White Knight Bucky Turco: Portrait of the Feminist Agenda-Driven, Misleading Modern Journalist

By Dean Esmay: I honestly was not going to write one single word on the front page of A Voice for Men about the obscure publication known as “Animal New York” and its apparent founder and reporter, known as Bucky Turco. “Animal New York” had requested a press passes to our conference on the 27th and 28th, and been granted one, in addition to being invited to attend the free press conference on the 26th (held at the same time as Warren Farrell’s pre-conference private workshop). We had noted after the conference was over that “Animal New York” had put up a couple of short reports, with some accurate, if arguably out-of-context, quotes, and we had noticed that they really had not “attended” the conference they asked for a free pass to, but rather had only attended the free press conference the day before the main event and just left, asking hardly anyone any questions of any substance.

I figured, “meh, that’s the way some reporters are” and figured that was that. I left a couple of comments on the “Animal New York” site pointing out politely that they got a couple of things wrong, that some of the quotes were a bit out of context, and that I didn’t think they’d gotten the full story. I politely gave a link to where their readers could go look at the whole conference and make up their own minds about its merits, and figured that would be that. We had, after all, seen far more egregiously abusive and irresponsible reporting from the likes of Adam Serwer and Jessica K. Roy.
Professional journalist John P. Ribner had written a brief article for us about lame coverage of the event from some (not all) press outlets, and how some of the reporters had seemed rude, noted something shallow and condescending Bucky Turco had said to him while he was explaining things like the way his beloved daughter was ripped away from him. Turco had interrupted John with a rude jab and John had just walked away. Hey, what can you expect in these misandrist times? We really didn’t think Turco was worth more of our time. I didn’t even bother mentioning Turco’s lack of professionalism to the “Animal New York” readers. Why bother? Just give people the link, let them make up their own minds, and move on.
But then I noticed Turco was posting stuff on his Twitter feed about how stupid we were, and was joining in on a juvenile, shallow mock-fest of MRAs with Matt Binder and Sam Seder. And so me, John Ribner, and Rosemary Ribner got into a little bit of Twitter snarkfest with Turco. He called us stupid, we called him a dumbass, and he seemed dead set on saying that attending a couple of hours of press conference and asking practically no questions was exactly the same thing as covering the conference for the next two days. It seemed a little misleading to his readers, but I chalked it up to a bit of shallowness on his part, maybe a bit of honest disagreement, and in the final analysis, not all that important.
Then, he called me, obviously in a rage, and would not calm down when I tried to just be human and reason with with him. Instead, he ranted and raved, making some of the most revealing comments about the shockingly shoddy state of modern journalism and ideological indoctrination of our times I have ever heard.  It was now clear that reason and humanity had left this man, and all he wanted to do was tear down anyone who would dare question his dogmatic pseudoreligious beliefs about male and female power. And since then, he’s continued to tweet about this stuff, crowing about his prowess as a reporter and our general stupidity. Apparently he can’t just be a professional, admit to an error or a disagreement of interpretation, or issue an update and clarification like professionals do.
So John Ribner and I decided to put together a video helping Bucky understand how journalism works. I hope he and his readers find it helpful.
I hope you do too.
Bucky Turco is, in the grand scheme of things, a pretty small fish in a big sea. But this sad little tale has inspired us to help him, and other amateur journalists like Adam Serwer and Jessica Roy, know something about what professional journalism looks like. Or used to look like.

About Dean Esmay

AVfM Managing Editor Dean Esmay co-hosts AVfM Radio's Revelations with Erin Pizzey and Tales from the Infrared. He also writes about numerous topics on Dean's World and The Moderate Voice. He encourages people to look at issues through the lens of compassion for men who deserve it, and respect for women who deserve it. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed novel Methuselah's Daughter.

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