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"FacebookPinterest\n\n If you want to know how a surreal kernel of innuendo can travel from the floor of an NBA game to the front page of the New York Daily News and beyond, all without a single person actually knowing what it means, or whether it's even true, consider the tale of Carmelo Anthony's wife La La, Kevin Garnett, the apparently erotic flavor of Honey Nut Cheerios, and the vast, confusing world of black Internet gossip.\n\n Maybe you follow the NBA, or the New York tabloids; maybe you don't. So here's some context. In January, in the middle of a contentious Knicks-Celtics game, Anthony basically went berserk on Garnett. Garnett had said something to him on the floor, though the particulars were not initially clear. Whatever it was led Anthony to attempt a siege of the Celtics team bus after the game. It took five cops, an entire contingent of Madison Square Garden security, and Knicks head coach Mike Woodson to get Melo to stand down.\n\n A couple days later, the New York Daily News put La La on the front page, next to a giant, suggestive circle of breakfast cereal: Garnett, the tabloid alleged, had told Anthony that his wife tasted \"like Honey Nut Cheerios.\" Garnett was not referring to her mouth. And so the first great sports tabloid story of 2013 was born.\n\n Only problem was, according to La La\u2014meaning, according to her husband\u2014Garnett never actually said it. Which, in a way, made the Daily News story more ominous: Something that specific, that suggestive, had to come from somewhere. But where?\n\n So today La La has come to the Soho Grand Hotel on a chilly afternoon in February to talk with the one person who she thinks might know the answer: Fred Mwangaguhunga, the 39-year-old founder and editor of the celebrity-gossip site MediaTakeout. Fred isn't lunch buddies with most of the people MediaTakeout writes about\u2014he has even, on occasion, been seen with a bodyguard, to protect him from the people MediaTakeout writes about\u2014but he is friends with La La. She's the rare celebrity to get mostly favorable coverage on his site. Which, in the vernacular of MediaTakeout, tends to look something like:\n\n We've Got A DIFFICULT Question For All You DUDES Out There... Which Side Of Carmelo Anthony's Wife LALA Do You Prefer... The FACE... Or The AZZ!!! \n\n Or, more topically, vis-&amp;amp;#xE0;-vis the subject of our lunch today: DAYUMMMMMMMM!!! Carmelo Anthony's Wife Was Out Last Night Looking SPECTACULAR... After Seeing Them TIDDAYS... Now We Know Why He Was Willing TO FIGHT FOR HER!!! \n\n For what it's worth, La La is indeed looking SPECTACULAR, in a complicated white-mesh-and-snakeskin sweatshirt, pristine white pants, and pink talon nails.The FACE/AZZ headline, which will go up on MediaTakeout tomorrow morning, will be accompanied by a picture of her in this very same outfit, outside this very same hotel. La La knows the deal, saw the cameras, even joked to Fred about them when she got inside: \"You call paparazzi on me?\"\n\n La La is aware that MediaTakeout can be the enemy of both good taste and public figures such as herself. But she also knows that the site is where nearly every grimy rumor sluices down to, that Fred's sources are myriad and omnipresent\u2014managers and publicists, video vins and hangers-on, aggrieved hairdressers and under-tipped waitresses\u2014and that if there's anything worth knowing about her husband that she doesn't already know, Fred is the person who will know it.\n\n So, she asks: \"How'd they come up with Honey Nut Cheerios?\"\n\n Fred is thin, tall, and today is wearing a denim shirt and Jordans; with his black-framed glasses and neatly shaved head, he still looks like the Ivy League graduate that he is. He tells La La that the same anonymous source who approached the Daily News, peddling the Cheerios rumor, had approached him first. \"I didn't believe that shit,\" he explains.