The Meat Expose - and a few questions

I have no opinion about this one way or the other, except that the guy who made it needs to learn how to hold the camera. Hey, anyone see "Man of Steel," and think "This would be so much better if the picture was really tall and narrow"? No.

Now that the obligatory shaming is over, here. When I started writing this, it hadn 125,000 hits. Now it has a quarter of a million:

Daily Dot notes that this is a bad day for the restaurant chain, which has a platter of bad publicity to clean up. Here's the Gawker story:

Tried going directly to news outlets? The link in the Gawker piece about "going directly" goes to the Reddit thread where it broke. At the top, someone paraphrases the whistleblower's actions thus:

Okay. Let's say this is all true. I'm trying to think of a situation in which someone calls a newsroom, asks to talk to someone about a consumer safety story, and says "we are storing raw meat by the dumpster." Every station in town says "nah." Does that seem right? Can you imagine a TV station not leading the broadcast with rotten restaurant meat?

As for that ebay post, here's what it looked like. The text, in part:

Now here's the money quote. Literally:

Mashable says that Golden Corral has responded:

There's no link there, either. And now it's the FATHER who made the ebay page?

International Business Times has another detail: management responded to employee concerns by warning them that they might be killed if they didn't shut up.

Here's the email, apparently taken from . . . where? The source is "YouTube."

It's obviously not the original email; it's copied and edited, with the names redacted, although rudimentary googling reveals the full name of "Tovah," who indeed works at Golden Corral.

And so on. "Ben Jammin" says he made the ebay page; if you believe the Mashable piece, then Ben Jammin" would seem to be the guy's dad, no? There's another video with the "email," and another addressed to Tovah, alerting her to the ebay page, where the pictures and location are on sale for $5K. So: it could all be completely legit. After all, as Mashable notes: