The Gazeta

Hand to God, I hadn’t planned on writing about the Coral Gables Faux-zette ever again, or at least for a while. Once I realized it contained the same digital DNA as Felix Pardo's campaign website, I figured my first post on the topic would also be my last. I may be obliged to expose coordinated public deception, but I’m not obliged to waste my time playing an endless game of Point-Counterpoint with the stale leftovers of a failed political candidate's bush-league propaganda outfit.

But then Justin Prisendorf, the “publisher” of the Gazette, penned what has to be the flimsiest non-denial denial I've seen since "I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” But Clinton at least attempted to counter the chief claims made against him, relying on a ridiculously narrow definition of “sexual relations” to avoid perjuring himself. Prisendorf, for his part, fails to even acknowledge the forensic evidence tying the Gazette to Felix Pardo’s campaign website, which is why his clumsy 1,000-word AI-assisted apologia functions more as a tacit confession than a defense. How bad is it? Well, here’s Vincent Gambini with what is probably the most accurate assessment:

Fortunately, there’s not that much to dig into, so it shouldn’t take too long to properly unpack.

The art of paltering

I'll skip over Prisendorf's first few paragraphs of throat clearing, as they neither attempt nor achieve anything of substance other than to disingenuously frame this affair as an attack from the mayor and establish what will become the overarching theme of the piece: obfuscation via a naked appeal to moral and journalistic authority, the latter of which Prisendorf clearly possess thanks to his having earned that coveted journalism degree called a B.A. in Government and Art History from Bowdoin College.

The Gazette’s sole mission, we are told, is to “serve the people of Coral Gables,” and “report with fairness, consistency, and care,” and so forth and so on. You’ll note that these claims are backed with as much evidence as any other claim made throughout the essay, which is to say none at all.

It isn’t until the fifth paragraph that we get to anything specific:

One of the criticisms cited—a fair one—concerns our first article following the Gazette’s relaunch in February. In hindsight, that piece carried a tone more appropriate to an editorial than a news story. It should have been labeled as such, and perhaps should not have run in its original form at all. I own that mistake. If it put the mayor and his supporters on the defensive, that’s understandable—and I accept that. But I also encourage readers to judge the Gazette not by one article, but by the more than 300 we’ve published since. I stand by the full body of work.

How very noble of you, Mr. Prisendorf, "owning" a "mistake" after nearly half a year, countless comments from irked readers, and a 3,500-word Substack post taking you to task for it. But as you'll remind us throughout your essay, you're a seasoned journalist who really knows his craft, which leads me to wonder how such an experienced newsman could have read that article and thought "Now this is news!"

And while I appreciate your encouragement, my judgment of you and your "news" content is based not on one article, but your entire and consistently bad oeuvre, which includes more recent "news" pieces such as this:

Is that from the Gazette or page A2 of the Wall Street Journal? I can hardly tell the difference what with such penetrating investigative reporting on that lovable "abuelita," Mrs. Cruzchev, riding the mayor's donkey.

But let's move on to Prisendorf's next concession, such as it is:

Let me address another fair point.

Yes, the Gazette uses AI. So do nearly all modern newsrooms. We use it to support the work of real journalism—formatting, transcribing, clarifying—but only to complement the hours of reporting, interviewing, and fact-checking that go into every article. Our staff has spent hundreds of hours covering Coral Gables with care and depth. If the mayor—or his blog of choice—believes otherwise, I invite them to spend a week doing what we do.

You can tell the AI thing really struck a nerve, which is somewhat amusing given that I nearly cut that section altogether. But since he brings it up: using AI for "formatting, transcribing, and clarifying" won’t produce the kind of fact-errors and machine-like punctuation and grammatical constructions found in virtually every Gazette article. AI won’t swap the name of your current city attorney with one who resigned years earlier through mere “editing.”

Moreover, there’s a reason Gazette articles, including Prisendorf’s essay, contain so many em dashes that they tend to read more like Morse code than standard American English. It’s because most AI models have a well-documented obsession with em dashes and can barely complete a sentence without one. Don’t get me wrong, I love em dashes, they’re the veritable Swiss army knife of punctuation, but you don’t need 18 of them in a 1,000 word essay, nor will you get them unless you give AI free rein. And besides, if Prisendorf and his team are really spending hours fact-checking every article, how exactly are errors that are tantamount to referring to Gerald Ford as the current president slipping past them?

But let’s get to the good part:

And now to some points that require more imagination than evidence.

“More imagination than evidence,” says the man who is about to spend the next paragraph discussing actual evidence while studiously avoiding the most damning piece of it:

The blog also points to a $500 donation I made to Felix Pardo as evidence of collusion. That contribution came before the Gazette resumed publishing.

Yes, Mr. Prisendorf, that $500 contribution came before the Gazette resumed publishing, and less than two weeks before gables-gazette.com was set up alongside felixpardo.com. Is this supposed to be a good thing?

More importantly, you frame the donation as my "evidence of collusion" when it was merely the first clue that led me to the DNS data that constitutes the actual hard evidence linking your Gazette to Pardo's campaign. This is like a defense attorney attacking cell-tower data that suggests the defendant was near the victim’s apartment on the night of the murder while completely ignoring the fact that there’s actual surveillance footage of the defendant breaking into that apartment and plunging a knife into the victim’s chest.