\n\n Fred doesn't know much more than that about where the rumor came from. Which is okay, because it turns out La La has a second, more important question that Fred does know the answer to. She doesn't really care about Honey Nut Cheerios. The cereal was a pretext. What she really wants to know is: Has Fred heard about anything involving Melo and women who are not named La La Anthony? Tabloid stories have a way of begetting more tabloid stories. Groupies, girls, that kind of thing\u2014just look at Tiger Woods, whose one VIP hostess quickly turned into a dozen after news of his infidelities went public. Once she's on the front page of the Daily News next to a stranger's quote about her vagina, La La says, \"that's when people feel like, 'That's my chance to start something up or to make something up.' \"\n\n Fred nods sympathetically. On this subject, he says, he can help: \"No bullshit came out.\"\n\n \"Good,\" La La says, as somewhere far away from here a chill shoots down the spine of the NBA's reigning scoring champion. \"Because I'll cut a motherfucker's dick off, okay? And that'll be the next story.\"\n\n\n\n MediaTakeout is often referred to as \"the black TMZ,\" but it's hard to imagine even TMZ running a story about any human, black or white, with the headline, \"SEXY OR GAY??? RB Singer Miguel Makes Simulated Booty Love To An Invisible Person!!!\" The site is hugely popular\u2014viewed by around 16 million people each month\u2014and it does indeed specialize in coverage of African-American celebrities. Athletes, rappers, radio personalities, actors, politicians, reality-television stars; anyone black and famous, up to and including our president: \"We've Got PICS Of That WOMAN That PRESIDENT OBAMA Was Flirting With... And Look At The BODY LANGUAGE Between The Two Of Them... Michelle It's Time To STEP IN AND GET YOUR MAN!!!!\"\n\n Like TMZ, MediaTakeout does occasionally break news: It was the site, for instance, that first outed rapper Rick Ross, author of \"Rich Off Cocaine,\" as a former corrections officer. This past spring, MTO posted photos of NFL cornerback Kerry Rhodes in a clutch with another man\u2014\"This Ish Here Is Looking SUSPECT,\" the site wrote\u2014though tellingly, Rhodes went to TMZ, not MediaTakeout, for the exclusive interview to avow his heterosexuality.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n A big MediaTakout score\u2014outing thug-lifer Rick Ross as a former corrections officer\u2014soon stolen by many other sites.\n\n But MTO has also inaccurately claimed \"exclusives\" on everything from suggestions that Beyonc\u00E9 was faking her pregnancy (until she gave birth) to Lil Wayne's decision to cut off his dreadlocks (until another photo showed that the dreads were very much still there). In June, the site proudly proclaimed a \"WORLD SUPER MEGA EXCLUSIVE\" on the name of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian's newly born child, Kaidence Donda West, and then, a few days later, quietly \"updated\" the post to reflect the baby's actual name, which was and remains North. Other MTO stories seem essentially unverifiable but equally improbable: \"Beyonce Is Linked To Ray Lewis STEROID SCANDAL... And We've Got AIRTIGHT Evidence That Bey's ON THE JUICE!!!\"\n\n After reading for a while, you get the rhythm of it\u2014it's maybe one-sixteenth news and fifteen-sixteenths entertainment, more fun-house filter than reliable source. The in-vogue bit of slang ratchet\u2014gleefully irresponsible, more than a little wild\u2014was basically invented to describe MediaTakeout. The site, which updates just once a day, true to tabloid form, is alternately funny, outlandish, vulgar, bullying, and surreal; usually it's most of those things at the same time. MTO's writers (there are five, including Fred, none with traditional training in journalism) are virtuosos of the caps-lock button, geniuses of ellipses, masters of the end-parenthetical: \"We Have CLOSE UP PICS... Of The Woman That Rick Ross Was In The CAR WITH... When He Got SHOT UP!! (Cute Girl).\" There are days when it feels like the site gets as much mileage out of grammar and punctuation as it does from real people and what they do in the real world. There are also days when MediaTakeout doesn't seem to be describing the real world at all.\n\n Says one high-level editor at a rival, more established gossip magazine: \"At a certain point, if you're so far removed from the actual information, what you're doing is basically a creative-writing assignment.