CENSORSHIP AT THE STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE. HOW TOM WROBLESKI SKEWS AND CONTROLS THE NEWS.

10/16/08

CENSORSHIP AT THE STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE. HOW TOM WROBLESKI SKEWS AND CONTROLS THE NEWS. THE ADVANCE COVERS UP ITS COVERUPS BY EXCLUDING ME FROM THE CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE DEBATES.

TomWeissforUSCongress@gmail.com
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/
http://www.tomweissforuscongress.blogspot.com/
www.groups.yahoo.com/group/upfrontnewsdiscussionforum

By Tom Weiss

A few weeks ago at a meeting of SiColab, a Staten Island grass roots arts advocacy organization, a filmmaker strongly criticized the Staten Island Advance for ignoring her calls for coverage and for the skimpy coverage of grass roots issues. Little did she know that she was making contact with the tip of an iceberg of censorship and slanted reporting at the Staten Island Advance.

Also present at the meeting was Ben Johnson, the music editor of the Advance's weekly entertainment magazine called "Awe." I could understand some defensiveness on his part as he acknowledged the lady's polite but very firm criticisms and then suggested that complaints should be directed to the Advance's Editor Brian Laline. Mr. Johnson needn't have bothered as it seems that directing a complaint about reporting or non-reporting to Mr. Laline is the equivalent of directing a complaint against Dick Cheney to George W. Bush.

The reality is that the Staten Island Advance, owned by the multibillionaire media mogul Donald Newhouse, is a corporate mouthpiece that regularly practices censorship, most clearly in its political coverage. The villain in the piece is a dour and dishonest man named Tom Wrobleski, who is the Political Editor of the Advance.

I first met Mr. Wrobleski in as I recall March of 2005, a few weeks after I had decided to run for the U.S. Senate against the very corporate Republicrat Hillary Clinton, who, among her many other negligences, is directly involved in the political and media coverup of the Genocide in Tibet. Mr. Wrobleski and I met for over an hour in his Borough Hall office. I answered all of his questions, provided him with the identities and contact information for sources about me and gave him a pile of news clippings about me from various newspapers and magazines over the years. When, at the interview, I asked him about coverage, he said, "let's see how your campaign goes." He asked me to stay in touch with him by telephone and e-mail. I did.

As I have said and written previously. If there were an Olympic gold medal for not answering messages and e-mails, Tom Wrobleski would be an easy winner.

All of that changed during a televised campaign debate in August, 2005 involving candidates for the office of NYC Public Advocate. One of those candidates was the incumbent Betsy Gotbaum, a person with whom, via a family member of mine, I've been personally acquainted since 1979. Betsy Gotbaum is a symbol of what is bad and corrupt about politics, particularly when ruled by rich and greedy people like her. My first experience with Betsy Gotbaum as Public Advocate occurred a number of years ago when I had an appointment with her then Chief of Staff Scott Coccaro to discuss staff abuse of homeless people in shelters and drop-in centers. Ms. Gotbaum responded by trying to have me arrested in her office. Fortunately the intelligence police officer assigned to the task proved to be far more intelligent and stable than Ms. Gotbaum handled the situation appropriately and, after asking me the right questions, merely advised me to return home and leave Gotbaum alone for awhile.

Ms. Gotbaum's anxieties about me relate directly to the fact that I'm a free lance investigative journalist and that she has a closetful of political skeletons including (at least) marital links to the Central Intelligence Agency and some adultery.

Under any circumstances, any reasonably competent psychiatrist evaluating Betsy Gotbaum should have no difficulty in including "paranoid" in his or her diagnostic assessment.

Because of Ms. Gotbaum's apparent unwillingness to do something about the rampant staff abuse of homeless people in shelters and drop-in centers, I decided to support civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel for Public Advocate. One day Mr. Siegel told me that he had received a Gotbaum complaint that I had been "stalking" her. In fact, as I told Mr. Siegel, I've never stalked anyone and but I have been present as a journalist at some events at which Gotbaum has appeared. Mr. Siegel and I had a chuckle about all that.

And so during the aforementioned 2005 debate, the very secretive Gotbaum was asked to reveal the contents of her Public Advocate appointment schedule. Perhaps with the Tom Weiss appointment in mind, she refused, stating that she was being stalked by a homeless individual. Thanks to what may be the one of the greediest landlords around, the very politically con- nected loftlord, Forest Hills, Queens resident Thomas Berger ("The Greed Merchant of Tribeca"), I was homeless for a time.

Upon reading the "stalker" comment in several newspapers I contacted the Daily News and very soon met with reporter Celeste Katz. Her story, which accurately reported my side of the Gotbaum "stalker" delusion, appeared in the Daily News on August 27, 2005. My side was also covered in a New York Times story on the same date by Jonathan Hicks.