Felix is a dear friend of more than 25 years and a respected figure in Coral Gables civic life. In addition to serving on city boards, he’s a past Rotary Club president and someone who has contributed to this community for decades. After thanking me for the donation, he urged me to consider bringing the Gazette back—because, in his view, the city lacked steady, independent local news. Publishing the Gazette is something I know, something I enjoy, and something I do well. I hadn’t planned to relaunch it. But that conversation made me reconsider—and I chose to step forward.

To be clear: the Gazette is independent. No candidate, special interest or faction determines what we cover or how we cover it. That responsibility lies with the editorial staff alone. We’ve praised and criticized public officials based solely on their actions.

So that’s it? That was the big debunking: “Pardo is a swell guy who told me to bring back the Gazette and so I did and I’m totally independent and that’s all there is to it so shut up”?

He’s not even going to acknowledge the overlapping DNS records? He’s not going to explain why the Gazette’s and Felix Pardo’s websites sprang from the same setup session? He’s just going to make us all the Kelly McGillis to his Tom Cruise a la Top Gun, pretending he can’t hear us over his revving motorcycle engine?

Actually, what Prisendorf is doing here is something called "paltering," which is defined as using partial truths in order to mislead. I have no doubt Prisendorf and Pardo had a conversation about the Gazette, and that some facet of this conversation revolved around the idea of resurrecting the site. This conversation taking place and those two being in cahoots are not mutually exclusive; rather, the former is essentially a precondition for the latter. Some form of this conversation had to happen. The only question is what else was said? What was discussed which would lead to their respective websites securing consecutive nameservers and landing on the same IP subnet, the odds of which happening absent coordination are in Powerball jackpot territory?

Indeed, something tells me there was more to that conversation than Prisendorf is letting on. Something tells me he didn't go from having zero plans to resurrect the Gazette to suddenly ending a 13-year hiatus and overcoming 1,800 miles to rush-launch the site all because a few days earlier his good friend Felix, who happened to be running for commissioner, dazzled him with the immense persuasive power and mind-blowing novelty of 'Hey, you should do that thing you used to do.'

Needless to say, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for either one to come clean. And make no mistake, the fact that Prisendorf even admitted to Pardo asking him to relaunch the Gazette is revealing in itself. It tells me he looked into the technical evidence and realized it's both legitimate and dispositive. He knew the jig was up as far as there being a connection to Pardo, and that the wisest course of action was to weave Pardo into his version of the Gazette's comeback story rather than deny any connection at all. If all I had was the $500 donation, he could have simply dismissed it as irrelevant, a personal show of support that had no influence over the Gazette's editorial decisions. But when he found himself staring down technical evidence that proved coordination, he needed a cover story that could potentially accommodate some future explanation for why their websites share the same digital DNA, should he ever be compelled to give one. It’s a little something called positioning for plausible deniability. Hence the heartwarming tale of two old friends rekindling their shared passion for local journalism mere days before the Gazette resurfaces.

The newsman doth protest too much

At this point you may be wondering if the essay gets any better, if it goes on to reveal anything meaningful or even mildly exculpatory. Well, I'll go ahead and end the suspense for you with some more Top Gun: Negative, Ghost Rider.

The rest is pretty much Prisendorf recapitulating his main theme—how wonderful and virtuous he and, by extension, the Gazette are. He seems happiest when telling you how real journalism is done, which he would know, you see, because he is a very serious journalist who seriously practices serious journalism, and he's very serious about that. He's donated copies of the Gazette to the Coral Gables Museum, if you can believe it (I hope they're stored in argon display cases like the priceless artifacts they are), and he was even "a director of the Florida Press Association," for crying out loud.

Yes, and when I was twelve I was named 'Captain of the Day' at Calico Jack's Shrimp Shack, but that hardly makes me qualified to run a pirate ship. Pumping out error-riddled AI-generated slop and calling it "news" is not journalism. Deliberately forgoing bylines, attributions, and a basic company masthead is not journalism. Slapping fake labels like "analysis" on transparent hit pieces and filing them under "news" is not journalism. It's just propaganda dressed up as news—one of KFC's favorite genres of cosplay.

Ultimately, the entire essay can be distilled into a relatively simple message: Prisendorf is an honest and honorable man and the Gazette is an independent and objective news source—because he says so. Sure mistakes are made, glaring ones, and lots of them, but that's because nobody's perfect and they're just a ragtag team doing their best. Except when it comes to defending their journalistic integrity, at which point they transform into a crew of dedicated professionals exercising the utmost care under the careful guidance of a seasoned media veteran whose initials, JP, could easily stand for Joseph Pulitzer.

But the thing about mistakes is that they're supposed to be random. When someone's mistakes always, and I do mean always, end up harming the same people, that's a good indication those mistakes aren't mistakes at all.

In the final analysis, Prisendorf's apologia is nothing more than a doth-protest-too-much manifesto of self-proclaimed honesty, integrity, and virtue. But I have a rule: the more someone implores you to trust them, the less you probably should. Virtue tends to speak for itself. It's liars who feel the need to brag about their honesty, and fabulists who drone on about their commitment to truth.

I've joked about the old Soviet Communist newspaper Pravda quite a bit over the years, but one thing I haven't mentioned is that Pravda literally means "truth" in Russian. And Pravda's counterpart, the official paper of the Soviet government, was called Izvestia, the Russian word for "news." This remarkable irony gave rise to the old Russian saying: "There's no news in Pravda and no truth in Izvestia."

But that’s what they all do. They all claim loudly, unabashedly, and incessantly to be precisely the thing they’re not.

For those interested, the Russian word for gazette is газета, or gazeta. It means “newspaper.”