\"\n\n Fred will admit this much, after a fashion. \"You're not making stuff up if you're looking at something and just noting what you see,\" he says, which pretty much translates to: We look at wire photos and make stuff up. At its best\u2014and most ratchet\u2014MediaTakeout takes the kind of private, uncensored bar conversation you would have about famous people and makes it very, very public. Says Fred's friend and rival David Wilson, founder and editor of NBC's African-American-oriented site the Grio: \"You don't have to be polite when you're talking with friends, you know what I mean?\" And MediaTakeout is rarely, if ever, polite.\n\n\n\n Fred spent his childhood near the same unassuming square mile of Hollis, Queens, that birthed Russell Simmons, Run-DMC, and LL Cool J\u2014the watchers and the watched, all commingling as kids. As a boy he'd lurk outside the local pizzeria while Run-DMC would eat inside, gawk at them through the window.\n\n He grew up a bit awkward, with an ungainly last name that he got from his first-generation Ugandan parents\u2014Mwangaguhunga (pronounced \"Muh-won-ga-guh-hunga\")\u2014and that he now makes the occasional embarrassed joke about. \"Drum-beating African\" was how he described his origins on The Wendy Williams Show. \"Dancing African.\" He was a decent student, got a joint law and business degree at Columbia and then a job at a tax firm downtown, where he was well paid and disinterested. So he left the firm to start a high-end dry-cleaning business. For a while he did Jay-Z's laundry, he says. Mariah Carey, Jennifer Lopez\u2014he'd get $50 to wash $2,000 sheet sets that he was terrified of ruining. The business wasn't a failure, but it wasn't really a success either, and after a couple years he cashed out.\n\n This was around 2006. \"We had been advertising on a bunch of blogs, and I saw how big they got. So when I sold the business, I was like, what do I do with that?\" The original plan was to just rip off the Drudge Report: a collection of links that would go to various stories about sports, hard news, entertainment. The plan did not work. But the links to stories about African-Americans, for whatever reason, were failing less than the others were.\n\n Two thousand five was the year TMZ launched, the year sites like Gawker were gaining national traction, the year most American newsrooms were beginning a slow and agonized pivot to the web. And while TMZ was competing with established print brands like Us Weekly, black gossip was still a novelty. Older African-American publications like Essence, Ebony, and Jet had made a point of treating black celebrities with a deliberate kind of discretion. \"Our media was pretty much a firewall for our talent, for our entertainers, our heroes,\" says the Grio's Wilson.\n\n There was a huge audience waiting for something that didn't really exist yet, and MediaTakeout joined a handful of other early sites trying to provide it\u2014places with names like Crunk + Disorderly and WorldStarHipHop. Bossip, one of the biggest black gossip sites, rose to prominence in that era too, becoming to slang what MediaTakeout is to punctuation. \"Gut Full of White Seed,\" to describe a woman pregnant by a white man, is theirs; so is \"cakes,\" as in, \"Adrienne Bosh Puts Her Big Azz Mommy Bikini Cakes On Blast On A Puerto Rico Beach!\" And MediaTakeout, perhaps most of all, has fundamentally changed the lives of the black celebrities it covers, and not necessarily for the better.\n\n \"It's the new black-on-black crime,\" says RB star The-Dream, a frequent target. \"If there's a black guy or girl that's doing good, then there is probably a site trying to figure out any type of way to tear them down.\" Kanye West halted a performance in Atlantic City last year in order to rail against the site and its founder, who posted a nude photo of the semi-aroused rapper on MTO in 2010. \"Look at MediaTakeout, they so fucking full of shit,\" West howled, improvising over a mournful piano interlude. \"Show your motherfucking face so I can smack the shit out of you!\" In the past two years alone, the site has faced legal action by both Chad Johnson (who took offense at MTO's decision to post a sex tape of his) and Johnson's ex-wife, Evelyn Lozada, who claimed \"emotional distress\" resulting from an article headlined \"Evelyn Lozada From The Basketball Wives Was CREEPING... With One Of Chad's BALLER FRIENDS!!! (Explosive Details).