The main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website had, at 7:07 PM EDT on Sunday, June 25th, an interesting juxtaposition. The site seems to automatically search for and note related stories, and had two listed below the main story headline.
A South Philly neighborhood was awash in retaliatory gunfire. A recent trial showed the human cost.
“We don’t like each other,” Nyseem Smith said while telling police about shootings he and his friends committed against rival groups.
by Chris Palmer | Sunday, June 25, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT
To hear Nyseem Smith tell it, shooting people was something of a pastime for him and his friends in South Philadelphia.
Week after week, sometimes day after day, Smith said, he and his crew from 31st Street would fall into a familiar routine: They’d steal a car, hop in with guns they all shared, then go looking for rivals to shoot.
Sometimes, he said, they’d seek out young men associated with 27th Street, another neighborhood group. Other times, they’d look for people who lived around the nearby Wilson Park apartments.
The cycle of violence — sometimes chronicled on Instagram — became virtually impossible to extinguish. And by the time investigators caught up with Smith in 2019, he confessed to a staggering array of crimes.
I guess that Mr Smith knew they had him! But, as you’d probably have guessed, he was singing because the prosecutors had cut him a deal.
Regular readers of The First Street Journal — both of them! — have probably realized by now that I read with a careful eye, and notice things that some might miss. In the first four paragraphs of reporter Chris Palmer’s story, we see Mr Smith’s, and other people’s, gangs referred to as “his friends,” “neighborhood group,” “crew”, and “people”. We have previously noted that the newspaper really, really, really doesn’t like to refer to gangs as gangs, and in the 42 paragraphs beyond the four that I quoted, unless I just plain missed it — and unless you’re an Inquirer subscriber, you can’t check my work on this! 🙂 — the words “gang” or “gangs” appear exactly zero times.
Mr Palmer is one of the four Inquirer reporters credited with the article in which the newspaper told us that there were no real gangs in the city!
In Philadelphia, there are no gangs in the traditional, nationally known sense. Instead, they are cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families. The groups have names — Young Bag Chasers, Penntown, Northside — and members carry an allegiance to each other, but they aren’t committing traditional organized crimes, like moving drugs, the way gangs did in the past.
Ahhh, but that search function led the Inky to post a link to this story:
Krasner, state officials announce nine arrests in long-running South Philly gang feud
District Attorney Larry Krasner said Thursday that an additional six suspects are being sought.
by Vinny Vella and Mike Newall | Thursday, April 15, 2021
Jackee Nichols had come to believe the city had forgotten about her 15-year-old grandson, Rasul Benson. In October 2018, Rasul was gunned down at a South Philadelphia Gulf station while pumping gas with his friends for tip money to buy a cheesesteak.
On Thursday morning, Nichols finally received the answer she had been waiting for when an investigator working with the Philadelphia Gun Violence Task Force called to tell her a man had been arrested and another was being sought for Benson’s slaying as part of a sweep of nine suspects involved in a gang-fueled turf war between 2016 and 2020.
There’s more at the original, but it seems that the Inky wasn’t shying away from the truth on income tax day two years ago. I assume that this somehow all stems from publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ edict that the newspaper would be an “anti-racist news organization.”
We are, we have been told, supposed to respect journalists. Columnist Jenice Armstrong recently told us that “the press is the only profession mentioned in the U.S. Constitution,” though it actually refers to the right ot people to publish, not the journalists’ profession. The newspaper’s Senior Vice President and Executive Editor, Gabriel Escobar, said, “When people say ‘fake news’ and it is aimed at staining the work that journalists do, there’s great danger in that.”
Yet here is The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, older than The New York Times and The Washington Post, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, mealy-mouthing their words, seemingly having amended their stylebook to soften the truth rather than simply printing it.
Our professional media don’t normally lie outright, though, like any other human beings, reporters and editors can occasionally make mistakes. But the bias in the media comes through, if you take care to notice, by what they choose to print, and not to print, by the words that they choose, normally regulated by a stylebook, to use in their stories.
If it’s a gang, say it’s a gang!