Breaking that story, however was Dan Janison, then the City Hall reporter for Newsday. In his essentially accurate story on the Gotbaum fantasy and the Weiss rebuttal which appeared in NYC Newsday on August 26, he also reported my U.S. Senate candidacy.

It was at that point that Tom Wrobleski, who had written not one word about my Senate candidacy, contacted me asking me for an "exclusive." We did a telephone interview. His story, which appeared with a front page lead on August 27, was error-riddled and openly slanted in favor of Gotbaum (who, by the way, later and very secretively, apologized to me). He even gave State Senator Diane Savino, whose Chief of staff Robert Cataldo, almost physically attacked me in her office several years ago when I was there for a homelessness-related scheduled appointment, the opportunity to make a blatantly defamatory comment about me in print and gave the same opportunity to Keith Parascandola, a Chief of Staff who demonstrates why the New York State Legislature has been properly rated as "the worst in the country."

I complained to the Advance and was assured they would publish corrections. They lied. I was asked to write a letter to the editor. I wrote two. They refused to publish them and when I asked why, the response was a Tom Wrobleski/Dick Cheney-style silence.

And as far as "stalking" Betsy Gotbaum is concerned, I usually respond to that Gotbaum fantasy by a reference to a fine country song recorded by Dwight Yoakum titled "I Ain't That Lonely Yet."

Following Wrobleski's poorly written article he resumed his journalistic silence about my candidacy for the U.S. Senate. It is apparent that he regarded protecting Hillary Clinton as part of his job. I therefore wrote an article on my U.S. Senate campaign blog http://www.tomweissdemocratforussenate.blogspot.com/ accusing the Staten Island Advance of censorship and referring to him as Tom Wrongleski. Not to long after that I had a telephone conversation with Advance editor Dean Balsamini. As we were talking he brought up my article on his computer and exclaimed, "You trashed my reporter." I reminded him that Mr. Wrobleski had been guilty of false reporting and censorship with regard to me and advised him that I felt free to write further critical articles about Wrobleski and the Advance.

It was not too long after that conversation that I received a call from Mr. Wrobleski asking for an interview. The interview was conducted by phone and resulted in a front page article in the Advance appearing on August 21, 2006 under the headline "With the stroke of a pencil vote for anyone." Mr. Wrobleski spent most of the article on the technicalities of write-in voting and very few words on my very serious issues with Hillary Clinton. He did mention that I have accused Mrs. Clinton of ignoring the Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet. And that makes the Staten Island Advance perhaps the only paper anwhere that mentions a genocide and doesn't follow up the story.

Some months ago an Advance reporter named Tevah Platt wrote a story about some civil rights work by Rev. Demetrius Carolina, Pastor of the First Central Baptist Church in Stapleton, of which I am a member. I sent her an e-mail commenting favorably about her article but advising her of the serious censorship problems at the Advance. To my surprise Ms. Platt replied with an e-mail expressing interest in my issues and also claiming that she would never work for a paper that practices censorship. (If she meant it, she will have to start looking for work elsewhere.) She referred me over to several editors, such as Marjorie Hack and they buried everything.

The Staten Island Advance knows full well that I can prove major negligences by Diane Savino, the really bad State Assemblyman Matthew Titone and City Councilman Michael McMahon. They know I have the facts and the paperwork on the Clintons' involvement in the coverup of the genocide in Tibet. They know that I have the facts about domestic fascism in NYC, including Staten Island (via the racist Lenora Fulani and the "Independence Party of New York" - and Fulani's ideological godfather, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.).

And now that I am a write-in candidate for the U.S. Congressman the Staten Island Advance is trying to shut me up again by singling me out for exclusion from the Advance-sponsored debates on October 15 and the 28th. the Advance is even covering up its coverups. (The October 28th debate is co-sponsored by the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce. Hopefully the Chamber of Commerce's President & CEO Linda M. Baran and it's Vice President Patrick Hyland have more respect for the first amendment and for the voters of the 13th congressional district and will see to it that I am included in the October 28th debate).

And so Ben Johnson might be interested to know that Brian Laline, who ignored a mountain of information provided him by me and my Communicatons Director Frank De Luca on the Wrobleski censorship, in a one line note apologized for excluding me from its debates and said that the Advance wants to confine itself to candidates whose names appear on the ballot. What that means that they favor candidates who are backed by political party machines.

One of the stories covered up by the Advance was the political blowout in the NYC City Council some months ago generated when the imperious Council Speaker Christine Quinn ("The Marie Antoinette of City Hall") sabotaged the effort to have several blocks of a street in Bedford-Stuyvesant now named for a slaveowner named Gates renamed in honor of the late and very controversal black nationalist Sonny Abubadika Carson. Among those who most vociferously denounced Carson, thereby disrespecting thousands of African-Americans, was Councilman Michael McMahon. I was in the Council chambers that day and I saw the whole thing.

