Author Archives: Dana Pico

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You know that the #COVID19 #VaccineMandates are nothing but politics when they won’t allow medical exemptions

DeAnn Stephens Cox has been a television reporter for WKYT-TV for 27 years, a long time to be at one station in local news, but, as of now, she’s toast.

THE highlight of my professional career has been my genuine love for the people of Kentucky! YOU make my work every day feel like an expression of friendship. Every day I have been “Out & About” has brought me the honor of meeting some of the kindest Kentuckians!

DeAnn Stephens Cox, from her Facebook page.

But I am writing this post in response to inquiries I have received over the last several hours and an announcement by WKYT-TV, Gray Television that some of you have heard.

Gray required all employees to be vaccinated against COVID. Unfortunately, due to my medical history, my physician has told me I am NOT a candidate for the Covid Vaccination. I have explained my medical history and provided my doctor’s records and her opinion to Gray.

But sadly Gray has terminated my employment instead.

This is NOT about being FOR or AGAINST vaccinations! This is about following my Doctor’s recommendation to NOT get it because my past medical history and current medical issues.

Here’s where I stand: If you want to get the vaccine and you feel that’s best for you and your family, then I say get it!

I also feel that those, like me, should also be accommodated.

Out of respect for everyone’s differing views, I will not be responding to comments on any social media platform.

So after 27 years with WKYT, that’s a WRAP!

But don’t forget, the radio comes in loud and clear on 98.1 The Bull AND you will definitely be seeing me ‘Out & About!’

I’ve been so incredibly blessed by all of your love and support over the years!! Thank you for that!

‘Trust in Jesus with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He will direct your paths.’ Proverbs 3:5

I’m listening Lord!! I’m listening!!

I love you guys so very much.

Now, why would Gray Television discharge Mrs Cox for not taking the COVID-19 vaccine when her doctor told he that she was not a safe candidate for it, and she provided her physician’s records to her employer? She wasn’t a public, or even private, anti-vaxxer, but someone with a valid medical reason, and the documentation to prove it. That can’t be anything but political mindlessness, because Gray’s lawyers must surely have warned them that they were making themselves vulnerable to a lawsuit.

Given that all other employees were vaccinated, it would have been simple to provide Mrs Cox with what the law would refer to as a reasonable accommodation. Mrs Cox needs to file a multi-million dollar lawsuit against her former employers.

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The witnesses who sat by and did nothing should be publicly identified and publicly shamed A woman is raped on a SEPTA train, and not one other passenger had the courage to stop it or even call 911

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain is incensed:

From the New York Post:

Passengers do nothing as woman is raped on Philadelphia train, cops say

By Eileen AJ Connelly | October 16, 2021 | 2:39 PM EDT Updated 5:06 PM EDT

A homeless man raped a woman this week on a commuter train in suburban Philadelphia in full view of other passengers –who cops said didn’t lift a finger to help, or even dial 911, reports said.

The attack at around 10 p.m. Wednesday was captured on surveillance video that showed other people in the train car, according to Superintendent Timothy Bernhardt of the Upper Darby Police Department.

“Were they watching? I don’t know. Again, we’re still going through the video but there was a lot of people, in my opinion, that should’ve intervened. Somebody should’ve done something.,” Bernhardt said, Philadelphia’s CBS-3 reported.

“It speaks to where we are in society; I mean, who would allow something like that to take place? So it’s troubling.”

Bernhardt said it was a Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority employee who called the cops to report that “something wasn’t right” with a woman aboard the train.

SEPTA police waiting at the next stop were able to “apprehend the suspect in the act,” an agency spokesman said in a statement, according to NBC-10 Philadelphia.

They arrested Fiston Ngoy, 35, who is believed to be homeless, the station reported.

Ngoy was charged with rape, aggravated indecent assault and related counts, police said.

He remains behind bars in lieu of 10% of $180,000 bail, Philadelphia’s ABC-6 reported.

Bernhardt said he is known to both SEPTA and Upper Darby police.

The woman, who did not know her attacker, was taken to a hospital. Bernhardt called her an “unbelievably strong woman” who provided police with a lot of information, The Associated Press reported.

“She’s on the mend,” Bernhardt said. “Hopefully she will get through this.”

SEPTA issued a statement calling the attack a “horrendous criminal act.”

“There were other people on the train who witnessed this horrific act, and it may have been stopped sooner if a rider called 911,” the authority said.

Or maybe it would have been stopped sooner if people had the courage to intervene physically. Were there no men on that train at all? We may eventually find out that there were some males on that train, but it’s obvious that none of them were actually men.

The Philadelphia Inquirer had an article on the assault, but, of course, the Inquirer would never publish the (alleged) rapist’s mugshot:

SEPTA reports rape on Market-Frankford Line, says no one called 911

A rape occurred Wednesday night but riders did not report it, SEPTA said.

by Stephan Salisbury | Saturday, October 16, 2021

A woman was raped on the Market-Frankford Line on Wednesday night in a car with other passengers but none called 911.

