The Dishonest City Paper Story on me

A schmuck named Gadi Dechter has a poorly-written, wildly innacurate and very hateful piece on me in the current issue of the Baltimore City Paper. Before I go into more detail, here's what I wrote to him, the Editor-In-Chief, and the Arts Editor. In case they edit the letter, here's the full text:

I knew I was going to get nailed, but what Gadi Dechter doesn't tell you is that he seriously slanted and cherry-picked the things I told him. He left out the fact that I walk the streets of Portland wearing my Orioles sweatshirt, how I nearly cried when I heard a real Baltimore accent last summer....and there are a lot of other things.
Dechter chooses to leave out a lot of positive things in order to set me up as a straw villain. What else can we expect from an L.A. guy who's aim is to gather as many scalps as he can before he moves on to a larger market. Same as it ever was...Baltimoreans being exploited and victimized by journalists on the way up and who can't wait to get out of town.
By the way, my impression, after talking to him for a couple of hours, is that he hates Baltimore much more than I. He agreed with me on many points.
Here's an example of how he dishonestly skews things. He writes, "He remembers one scene in particular. 'I pick up this black woman and her daughter,' he says. “And for some reason the little girl looks through the sliding glass shield and she says, ‘I love you.’ And I busted out crying right there in the cab. It was such a contrast to what I had to face every day.'
His conclusion: 'People in Baltimore are angry and mean.'"
That story did not make me conclude that people in Baltimore are angry and mean. I think many are, but that was one tender moment in a nightmare of a job.
I told him a lot of things. I told him about the documentary I've just completed on the Oregon Death With Dignity law. I followed a man for two years beginning the day he got the legal lethal dose, through all the twists and turns of the decision-making process as to when to end his life. He died wearing our mic.
Dechter could have included that, but it wouldn't have fit his idea of caricaturing me and his scalp-gathering agenda.
Lucky for me, he can't hurt me, he can only piss me off...unlike poor Mike Olesker, who deserved better.
How does he know I am "hustling for even more publicity?" And is there something wrong with promoting your own book? If he writes a book and it's bought by Random House, is he planning to turn down the promotional opportunities his publicist gives him? I doubt it.
While I'm complaining, the photographer who took that picture was here for an hour on Saturday and most of the pictures he took were of me smiling. You chose to run one where I was frowning.
So when the headline says, "Fuck Us," Dechter isn't including himself in the "us." Believe me. I'm more "us" than he'll ever be.
Baltimore....Gadi Dechter is not on your side.
Before he hung up, he said that he'd like to hang out with me and see how I reacted the next time I came back to Baltimore. Uh, no thanks, dude. I'll stick to Jimmy's and people who know who Jerry Turner was.
By the way, I still yell "O" during the national anthem when I drive up to Seattle to see the Orioles.
Here are some of Dechter's blatant mistakes:

1. I was never a news producer at WJZ-TV. I was a news producer at WMAR-TV and a story producer at WJZ-TV's Evening Magazine. Also, I never told him that Evening was new and hiring producers. It had been on the air for a year and was already a hit when I came to work for them.
I also never told him that I regretted coming back to Baltimore to work for Evening, as he claims. I don't regret a moment of my work at Evening.
2. I said "Baltimore's greatest cultural contribution in the past 50 years is Divine eating dog shit off a sidewalk on Read St." Not “Baltimore’s greatest claim to fame is that Divine ate shit on Read Street,”
3. P.J. O'Rourke was editor of HARRY for a brief period of time (a matter of months). In reality, Michael Carliner, HARRY's original publisher was the editor, followed by O'Rourke for a few months when I was publisher, and then I was editor/publisher.
4. I did not tell him I was a "children's party DJ." I was a wedding reception/party DJ. If he had bothered to check the piece I wrote for the City Paper in 1996 on my brief DJ career, he would have discovered that. Notice how sloppy Dechter is? I sent him my resume with the jobs I've had and the dates I had them. Apparently he did not avail himself of that document.
5. He implies that I took "odd jobs to pay the rent on his Mount Vernon apartment. He penned tabloid articles, created screaming car dealership TV ads, produced features stories for a failed “Trucker TV” network, and worked as a children’s party DJ." Actually, other than the tabloid work, I did all those other things from 1986-1996.

So that was what I wrote to him and his editors yesterday.
I'm just as pisssed off today, but my skin is very thick and guys like Dechter are a dime a dozen.
He calls me a hack for writing jokes for a humor publication. His prose is clunky, not clever, not funny, and just plain mean...but bad mean. Not even clever mean. Just ugly.
Who's the hack here? I think it's that schmuck.
An ugly piece by an ugly writer who is living off his famous name. Isn't that how he got all his gigs, anyway?
More later.