Some months ago at a Sonny Carson-supporting rally in Brooklyn, a prominent Staten Island African-American activist, responding to my mention of the Staten Island Advance, said firmly, "The Staten Island Advance is the most racist paper in New York." As long as Tom Wrobleski runs things politically there, I cannot disagree.
* * * * * * *

“5-BOROUGH MAN” GOES HEAD-TO-HEAD VS. ENTRENCHED MACHINE POLITICIANS

FRANK DE LUCA & ASSOCIATES
239 EAST 33RD STREET
NEW YORK, NY 10016
For Immediate Release
Contact: Frank De Luca
delucanyc@hotmail.com
tomsupfrontnews@yahoo.com
tomweissforuscongress@gmail.com

TOM WEISS SEEKS U.S. CONGRESSIONAL SEAT

STATEN ISLAND RESIDENT TOM WEISS ANNOUNCES CANDIDACY
IN THE 13TH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT

“5-BOROUGH MAN” GOES HEAD-TO-HEAD VS. ENTRENCHED MACHINE POLITICIANS

New York, N.Y.; September 18 - - Staten Island resident, long-time community activist and freelance journalist Tom Weiss has announced that he will seek to become the first write-in candidate for congress representing New York’s 13th congressional district (which is comprised of the entire borough of Staten Island, and several neighborhoods in Brooklyn including Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, Dyker Heights, and Gravesend). Weiss will face a contentious battle against his post September 9th primary candidates, the politically entrenched Michael McMahon (Democrat), Robert Stranieri (Republican), and Carmine Morano (Independence Party of New York).

Tom Weiss serves as publisher and editor of UP FRONT News, an influential free newspaper (“the paper that can’t be bought or sold”) that has scooped the mainstream and “alternative” media by breaking such stories as the Koch Administration cover-up of how budget-cuts caused patient deaths at Queens Hospital Center; tenant rights legislation; the Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. infiltration into the “left” (through, for example, the New Alliance Party and Lenora Fulani); and the LaRouche/Fulani infiltration into the Green Party and the Ralph Nader presidential campaigns; and many other stories during its 25-plus years of publication.

Weiss, a registered Democrat, will face the aforementioned candidates in the November 4th election and is ready to debate the candidates on such issues as gentrification/over-development/housing; civil rights/civil liberties; the Iraq War and the Middle East; genocide (e.g.Tibet, Darfur, and poor communities in America); wealth re-distribution/poverty/economy/corporate welfare; political corruption; immigration, foreign affairs, globalization; energy and the environment; healthcare; gay rights; and domestic fascism (e.g. LaRouche, Lenora Fulani, etc.). Tom Weiss’ viewpoint on all the issues can be accessed on his news blog: http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/.

(more)
Page two

Tom Weiss’ take-on-the-system endeavor is in the small “d” democratic tradition of young Michael Sessions, who, as a write-in candidate in 2005, defeated an entrenched incumbent and became the mayor of Hillsdale, Michigan. Weiss and his increasing number of supporters have also been energized by the recent news that Dennis Morris won a primary as a write-in candidate in California.

While New York City is a larger political battleground than the communities that Sessions and Morris fought in, Weiss is confident he will prevail due to the fact he has been a political factor and influence in New York for more than 40 years. A native New Yorker, a long-time union member and supporter, a community leader, and a social worker for more than 25 years, Weiss is known as the “5-Borough Man” as he has, at one time or another, been a resident in each of New York City’s five boroughs.

Along with UP FRONT News, the newspaper he publishes, edits, and contributes to, Weiss is a freelance journalist who has been published in the Queens Tribune, Jewish Currents, Brooklyn Paper, Downtown Magazine (no longer in print), and a number of literary journals and magazines. As a community leader, activist, and producer of performing arts events, Weiss has made the front pages of Newsday and the Staten Island Advance; and has received considerable coverage in The New York Times, New York Post, Daily News, Christian Science Monitor, New York Press, Downtown Magazine, Downtown Express, The Villager, The SoHo Weekly News (no longer in print), Queens Tribune, The Paper (Fordham University), The Knight News (Queens College), Pipedream (Binghamton University), Chelsea-Clinton News, Novoye Russke Slovo (the largest Russian-language daily newspaper in New York), and the Gannett-owned Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin among others.

Weiss has also appeared on NBC-TV news, WPIX-TV news, WBAI radio, the “INN World Report” and “Conversations with Harold Channer” (both seen on Manhattan Neighborhood Network), Vyzygoth’s “Grassy Knoll” radio and internet talk show, and a number of mainstream and alternative radio, television and internet broadcasts, as well as college radio broadcasts at Binghamton University, SUNY-Purchase, and Fordham University.