\"\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n And now they're playing in the same city: Celtic turned Brooklyn Net Kevin Garnett says something impolite to the Knicks' Carmelo Anthony.\n\n Being so publicly loathed has its perks, though. Back in his tax-law days, Fred says, \"I was making, like, two hundred grand, something like that, after three years of work, and you'd still feel fucking poor.\" In New York, he says, low six figures is just another word for \"middle class.\"\n\n What about now?\n\n \"You can make a lot more money doing what I'm doing, and I do.\"\n\n\n\n One day I accompany Fred to meet a source at a cigar bar in midtown Manhattan. The most common providers of information to MediaTakeout, he says as we head over, are video vins, the improbably proportioned women who dance in rap videos and cover magazines with names like Don Diva and Rhymes and Dimes. \"They all talk,\" Fred says. The man we're meeting today, Janero Marchand, is in a related category. His job is wrangling these vins on behalf of rappers like Drake and Kanye. Janero's the guy who introduced West to a bald aspiring model named Amber Rose, the eventual inspiration for Kanye's masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which chronicles, in sad and pornographic detail, their doomed affair. So in a way we have Janero the vin wrangler to thank for that.\n\n When he arrives, Janero turns out to be a boyish 25, handsome, wearing a ski cap and a backpack; he and Fred are the only two black guys in the entire room, which is otherwise filled with old weathered white men in sweater vests and a thick, plant-killing fog of smoke. We're here because Janero has just returned from the Super Bowl in New Orleans, where a few of his clients were doing vinish things around the gang of famous and wealthy men who gravitate toward the year's biggest sporting event. Fred asks Janero what went down, who did what with whom, that kind of thing. But Janero\u2014eyeing the GQ reporter across the table from him\u2014is being cagey.\n\n \"The economy is not that great,\" he says, describing the scene in New Orleans. \"This is the season for a lot of girls who are looking to be taken care of, to get pregnant by a rapper or a ballplayer.\" Vins used to get paid just to show up at clubs, to hang out in the VIP and do nothing. But Instagram, Janero says sadly, has significantly eroded the line between amateur and professional models; the money isn't what it used to be.\n\n Fred, who already knows all this\u2014whose site pillages those same amateur Instagram accounts on a near daily basis, thus contributing to the great vin-devaluing crash of 2013\u2014looks disappointed. The conversation moves on: Rob Kardashian's unhappy love life; beef between two members of The Real Housewives of Atlanta over an ercise video; Rihanna, shot by Terry Richardson on the cover of this week's Rolling Stone.\n\n This last bit catches the attention of a balding man with a pinched face at the next table over. \"I thought Chris Brown shot Rihanna,\" he says. He produces a skull-shaped decanter, begins pouring Johnnie Walker into it while staring flatly in the direction of Fred and Janero. \"Oh that's right\u2014he just beat her up,\" the guy says, topping off his skull, and then walks away before anyone can respond.\n\n For a second it feels like reality itself has taken on MediaTakeout-style random ellipses and inexplicable capital letters: \"Fred Mwangaguhunga... Whose Business Is Trafficking In The WORST REPRESENTATIONS OF BLACK CULTURE... Just Got SERVED By His Own HATE-FILLED Creation!!! (Pics And Details).\" The way this guy at the cigar bar, with the death's-head decanter and the stogie clenched between his teeth, seems to know exactly one thing about black celebrities, which is that when they're not shooting each other they're beating up their girlfriends\u2014Fred arguably bears some responsibility for the way in which this gentleman is misinformed. Last year, in a nationally televised interview on BET, network personality T. J. Holmes suggested to Fred that as one of the very few African-American-owned media companies on the planet, MediaTakeout should work harder to present black people in a positive light, lest this exact thing happen\u2014that the tongue-in-cheek, not entirely serious MTO worldview might emanate out into the larger culture and return to haunt its author, not to mention all the other black folks who have to live on this planet.