Shelley Ross's Lengthy Rebuttal to Anything Mean Ever Said About Her
Shelley Ross is a former executive producer at Good Morning America and the CBS Early Show. She's most famous for being disliked by her employees, and then having said employees snitch to the media about how much they hated her.
Anyhow. The point is that Shelley Ross signed up for weird little celebrity fact-correction site iCorrect to dispute the reports about her being a wicked tyrant. This was reported in the New York Times, which led to a New York Observer blog post by Kat Stoeffel, in which she essentially said that Ross is dumb, because all iCorrect does is remind everyone of past foibles that have probably been long since forgotten by most people.
And—as if to further prove Stoeffel's point—Shelley Ross sent the NYO this lengthy "rebuttal" (the whole thing is embedded at the bottom of this post) in which she responds point-by-point to Stoeffel's post. The takeaway: Shelley Ross is very, very upset about her Google results. To pick but one example:
NYO: "ICorrect has yet to crack Ms. Ross's first page of Google results. To rig that requires a little more web savvy..."
SR: "which is something you must know of since this nasty little article in the NYO, which says in the headline that I've"resurfaced," cracked page one of my Google search in just hours. (Hey, I've never been away, but someone who never heard of me wouldn't know that.) Now cracking page one of my Google search is quite a feat since you must know your newspaper is pretty low on the Google algorithm scale. Maybe someone you know has been "gaming" Google to put it there. Compare it to two Newsweek articles I wrote last November. They just recently moved to my front page on Google. One, "Sarah Palin: the 7 Hidden Messages in her New Reality Show" got over 100,000 hits the first week it was online and took this long to get to my front page. Also on my front page you'll find a news release that the latest (third) edition of a medical book I wrote with a retired professor of clinical neurology was selected for the launch of Dr. Mehmet Oz's new online website, Sharecare. Yes, it is a shame this NYO story moves real my accomplishments down."
Later on she blasts Charlie Gibson for "truly disgusting...cheap gossip" (about her) at a colleague's funeral. And she calls on Stoeffel to "do the right thing and delete your post," which, what?
Without passing judgments on the facts of Ross's case (we have no way to do so!), we are sympathetic to anyone who feels tortured by the internet, or misjudged by the media. But it appears that constant self-Googling may be driving Shelley Ross a bit over the edge. Shelley: stop Googling yourself for a while! It will do wonders for your mental health. Or, you know, just write a letter to the editor. You never want to let the media smell craziness on you. That's when they pounce.
[Photo of Ross via Getty Images]