Their failure to do that was noted by SEPTA in an unusual statement — and condemned by the police chief in Upper Darby, where the attack took place.

“There was a lot of people in my opinion that should have intervened, somebody should have done something,” Police Superintendent Timothy Bernhardt said. “It speaks to where we are in society and who would allow something like that to take place. So it’s troubling.”

In the statement Friday, the SEPTA agency said that “anyone witnessing an emergency” needed to report it immediately.

Report it immediately? How about take action to stop it?

Frank Herbert, in Dune, noted fear, and how fear had to be overcome. But our governments, federal and state and city, have spent the last year and a half trying to instill fear into the public, and it looks like they have succeeded: a train car full of people, and no one of them had the courage to intervene, to stop a rape being perpetrated right in front of them.

“The assault was observed by a SEPTA employee, who called 911, enabling SEPTA officers to respond immediately and apprehend the suspect in the act,” the agency said. ”There were other people on the train who witnessed this horrific act, and it may have been stopped sooner if a rider called 911.” . . . .

Bernhardt said the assault was caught entirely on surveillance video. Bernhardt said they are reviewing the footage, in part to look at the passengers.

Good, and I hope that tape is revealed, and every passenger, especially every male passenger, in that railcar is identified, by name and by photograph, and their information published, widely published, so that everyone knows who they are, and what they were too cowardly to do. I noted that neither story indicated that the (alleged) assailant was armed, with a knife or a firearm.

All it would have taken was one man, just one, to rally the other passengers to intervene and stop the assault, but no one did. Those people need to be publicly shamed, publicly humiliated, and the men males divorced by their wives.

The alleged assailant had been previously convicted of drug possession in 2015, and had been arrested both last year and this in both Philadelphia and Delaware County on charges that included public drunkenness, resisting arrest, and scalping tickets. The Defender Association of Philadelphia, which provides lawyers for people too poor to hire one, had been providing him with representation on the ticket scalping charge.

This crime happened not in Philadelphia, but in Delaware County, and if there’s any good at all in this, it’s that Mr Ngoy won’t be prosecuted by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who would give him a serious, serious! slap on the back of the hand, and maybe even a stern talking to.

There was a time in which, had this occurred then, the other men on that train would have rushed to the victim’s defense and beaten the assailant to a bloody pulp. But fear, fear! was upon them, upon a population cowed into masks and isolation and indifference.

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The #ClimateActivists don’t care what you want, or need, they just want to impose their will

Molly Yeh Hagen, from the Food Network’s Girl Meets Farm. Click to enlarge.

One of the channels that’s on television with some frequency at the Pico household, especially when my daughters come to visit — which is almost every weekend — is the Food Network, Channel 231 on DirecTV, and one of the shows is Girl Meets Farm, starring Molly Yeh Hagen. She’s a very pretty and personable cook, working in what appears to be a small kitchen on the family farm with her husband Nick Hagen.

Unlike Joanna Gaines, and her imported $53,000+ La Cornue Chateau range, if you’ll look in the lower right hand corner of the photo, Mrs Hagen uses an old electric range. Not even one of the newer, glass-topped stoves, but one with the curlicue electric heating elements.

She’s also unlike most of the people that you see on the various house hunter and remodeling shows on HGTV, the DIY Network and others, in which it seems that everybody wants a gas range.

We did, too. So when we remodeled our kitchen in 2018, we installed what Mrs Pico wanted, a gas — propane in our case, being out in the country beyond natural gas lines — range, replacing the old electric one that came with the house when we bought it.

We had other reasons, as well. Our house was all electric, and our first winter here was miserable. It got colder than usual for a winter in central/eastern Kentucky, and the electric heat pump just wouldn’t keep up very well. Then, when we lost electricity for 4½ days in an ice storm, it was decided: we would not depend just on sparktricity for heat, cooking and hot water. We added a propane fireplace and water heater as well, so if we lose electricity again — and we’re pretty much at the end of the service line, last ones to get service restored out here — we’ll still have heat and hot water and can cook.

Yes, my wife and I remodeled that kitchen all by ourselves, with help from my sisters and, occasionally, a nephew, but no ‘professionals’ were involved. The plumbing, the electrical, the drywall, the floor and backsplash time, the cabinet installation, the wallpaper, the window installation, everything you see — and you can click on the image to enlarge it — with the exception of the quartz countertop installation was done by us. Pardon me while I pat myself on the back.  🙂

Well, we might like a gas range, and most homebuyers want gas ranges, but it seems like the climate change activists don’t think you should be allowed to have one. From National Review:

The Democrats’ War on Gas Stoves Is a Slap at Cooking Cultures

By Judson Berger | October 17, 2021 | 6:30 AM EDT

“No way in hell you are going to put a wok on an electric stove.”

