Thursday, June 23, 2011

Conspiracy Theorists Attempt A Hijacking Of Rachel Sterne’s “Ground Report” And Readership Plummets

Posted by Peter Quennell





Rachel Sterne is attempting to help Mayor Bloomberg of New York to put the city government’s business across online in a neutral, credible and well-informed way.

Her own website, Ground Report, is an increasingly poor advertisement for her management skills. See the Alexa figures below. Readership of Ground Report is right now less than 100,000 in the world.

TJMk has several times beaten that ranking, and it may soon do so again. That is dangerously far away from being commercially viable, which for this kind of site means being in at least the top 10,000.

Worse, as the chart below shows, Ground Report’s readership has dropped FIFTY PERCENT since the Knox conspiracy theorists started targeting it with inaccurate, misleading and personally vicious posts daily.

Ground Report competes for the same eyeballs as the Huffington Post (70th in the world), Technorati (948) and Gather (2,231). Those smart and well-managed sites minimize attempted hijackings, ensure some sort of balance, and encourage robust commenting by readers who know raw truth when they see it.

Here on Ground Report are loopy new articles by Grace Moore and Bruce Fisher which should never have appeared. They are highly misleading and wildly at variance with the real facts. The Huffington Post would never have accepted such crap.

Bruce Fisher, a real Knoxaholic, is famously at sea on the hard evidence, and he is subjected to almost daily ridicule on the PMF forum for his pretentious wrong-headedness. He was previously kicked off both Technorati and Gather for defamatory posts against any messengers who objectively explain the hard realities of the case. Smart moves by Technorati and Gather.

Grace Moore flatly claims that Rudy Guede did it alone. Really?! How laughable.

The Micheli court and Massei court and Supreme Court of Italy have ALL already ruled that this was quite impossible. Two others were definitely there too.  That is precisely why the defenses were putting convicted perps on the stand last Saturday - to try to prove Knox and Sollecito were not those two others.

Conspiracists are rather like sucker fish, which always cause the death of their hosts. Withstanding conspiracists desperate for an online home and existing audience when their own websites tank really is Group Blogging 101.

So. Good luck in withstanding the attempted hijacking of your website, Rachel Sterne. Truth in governance and accurate reporting do count.


Comments

That article from Grace Moore was an exercise in pointlessness. On the other hand, the “my educated opinion” line was worth a laugh or two.

I’ve noticed an increase in these “everybody knows Knox is innocent” statements by Knoxophiles, almost as if by saying it, they can make it so, which is what they’ve been doing for..years now.

Posted by Janus on 06/23/11 at 03:42 PM | #

Ji Janus. Agreed. Michael’s rebuttals on that comment thread (which really should not be required in the first place if the editors have even a modicum of editorial control) are extremely good.

Here Michael explains things to the daffy Grace Moore whose research into the case is as shallow as a saucer of milk.

*************

This ‘article’ is riddled with false claims and statements. They are classic FOA talking points. These I have corrected below:

1) Meredith Kercher did not arrive at the cottage until a few minutes after 9pm. It is therefore impossible that she was murdered at the cottage before 9pm and then molested at 9pm..

2) Evidence of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are all over the crime scene and other supporting evidence puts them there and not where they claim they were. They had everything to do with this crime. This is why they were found guilty of it by eight judges in a unanimous verdict after an eleven month trial.

3) Rudy Guede was NOT a “known drug dealer”. This was a misfact printed in the newspapers in the early days of the case and has been copied since. Whilst it is abundantly clear that it’s a myth, the Amanda Knox Cult have perpetuated it at every opportunity as it suits their agenda.

4) Guede was not a burglar and neither was he known to threaten people with knives. Again, this is a lie that has been perpetuated by Knox cultists in order to suit an agenda.

5) Guede’s DNA was not found “on” the body of the victim.

6) Rudy Guede was not captured on CCTV, that is someone else, someone unidentified and as such was not used as evidence against him by Judge Micheli in his conviction or by his subsequent appeal court judges.

7) Meredith placed no telephone call at 8:51 that was ‘interrupted’. At 8:51, Meredith was still with her friend.

8) TOD was between 11pm and 12 midnight.

9) The knife didn’t have blood on it because it had been cleaned. There is no mystery here.

10) It is false to say Amanda Knox left no trace of herself in the room. It can only be stated that no trace of her in the room was ‘found’. These are two different things. Since only a few points in the room were checked for DNA, it is not surprising that her traces weren’t found. There are also 16 unidentified fingerprints in the room that remain unidentified as they are too smidged. Any or those could belong to Knox or Sollecito.

11) The clothes Knox wore on the night of the murder have never been formally found and identified. it therefore cannot be stated Knox had nothing on her clothing, clothing that could easily have been dumped at some point after the murder. As for her body, that was showered multiple times after the murder and since Knox’s body was never forensically examined in the first place,, it’s hardly surprising no evidence was found on it.

12) Far from impossible, it is actually quite common for murderers not to leave forensic traces of themselves at the crime scenes. That is not the case here however, as Knox and Sollecito indeed left traces of themselves.

Grace has been corrected on her inaccuracies on multiple occasions in various comments sections, but has refused to address her misfacts, Like Hollywood, Grace doesn’t believe in letting the facts get in the way of a food story.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 06/23/11 at 05:06 PM | #

By the way there is a very strong correlation between media that is tanking and media that carries water for the Knox PR campaign.

ABC and CBS 48 Hours and Time Warner’s CNN and the NBC Morning Show did so - and parent stock values and viewers headed off a cliff. For example:

http://truejustice.org/ee/index.php?/tjmk/comments/anti_justice_for_meredith_is_increasingly_bad_business/

http://truejustice.org/ee/index.php?/tjmk/comments/explaining_why_cnn_is_so_desperate_for_a_hit_and_niceties_like_truth_b/

No wonder smart Fox and Fox News keep so far away - and now CBS too. On the whole the Examiner media network of local sites strikes a good balance.

This advice was actually shared with the struggling editors of Ground Report. Hopefully now it will sink in.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 06/23/11 at 05:13 PM | #

.... Nicole Minetti ha fatto scuola ....

Posted by ncountryside on 06/24/11 at 12:38 AM | #

I believe it’s worth noting that if the Seattle P/R firm and the vitriolic ‘Friends of Amanda’ had left it all alone, or at least tried another tactic then the Italian Justice System would not have examined the DNA and all the other evidence once more. They did this in order to absolutely get all their ducks in a row thereby leaving no holes in the prosecutions case that may come back to haunt them later. This way there will be absolutely no grounds for appeal later on. The 27th of this month will be interesting to say the least.

Posted by Grahame Rhodes on 06/24/11 at 04:46 AM | #

More interesting information Peter. May I say that I clicked on the link to Grace Moore and the Ground Report and daffy is the right word you nailed that one. Further I scrolled through the comment section and found 2 facts I hadn’t heard before. I wondered if you could confirm them or maybe a poster exaggerated.
1) Is Knox in debt to the Kerchars and attorneys for $ 4 million
2) Is the Knox/Mellas clan in debt for over $1 million
I don’t know if you can answer but if you can please. It is interesting because it seems to me if true although they’ve had many benefactors, they are spending more than they are raising and the day of reckoning would be down the road soon. Respectfully

Posted by friar fudd on 06/24/11 at 01:50 PM | #

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