This site has reported, many times, on how The Philadelphia Inquirer censors the news, at the direction of published Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes. Miss Hughes told us that “racial justice” concerns will be considered in the newspaper’s “crime and criminal justice coverage.”

Teen critically wounded in shooting on SEPTA bus in North Philly

The shooting occurred on Allegheny Avenue near Third Street, police said. Some gunshots hit the engine area and disabled the bus.

by Robert Moran and Earl Hopkins | Friday, October 4, 2024 | 9:47 PM EDT | Updated: Saturday, October 5, 2024 | 2:33 PM EDT

A 17-year-old was critically wounded in a shooting on a SEPTA bus Friday night in North Philadelphia, police said.

The shooting occurred just after 6:15 p.m. on Allegheny Avenue near Third Street, police said. The teen was taken by private vehicle to Temple University Hospital, where he was listed in critical but stable condition with several gunshot wounds, including to the face, police said Saturday.

The suspected shooter, described as a male wearing all-black clothing, got off the bus and fled in a silver Kia, which was located and pursued by police until it crashed at Fifth Street and Glenwood Avenue, said Inspector D.F. Pace. One person in the Kia ran from the car and was apprehended, according to video of the chase, but another remained at large, police said.

Based on a preliminary investigation, police said an altercation between several males on the bus likely led to the shooting near Allegheny Avenue and Fifth Street. The bus had several bullet holes, and spent shell casings were found on the highway in the 300 block of West Allegheny Avenue, so investigators are looking into the possibility of some shots fired outside the bus, Pace said.

There’s more at the original.

I noticed as soon as I read it: the “suspected shooter” was “described as a male wearing all-black clothing”. He wasn’t described as a white male, or an Hispanic male, or an Asian male, but just a male. And I was 99.44% certain that meant that the “suspected shooter” is a black male. The victim was described only as a “17-year-old,” but the Inquirer does tell us that he was male, through the use of the masculine pronouns.^[1]Since, in English grammar, the masculine subsumes the feminine, the masculine pronouns are used when the sex of the person to which they refer are unknown, so that does not tell us, technically … Continue reading

But the reporters knew: the Philadelphia Police Department released a crime notification to the media, which Fox 29 News reporter Steve Keeley duplicated at 7:18 PM Friday evening, 2½ hours before the newspaper’s original story, which stated that the victim is a black male. And NBC 10 News reported last night that the suspect was a black male.

Let’s tell the truth here: when violent crime is reported in the City of Brotherly Love, people who hear about it automatically assume that the perpetrators are black. And, in the majority of cases, they are.

But not all of the bad guys in Philly are black, and when the Inky deliberately conceals the race of suspects and victims, is the newspaper not contributing to the stereotype that they are all black?

The Inquirer is privately owned, by the Leftist Lenfest Institute for Journalism, and absolutely has the right to print what it wishes, and not publicize what it wants to keep quiet. But it ought to be asked just how much journalist respect we can have for a newspaper that censors the news for political purposes.