“Nobody Likes Tracy”

What Might Have Coverage Looked Like?

A source close to MemoryHoleBlog has informed us they contacted Palm Beach Post courts reporter Jane Musgrave via telephone following the December 2017 trial of TracyvFAU wherein FAU Professor James Tracy sued his former employer for civil rights violations. This individual asked the reporter why the Post‘s coverage was so egregiously biased against Tracy and favorable toward FAU.

“Well, nobody likes [Tracy],” Musgrave replied. “He got what he deserved” because “kids died.”

When the party pressed Musgrave on why the newspaper’s coverage included so many glaring omissions of important evidence and testimony–content that would have put Tracy in a more positive light–the reporter responded, “We weren’t allowed to report that,” and that at the end of the day the Post would never publish anything supportive of the plaintiff.

This conversation confirms what the TracyvFAU plaintiff and his legal team observed as both the Post and South Florida Sun-Sentinel‘s sensational and flagrantly misleading coverage throughout the trial and even after the jury verdict was rendered.

The story titles alone suggest the Post‘s clear bias, with the Post referring to Tracy as the “Sandy Hook denier.” In one “opinion piece” the newspaper even solicits an embellished defamatory account of Tracy’s teaching style from one of its salaried employees.

-“FAU Professor James Tracy Claims School Fired Him for Sandy Hook Rants,” Palm Beach Post, November 30, 2017

-“Ex-FAU Prof on Trial Tries To Downplay Attack on Sandy Hook Parents,” Palm Beach Post, December 1, 2017

-“Christie: Tracy-vs-FAU More about Arrogance Than Free Speech, Insubordination,” PalmBeachPost.com, December 5, 2017

-“What It Was Like in the Class of FAU’s Conspiracy-Spinning Professor,” Palm Beach Post, December 8, 2017

-“Claims against FAU by Sandy Hook Denier Headed To Federal Jury Monday,” Palm Beach Post, December 8, 2017

After lengthy litigation and a trial where a federal judge repeatedly defended FAU and its administrators from the bench, the Post continued to ignore crucial testimony given by Tracy’s colleagues that demonstrated just how haphazardly the university’s provosts and deans applied the “Outside Employment/Activities Policy,” and how Tracy was virtually the only employee required to submit an “Outside Employment Form” for his protected speech on a personal blog.

One must keep in mind that FAU is among South Florida’s largest employers, with thousands of taxpayer dollars to spend on largely ineffective advertising  in both newspapers. As one Post staffer explained to journalist and private investigator Jose Lambiet in 2017,

“Business people in the community are no fools. They know advertising in the Post no longer gets results. The news content is so weak that nobody’s reading. It’s like to trying to sell shit.”

Both the Post and Sun-Sentinel are so desperate to please this large advertiser that they are willing to effectively skew their coverage of one of the most significant First Amendment trials in recent history to fit what they perceive to be their readers’ prejudices–in fact, misconceptions that these papers and national news media played a major role in creating via slipshod if not fraudulent coverage of the December 2012 Newtown shooting. In this vein Musgrave is forced to function as an anti-journalist–one who documents an event then proceeds to deliberately deceive her readership.

More recently, Musgrave reported on US District Judge Robin L. Rosenberg’s decision to revisit her misguided Halloween day summary judgement ruling and deny the plaintiff a new trial, pointing to the judge’s “stinging rebuke of Tracy’s claim that the jury got it wrong …

“The central premise in (Tracy’s) motion for new trial is that the jury’s verdict was against the great weight of the evidence,” Rosenberg wrote in a 31-page ruling. “This contention is without merit. Instead, the court concludes that the great weight of the evidence at trial was in favor of (FAU).”

Musgrave’s reportage, probably at her editor’s behest, repeatedly emphasizes Rosenberg’s  ruling to deny the plaintiff a new trial.

Further, it is obvious that Musgrave never read Tracy’s Motions (here and here) since her slapdash piece attributes their authorship to Louis Leo IV, when in fact they were primarily authored and signed by co-counsel.

 

The Sun-Sentinel‘s brief story of Rosenberg’s ruling is (unsurprisingly) more reckless, as education reporter Marc Freeman fails to even mention the fact that the case is on its way to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

At the end of the day the eight-hundred pound gorilla in TracyvFAU must necessarily be overlooked by the Palm Beach Post, who ultimately answer to its owners-in-abesntia, the politically liberal Cox family. James Tracy stands accused of calling out Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration of staging a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in order to institute more stringent gun control laws. In December 2015 Tracy was (falsely) accused of criminally harassing the ostensibly Jewish “Sandy Hook parents” while consorting with “holocaust deniers.” These inflammatory accusations ultimately led to his termination.

According to the Post itself, Judge Rosenberg’s ultra-wealthy “Palm Beach parents are both well-known Democratic donors.” Rosenberg was appointed to her federal judgeship by President Obama in 2014. Rosenberg’s spouse, former Palm Beach County state attorney Michael McAuliffe, is a career Democratic Party politician. It is no secret in South Florida that he has major congressional and quite possibly gubernatorial aspirations.

Such ambition requires maintaining the good graces of Democratic Party power brokers whose central political platform is celebrating Obama’s political “achievements” and stampeding the US public into enacting stricter gun control. If this isn’t enough McAuliffe’s law partner, Martin Reeder, is the Palm Beach Post‘s attorney. One can only ponder how thick the “firewall” is between the newspaper’s editorial room and the McAuliffe-Reeder firm.

Rosenberg is also a former board member of the radical Anti-Defamation League, the Zionist espionage and agit-prop organization that stands vehemently against extending free speech to all and believes that any Gentile who so much as sneezes the wrong way is “hateful” or “anti-semitic.” The ADL is typically so extreme that its mention often elicits embarrassed eye-rolls from many in the Jewish diaspora.

Despite these conflicts of interest Rosenberg apparently never considered recusing herself. She instead allowed the plaintiff to embark on a costly litigation process then slammed the door in his face with a comprehensive October 31, 2017 summary judgement order in favor of FAU. With the trial the court simply gave defendant FAU, with the assistance of its advertising clientele, full exoneration in the court of public opinion.

Imagine for a moment if Tracy was a progressive-left professor terminated from his tenured faculty position for blogging about “climate change,” the villainous President Trump, and the conspiracy theory that Trump allied with Russia to subvert the 2016 election process. One need only look at the many Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and blogs of American academics that fit this very mold–some of whom work at Florida Atlantic and the state’s other publicly-funded universities. Imagine that the judge comes from a “well-known” Republican Party donor family and was appointed to the bench by Donald Trump.  Imagine the judge is married to a prominent Republican Party politician. Imagine the judge was Episcopalian and an active member of the National Rifle Association.

Then imagine just how different the Post‘s coverage of TracyvFAU would be?