... If you go on his website, http://www.ianwilliams.info/, you see what I'm talking about--if you can read it. This guy is such a dummy that he's got black print on a dark blue background.
We feel secure in classifying the above as "mean-spirited."
“Hypocrites on Parade” would go on to be replaced by “Creeps on Parade” and dozens of drive-by attacks on Williams, in which he is named, among other things: “The Payola Pundit,” “Fourth-rate Hack” (later promoted to “Fifth-rate Hack”), and “Bloated UN Minister of Propaganda.”
The final part of this series, coming very soon, examines the strange circumstances surrounding Mrs. Weiss’s gaining and losing her media credentials, the role Gary Weiss played in that process, and a new wrinkle that even we find difficult to believe.
All this attention is flattering
by Judd Bagley, principal contributor
For better or worse, I was born with an extremely well-developed sense of fairness, coupled with an even better-developed sense of obligation. Put those qualities together, and you get a person who, like me, tends to take up the fights of those being mistreated, even (or especially) when the outcome doesn’t affect me directly.
Antisocialmedia.net is a team effort, albeit conceived of and launched by me, which has taken part in the fight against the perpetrators of a form of financial fraud known as strategic failure to deliver, or, more commonly, illegal naked short selling.
What makes this situation different from others in which I’ve involved myself in the past is that the injustice taking place here does affect me. And you. And those you care about.
And it needs to stop.
You should click here to watch a presentation on illegal naked shorting already viewed by 300,000 others.
What does Antisocialmedia.net have to do with the fight against illegal naked shorting?
As was explained here, this site exists to do exactly one thing: help increase awareness of, and opposition to, illegal naked shorting by exposing the existence of organized and well-financed proponents of the practice, many of which ply their trade full-time on the web.
Living online as they do, we’ve collected an enormous amount of information about them, down to many of their identities, some of which have been exposed here. These people are abetting fraud against our capital markets and need to be held accountable for their actions. That’s why the data and research we’ve amassed is being turned over to law enforcement so that true accountability may follow.
Ends and Means
Given how many individuals have contributed information and research, I can’t speak to all the methods used, because I don’t know them all; however I can say that I’m confident no laws have been broken.
Those who stand to lose the most by what we’ve done will certainly cry hypocrisy because some of our means have resembled their own (particularly in our use of multiple identities), but that’s just a smokescreen to obscure the fact that our motive has been to foil the same crime their actions endeavor to facilitate...sort of like a police decoy dressing like a prostitute as a means of curtailing true prostitution. (Now there’s an analogy – naked short shills as whores – that could be milked all day long.)
As for me, I happen to work for Overstock.com, one of the many companies targeted by these criminals. Yet this effort has nothing to do with Overstock.com, other than make the offense of illegal naked shorting all the more offensive to me. In fact, given the insistence of my boss, CEO Patrick Byrne, that any continuation of my nearly one year old research be strictly and unambiguously limited to my own time, there’s no question but that my current employment has hampered my progress.
Prior to starting at Overstock.com, I established a relationship with a business writer covering the naked shorting issue, and we had frequent conversations about the results of my investigations.
A few days after starting at Overstock.com, she called me asking for an update, and I found myself in the awkward position of having to tell her that those calls would likely have to wait for the weekend (a time journalists would rather spend not working). The solution, I decided, was to regularly and anonymously post my progress in a way that the objective data could stand on its own, and keep me and my employer appropriately separate from it.
And that’s how Antisocialmedia.net was conceived.
Message bored
I find that active finance message board participants fall into one of two categories: those who are paid to post smears against others, and those who know the first group is paid to post smears against others. That the first group is apparently now being paid to smear me is both an honor and the best possible vindication of everything published on Antisocialmedia.net.
Today Roddy Boyd of the New York Post, who to his credit told me he agrees Gary Weiss faked many of his own books’ Amazon.com reviews, emailed asking for comment on how I’m being portrayed on various message boards. I replied that it had been a while since I’d had time to spend more than five minutes there, especially since concluding I had already gleaned all the useful data they’re likely to yield.
But to answer Roddy’s question, I really don’t care what the message board attack crew is saying about me in their little echo chambers, and am secure in the knowledge that that those whose opinions matter will consider the source of the attacks: Gary Weiss and his pseudonymously loyal toady ScipioAfricanus, the only two people left on earth who still insist Gary never faked a single Amazon.com review(!).
I care even less about the attacks originating from Gary Weiss’s push-button blog, which has, according to Alexa, a statistical readership of approximately zero.
So, I say: Smear on, Gary! Smear on Scipio! Otherwise, I’ll start to worry that I’m not on the right track. Thanks to you, I couldn’t be more confident that I am.
Final note
On those rare occasions in which defenders of illegal naked shorting allow themselves to be pinned down long enough to offer a philosophical defense of their indefensible actions, the best they can come up with is a perversion of the anarchocapitalist ideal, which tends to sound like this:
“The job of regulating our financial markets is too big for government to handle alone, so it’s the responsibility of investors to use tactics like naked shorting to find and punish bad companies.”
What a load of bullshit. Yet that, if you're curious, is how they manage to sleep at night.
But just for kicks, I’ll accept that premise and counter with my own:
The job of tracking down and exposing miscreants* like Gary Weiss, Darl J. Dumont, Floyd D. Schneider and their ilk is too big for government to handle alone, so it’s up to concerned citizens to employ tactics, such as those we have, to find them.
We’ll defer the punishment to those with the authority.
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*While I consider someone to be a "criminal" upon committing a crime, such as not disclosing compensation received in exchange for promoting or demoting stock; for the purposes of this blog, I've decided to adopt the legal standard, which demands a conviction before the term should be applied. Hence I have made a word substitution here to reflect that. (1/14/07)