Finally someone else is pointing out the gall & irony of that stupid Binsack radio show, which I pointed out a year ago.
As I always say, even the appearance of impropriety can damn you. And perhaps rightly so in many cases. If you don't want to be accused of promoting a criminal, don't promote a criminal, and then hide behind "well he paid us" when someone has the audacity to point out that you promoted a criminal.
If someone paid me to say something stupid on this blog, and I published it, even if I was paid, and openly stated I was paid, it doesn't mean I'm not responsible for my own actions & what I say. Binsack didn't hold the radio station hostage with a gun and force them to take his money, for pete's sake.
John Burkavage, vice president of station owner Entercom Pocono Northeast, doesn't see it that way. Mr. Binsack didn't have a show, he said. It was an ad. He compared it to a television infomercial. The station can't critically evaluate all its advertisers, he said.
I think radio stations should critically evaluate their sponsors!
It would be different if Binsack had no past. Then it would be pretty much an Ooops. But he had a criminal past in the same line of work of his radio show!
First off, their on-air disclaimer, I believe, did not say "this is a paid advertisement" and "the views expressed do not..." I listened once, after the first Scranton Times article, and heard the disclaimer, and it was more like "this is a paid programme", and that's it, nothing else. Nothing about the views expressed, and the word "advertisement" wasn't even used, just "paid". And "paid" can mean a lot of things depending on who's interpreting it.
Until days after his arrest last week, he was featured on the radio station's "on-air staff" Web page, just like WILK's own on-air personalities such as Steve Corbett and Kevin Lynn.
Well, perhaps this speaks more to the lack of professional wit of the web producer working for WILK. I must say that as a long-time graphic designer, both personally & professionally , I don't consider the WILK site to be a quality web site by any stretch of the imagination. I would not claim to be a real cutting edge whiz with web site programming, but certainly better could be done. It's clumsy at best, not organized nor tidy.
That said, someone in charge of content ought to have been able to look at the web site and say, "Hey, this is misleading, don't organize these paid advertisers in with the staff."
Indeed, if I were Steve Corbett, someone with a journalism background, I would've complained about having a paid advertiser listed alongside of actual radio hosts.
I never heard the radio show last year when I posted about it a year ago, so all I had to go by was their web site, which had no disclaimer, and no way to discern any difference between Binsack or Corbett or whoever else.
I took this screen shot today:
Why that page is still up, I don't know. All I had to do was click on the link from my post from last year.
But nowhere on that page does it say "paid advertisement" or have any type of disclaimer.
"Mr. Burkavage said he would review the practice."
Ya THINK so?
"He had a story, and you really want to believe the guy," Mr. Burkavage said.
...
He said WILK has "a few" unpaid invoices for Mansions & Estates, which established a record of unpaid bills with many vendors.
So Burkavage is claiming WILK to be a victim too?
This is most funny to me because this morning Kevin Lynn pretty much said anyone who fell for Binsack must've been foolish and stupid.
So Kevin Lynn will defend his radio station's support of Binsack, but he feels free to insult his boss, by pretty much saying he must've been a fool to have fallen for this character?
What a convoluted paradox.
I think the WILK radio station is just trying to hold its world together with the cheeks of its ass.
I believe they're scrambling there at WILK because they know they screwed up.
They'd get a lot more respect if they just admitted the judgement and decisions were inappropriate regarding their confusing promotion of Scott Binsack.
But no, Kevin Lynn was on the radio talking as if "criminal" was stamped next to Binsack's name on WILK material, and kind of insinuating that the radio station openly announced his criminal past, and even seemed to hint that they told people not to trust this guy.
They did no such thing. And it's terribly disingenuous of Kevin Lynn to innuendo that they had.
Some of Mr. Binsack's clippings were even fraudulent. A fawning advertorial that ran in The Times-Tribune's classified section was pasted under the Business page masthead to pass it off to customers as a conventional news story.
That's certainly sinister. I wonder where this was and how they found out about it.
Hardly the Scranton Times' fault, of course.
But it sounds like Binsack would use anyone & anything in whatever way he chose, no matter how dishonest. And anyone willing to go along with him, whether by default, because of not knowing anything, or because of greed, was at risk.
As is demonstrated by the other related articles in the Scranton Times this morning.
About five months ago, Mansions & Estates clients Jerome and Jean Sebastianelli, of Moosic Lakes, became investors. Mr. Sebastianelli became Mansions & Estates' secretary/treasurer, according to company memos.
Soon, Mr. Sebastianelli found himself in a struggle with Mr. Binsack over reviewing the books, Mr. Stever recalled.
"Like many people, including me, he believed in Scott," Mr. Stever said.
And a woman who through absolutely no fault of her own, was used most cruelly:
About a year after losing her husband to a fatal car crash and selling her house to help pay the bills, Robin Pellegrino thought her life had finally turned around on Christmas Eve.
Scott Binsack, of Mansions & Estates International LLC, told the widowed mother on his live radio program that he was going to build a house for her and her infant daughter, Gianna.
But the "Keys to Your Castle" contest, she said, turned out to be another false promise from the controversial homebuilder.
After months of excuses and delays, there was no house. Not even land on which to build it.
Instead, the Dickson City woman feels as though Mr. Binsack used her name and personal tragedy to burnish his image.
I think I feel the most compassion for this Robin Pellegrino out of all of the tragic characters in this wretched real-life soap opera.
The Times-Tribune - Binsack files seized by DA Legal filings Wednesday also revealed allegations of insurance fraud against Mr. Binsack and detailed an example of the homebuilder�s alleged pattern of wantonly writing checks from an account that company records showed was already short more than $200,000.
The latest revelations add to a growing list of troubles facing Mr. Binsack, including a violation of his parole from an earlier fraud conviction in Monroe County. In the 1990s, he was convicted of similar crimes in New York state, where he started his building career.
...
The allegations are connected to an April 30 fire at a Mansions & Estates construction site at Lot 26 of Circle Green Estates, South Abington Township, which investigators have treated as an arson.
The task force alleges Mr. Binsack claimed insurance reimbursement for equipment and objects that were not actually in the unfinished home when it burned.
Also, according to the affidavit, Mr. Binsack deducted workers compensation and medical insurance premiums from workers� paychecks, then failed to pay that to the insurance company.
Comment Avatar icons by Gravatar.
E-mail addresses are required, but not displayed nor shared.
Please post comments relevant to this page only. For off-topic comments, questions, and discussion, please use this site's Message Board Forum. All comments posted that are spam, abusive, use phoney e-mail, or that do not relate directly to the page, will be removed.
Thank you for respecting this site, author & readers, and for helping stem the flow of ridiculously inaccurate hits from search engines.
superficiality >>If the facade is what's important to you, all you wind up with is an illusion. Disillusionment is the gift of substance.
-- Chloe<<
(more)
Good heavens, and then there's more again:
