Judi McLeod, Canada Free Press, Black and Right



Looking at Teabag / GOP Hate Sites

There are several web sites that the Teabaggers and assorted right wing nut job’s use to back up their claims and I want to just mention a couple of them here.

The first is this one, something that calls itself canadafreepress.com

As far as I can see, this is a one person operation and that one person is Judi McLeod.

This is what she says about herself:

Canada Free Press.com and Toronto Free Pressfounding editor Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 25 years experience in the print media. A former Toronto Sun columnist, she also worked for the Kingston Whig Standard and the former Brampton Daily Times.

Here is what some others think:


Conservative writer Kevin Michael Grace has described McLeod’s writing as that of an “emotionally incontinent ninth grader,” while Toronto Star columnist Antonia Zerbisias describes her as “eccentric” and the Canada Free Press as a “whacko news site.”

from here
And this is the type of stuff that she gets up to.

Toronto Life magazine reported that McLeod was harassing city councillor Betty Disero. McLeod had been driving past Disero’s home, taking pictures.
McLeod published the home address and photograph of Cathy Crowe, co-founder of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, in the CFP along with what Crowe’s lawyer deemed defamatory statements. The lawyer alleged that McLeod was encouraging her readers to harass and even physically attack Crowe. The paper also published the home address of anti-poverty activist John Clarke along with a photograph of the house he was renting.

Also from here

McCleod is a bizarre mixture of wingnut, conspiracy theorist (did you know that 9/11 was perpetrated by the Mob?) and internet marketer.

A quick look at the Canada Free Press site illustrates this – it operates at the scummiest end of the pay per click business with lots of deliberately misleading links, e.g. where click on her picture and name and you are presented with a full page of the scammiest web advertising. As you can see I have nothing against advertising but rule number one is that you don’t trick you visitors.

Yesterday I was researching another site that the baggers have started quoting lately: http://www.black-and-right.com/ the reason being that the site content and the name didn’t match up. The title suggested that there would be a writing about, say, the relationship between the GOP and black voters but there was very little, just the boilerplate teabag/GOP hate type stuff.

I checked the whois information on the site as this can sometimes be a first step in finding out who owns what and where potential conflicts of interest may lie.

Registrant:
Judi McLeod
49 Elm St.
Suite 200
Toronto, Ontario M5G 1H1
Canada

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: BLACK-AND-RIGHT.COM
Created on: 14-Jul-08
Expires on: 14-Jul-10
Last Updated on: 14-Jul-09

Administrative Contact:
McLeod, Judi cfp@canadafreepress.com
49 Elm St.
Suite 200
Toronto, Ontario M5G 1H1
Canada
(416) 994-1308 Fax —

Technical Contact:
McLeod, Judi cfp@canadafreepress.com
49 Elm St.
Suite 200
Toronto, Ontario M5G 1H1
Canada
(416) 994-1308 Fax —

Domain servers in listed order:
NS5.LUNARBREEZE.COM
NS6.LUNARBREEZE.COM

(This information is public record, I am not revealing anything that is confidential).

No conflicts of interest but look who’s name is all over this one, it is our friend Judi Mcleod, busy little bee that she is. Also, and this is important, the servers are shared, lots of different companies rent space on them such as Godaddy (in this case) but also Tucows, Netfirms and Network Solutions among others. This would indicate that McLeod is not doing Parks a favor i.e. providing some of here own shared space but is the real owner of the web site.

A look at the site gives no hint about Black and Right’s ownership or management other than a mysterious graphic that says “Email Bob”. Turns out that Bob is Bob Parks who is a Navy Vet with an education in journalism and graphic design and some political ambition. Beyond those basics it is hard to find sources of information let alone those that are authoritative.

Judi McLeod, Canada Free Press, Black and Right

The site is also crawling with advertising, way beyond the amount that most sites use, not quite to the same extent as McLeod’s flagship site but I suspect that is more a limitation of the very basic template used than intent.

Sometime in the very near future I’ll be looking into the background of a site called Associated Contend, it is obviously a wingnut operation with a deliberately chosed mainstream sounding name – Associated Press – Associated Content? Watch this space.


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