“I think the bottom line issue is integrity,” Weiss commented. “I am the only candidate who can be consistently counted on to tell the truth.”

Tom Weiss has consistently won elections in which he has been a candidate including being elected and re-elected as Union Shop Steward in Local 1199, District Council 37, District Council 1707, and to the Queens Hospital Center Community Advisory Board.

Tom Weiss is available for interviews upon request. Please contact campaign Communications Director Frank De Luca at delucanyc@hotmail.com. Tom Weiss can be reached at tomsupfrontnews@yahoo.com.
# # #

CENSORSHIP AT THE STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE SPONSORED CONGRESSIONAL DEBATES

October 11, 2008

By Tom Weiss and Frank Deluca

U.S. congressional candidate Tom Weiss and his supporters strongly object to an apparent decision as communicated by Staten Island Advance Political Editor Tom Wrobleski to exclude Mr. Weiss from two Advance-sponsored debates on October 15th and October 28th.

A number of people have already expressed their opposition to this censorship and have urged the Advance to include Mr. Weiss in the 13th congressional district debates. Several letters sent to Advance Editor Brian Leline are posted below.

You may fax addtional letters to Mr. Leline at 718-981-5679.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Brian Laline, Editor 10/11/08
Staten Island Advance

Dear Mr. Laline,

I have been acquainted with Tom Weiss for over 4 years. We have participated in and have advocated for many causes together, including freedom of speech and assembly. I am a participant of a weekly free speech event at Union Square, which Tom has greatly contributed to and helped organize in the past few years. Aside from that I am also familiar with Tom’s previous activities, such as his advocacy for patients rights and outreach to the homeless regarding voter rights and education. I feel Tom is possibly the most legitimate candidate in the congressional race in the 13th congressional district, mainly because he has reached out to and has been there for people who needed him most. Tom is definitely not rich but he still finds ways to help and offer the little financial assistance that he can afford to help others less fortunate than him.

From spending time with Tom I have noticed that his helping people is not limited to any one person. If he met someone in need and befriended that person he was always willing to help in any way he could, whether it be with social work and information about government bureaucracies or by offering his own assistance. Tom has been around for a while and knows a lot about the legal system as well as the way our government operates. As a professional social worker he interacted with many people from different countries, as well as with the disadvantaged in our own midst who need the most assistance and compassion. There are no other candidates that have shown as much compassion and have the type of experience necessary to lead and inspire leadership within our communities and the country. Yes, Tom’s approach to politics is unorthodox, however it is this unorthodox approach that is necessary, especially in a “change” election like the one we are going through now. I realize that as an average citizen I have very little influence over the policies of your newspaper, and so I am not going to make any unreasonable demands on my own behalf. However, I am encouraging you to think about the good that can be accomplished by allowing people to know what their choices are in this election. I guarantee you that if your newspaper recognizes Tom and gives him the legitimacy he deserves, the people of S.I. as well as the country will view your paper in a completely different light and will be grateful for your safeguarding of democracy and liberty.

Under any circumstances it is my considered opinion that Tom Weiss is a serious and legitimate candidate for the United States Congress and that he should definitely be included in any Staten Island Advance - sponsered forums or debates among the candidates. I am urging you to include him in the October 15th and October 28th debates.

Thank you for your consideration and your early reply.

Sincerely,

Roman Shusterman Coordinator, No Police State Coalition
c.c. Rev. Demetrius Carolina, First Central Baptist Church, S.I.
Rabbi Gerald Sussman, Temple Emanu-El, S.I.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Laline,

I am a local musician, who plays at local who has recently been made aware that Mr. Tom Weiss has not been allowed to debate with the other candidates who are runningfor the 13th Congressional District seat. I am appalled that a write in candidate is not allowed to take part in this debate. It simply goes to show that true democracy is in danger in this country. i encourage you to let Mr. Weiss debate. Let the voice of the grass roots be heard! Stop going along with the status quo and being a cog in the media machine that is the right hand of the corporate-ocracy that has infiltrated the countries political system. Despite any personal opinions you may or may not have for Mr. Weiss, his voice should be allowed and encouraged to be heard in any debates for the upcoming debate.

Sincerely,

Frank Paul Miello II
-------------------------------------------------------
Daer Mr. Laline:

I think that Mr. Tom Weiss should be allowed to present his case to be a congessman in Staten Island at the upcoming debates (October 15 and October 28)

Tom is one of the most well-spoken gentleman I know, and I also think that his ideas should be considered.

Besides, to exclude him is a form of censorship.

I look forward to your response by email.

Thank you.

Peace.

James Mansfield
305 West 28th Street#7G
NYC 10001
212-929-2268