I attended a public 'Q&A lecture' at Orange County Community College titled Fake News, with Steve Israel and Barry Lewis, two editors of Times Herald-Record, after seeing it online and knowing it had to be interesting. By the time the event started, a lecture hall was packed with 50-60 people. After a brief lecture, consisting of introductions from staff and hosts, and few crude anecdotes of 'fake news' stories and websites on a projection screen, the Q&A section of the event began. I was not given an opportunity to ask the panel a question by the moderator for the remaining hour. Despite raising a hand every turn of the 'call for questions', I was seemingly skipped over. Interesting that almost every person called on spoke with little hesitation, quickly reciting all-too-familiar statements lamenting the state of public trust in 'the media', and other similar platitudes. I glanced a handwritten sheet of paper on the desk of a nearby selected commenter, interesting how apparently only those who came prepared to speak were called on. As the event concluded, I was able to meet and exchange a few words with Barry, which I later remembered and recorded, and were included as a partial transcript in a message to his public email address (sent from a burner account), starting a 5 message total conversation, which is not likely to continue after a 5 day silence, which is screencapped here.

Why does it matter? For a journalist to claim they have knowledge of the "source of the pizzagate story", after a (blatantly staged) Q&A panel/lecture on 'fake news', then to refuse to acknowledge provided links contradicting the mainstream narrative, including a link to a thread in this sub, after coming across as very defensive about presumably being recorded, is further circumstantial evidence of relatively smaller media outlets' (recordonline.com Alexa Rank: 50,391) collusion in this many headed syndicate cover-up, not just as misinformation parrots.