\n\n Later, when I ask him whether his site is bad for African-Americans, Fred says that if MediaTakeout \"were going out there and putting out the worst parts of black culture every day, black people, particularly black women, would not come back.\"\n\n There is something deeply disingenuous about this answer\u2014after all, catastrophic freeway chases and YouTube clips of people shattering their legs while Rollerblading also draw repeat viewers\u2014but Fred is right about one thing: His audience does come back. In droves, even\u2014MediaTakeout is consistently ranked among the top 500 most-visited sites in the country.\n\n It's like rap music, goes probably the best argument you can make for the site: People can love it and not take it as literally true at the same time. MediaTakeout is entertaining in \"the same way a ratchet rap song with crazy and explicit lyrics is entertaining,\" says the longtime MTV News host Sway. \"I mean, you go to the club, and you want to hear that same song you probably said is ratchet.\"\n\n\n\n And I can now confirm this: MediaTakeout doesn't post everything. Fred does ercise some restraint. One evening I meet him at another cigar bar, this one somewhere downtown. He's got a tip he's excited about: a prominent sports figure, I'm not allowed to say which league, involved in sexual shenanigans so debauched I can barely stand to look at the photos Fred shows me on his phone. He's got it like 70 percent confirmed, which is probably more than enough for most MTO stories, but this one needs to be closer to 100 percent\u2014the lawyer in him knows this, knows when the site is really exposed. So he's going to wait, a wait that will turn out to be permanent. The story never runs. But tonight we don't know that yet, and Fred is feeling happy about his get, so he's reached into his cigar locker and brought out the good ones, Trinidad cigars from Cuba.\n\n He lights one up, and we sit on some couches downstairs and talk\u2014about the weird hours he keeps (he wakes up at 2 a.m. every day, eight hours before MTO's one daily update, and goes to sleep again at around 10 or 11 p.m.), who reads his site (black women between 28 and 39, mostly), whether he'll ever sell (\"When I'm 90, maybe\"), that kind of thing.\n\n I ask him how it feels to be written about the way MediaTakeout writes about other people, and he immediately knows what I'm referring to, an insinuating blog post on a rival site called Diary of a Hollywood Street King. \"That's the one that said I was gay, and I went to some wild gay parties, right?\"\n\n I nod.\n\n He laughs. \"I should go to a gay party.\"\n\n We circle back to the big sports story that will never ultimately run. Could that be a big deal for the site, I ask?\n\n And this turns out to be the paradox MediaTakeout faces every time it actually breaks real news. \"The way that most of these things unfold is, it's like a big day the first day, and then usually someone will just completely lift the fucking story and pretend it's theirs,\" Fred says. You know the site's work, whether you know that you know it or not. But this is the price of being black and semi-disreputable: Other news organizations feel emboldened to steal.\n\n \"All black folks know that was a MediaTakeout story, but by the time it gets bigger and people throw a couple of things on it, you might not.\" Like the Rick Ross prison-guard story. \"We broke that.\"\n\n I say I thought that was a Smoking Gun story.\n\n It wasn't, he says: \"They actually credited us for breaking it.\" Other news organizations did not. For a day or two, MediaTakeout was the only site to have photos of Ross in uniform as a guard. They had a huge MediaTakeout watermark, right across the rapper's chest. \"And I think it was MTV News that cropped our photo,\" Fred says. \"The photograph that they use for Rick Ross only has his fucking head.\" He laughs a little bit. \"The reason why is because on his body is a big fucking MediaTakeout logo, you know?\"\n\n Zach Baron is GQ's staff writer."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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