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How Martha Ross’ Bigotry Inspired Me to Cancel My Subscription to The Mercury News
Martha Ross, in a world that’s brought us such greats as Cronkite, Brokaw, Woodward and Bernstein, how do you even begin to call yourself a journalist while spewing your bottom-of-the-barrel, boilerplated, and rehashed propaganda against Scientology?
If a topic has even the faintest connection to a Scientologist, then there you go again salivating like Pavlov’s dog and relying on the same old washed-up lying hacks that hurt good people for pay in order to numbly fill your column’s inches.
If I had a nickel for every time you’ve used the same tired approach to another one of your hate articles… Very, very lazy, Martha! Unoriginal, and plagiaristic—of yourself—and repeatedly!
Who’s your audience for this low-quality bigotry and contrived tripe? The American neo-Nazi Party?
I’ve been a South Bay resident for nearly 40 years and subscribed to The Mercury News, but since it and you continue to hit new lows with worthless hate propaganda, naturally I and my friends are cancelling our subscriptions.
If you ever endeavor to be a true journalist, you’ll have to take a bolder approach, do something out of the box, wild and crazy, that’s rarely done by reporters of your grade: tell the truth. Tell the whole story about the scores of Northern California Scientologists who delivered tens of thousands of educational booklets into the hands of their neighbors to help them stay well during the pandemic. Or the story of how dozens of Scientology Volunteer Ministers left their jobs and homes for days and weeks to help victims of the California wildfires, or how Scientologists brought aid and supplies to Bahamian victims of Hurricane Dorian. Or how a prominent community leader used The Way to Happiness and its 21 precepts to broker the first peace summit between 25 rival L.A. gangs and inspired the “Riding for Peace” movement joined by thousands, significantly reducing crime.
No, you probably won’t report any of the outstanding social betterment activities that Scientologists engage in every day. That would require reporting the unbiased truth, something only ventured upon by real journalists. No, you’ll likely continue taking the easy way out, like attacking an actor for his intolerance of inequities in the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
One of the key tenets of Scientology is that people are basically good. Perhaps there’s some good in you somewhere and one day you might aspire to step up from the bottom rung of your profession and report the facts—the kind of information that actually helps people.
Who knows? In the process, you might even appeal to some real readers.
But for now, all you’ve done is lost a bunch of them for The Mercury News.