That was Steven Lee, a San Francisco official and restaurant investor, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle last year after the city’s Board of Supervisors voted to outlaw natural gas in new buildings.

Nevertheless, they persisted. Per the Sierra Club, the quickening campaign to phase out natural gas recently notched its 50th city-level win in California alone. (Take a bow, Encinitas!) No. 50, as with some others, has “situational exemptions” for restaurants and the like, but the overall push to compel an all-electric design for homes and commercial buildings understandably has had chefs and home cooks worried, roughly for the reasons articulated by Steven Lee.

Berkeley was the pilot light of this movement. The city was the first to ban gas connections in new buildings in 2019, something the California Restaurant Association is still fighting in court. The speed at which other municipalities followed, from Seattle to New York to other cities across California, only underscores how the culture of lawmaking often is the culture of fads.

Berkeley was the “pilot light” of the movement?  Guffaws!

There’s more at the original, an no, it’s not hidden behind a paywall.

I wonder is self-proclaimed foodie Amanda Marcotte uses a gas range in her South Philadelphia apartment.

Chefs aired similar concerns in a Wall Street Journal piece published over the summer. The Journal detailed how some cities include carve-outs for gas stoves in their natural-gas restrictions (after all, it’s the heating of homes and water, not stoves, that gobbles up most natural gas around the house) but noted that advocates still see full electrification as the end goal.

That’s just it: gas for cooking is something of a luxury, a luxury that a lot of people want, but the heating of homes and water isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity. Those 4½ days we were without electricity in January of 2018? Mrs Pico went to stay with our daughters in Lexington, where there was plenty of heat, but I had to stay here, to take care of the critters, and the plumbing. Staying in a house that got down to 38º F just before the power came back on wasn’t a whole lot of fun!

Of course, when the power did come back on, here in central/eastern Kentucky, it was coming from a fossil-fueled power plant!

As I noted in a tweet on Saturday, the show This Old House was featuring the remodeling of an 1879 home in Newton, Massachusetts. The homeowners, even in very liberal, very ‘blue’ state Massachusetts, has a natural gas fueled modern heating system installed, in a show first broadcast in 2018, and even “a wood-burning stove.” It seems that in cold, snowy New England, homeowners care less about climate change than they do about keeping warm in the winter.

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California wants to close traditional power plants due to #ClimateEmergency Too bad they don't have the wind and solar plants in place to replace them!

The Pyrite State is forcing the closure of a nuclear and some natural gas powered electric power plants, but, surprise, surprise, they don’t have the solar and wind power generating capacity to replace them! From The Wall Street Journal:

    California Scrambles to Find Electricity to Offset Plant Closures

    State contends with coming loss of gas-fired power plants and its last remaining nuclear facility in transition to renewable energy

    By Katherine Blunt | October 16, 2021 | 2:50 PM EDT

    California is racing to secure large amounts of power in the next few years to make up for the impending closure of fossil-fuel power plants and a nuclear facility that provides nearly 10% of the electricity generated in the state.

    The California Public Utilities Commission has ordered utilities to buy an unprecedented amount of renewable energy and battery storage as the state phases out four natural-gas-fired power plants and retires Diablo Canyon, the state’s last nuclear plant, starting in 2024.

    The California Public Utilities Commission has ordered utilities to buy an unprecedented amount of renewable energy and battery storage as the state phases out four natural-gas-fired power plants and retires Diablo Canyon, the state’s last nuclear plant, starting in 2024.

An amusing statement, given the pile-up of container ships of the left coast that can’t be unloaded quickly. Right now, the batteries needed for electric storage are primarily manufactured in Japan, South Korea, and China. President Trump’s Department of Energy “wanted a secure domestic manufacturing supply chain that is independent of foreign sources of critical materials” in place by 2030, but there’s little progress toward that.

    While the companies are moving quickly to contract for power, the California Energy Commission and the state’s grid operator have recently expressed concern that the purchases may not be enough to prevent electricity shortages in coming summers.

    The order requires companies such as PG&E Corp. and Edison International’s Southern California Edison to bring more than 14,000 megawatts of power generation and storage capacity online in the coming years, an amount equal to roughly a third of the state’s forecast for peak summer demand.

    California has already been strained to keep the lights on this year. Wildfires have disrupted power transmission and a severe drought has crimped hydroelectric production throughout the West. Those involved in developing the new energy sources say they anticipate significant challenges in moving fast enough to ensure adequate supplies.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: ‘Containergeddon’: California Emissions Law Caused the Supply Chain Crisis

“Significant challenges,” huh? Perhaps, just perhaps, they should build whatever new power facilities they intend before they take old ones out of service?

Wildfires and drought are no new things for California; wildfires happen every single year, and drought has been frequent. But even without a drought season, California doesn’t get a lot of rain. Easterners might not really appreciate that. Pennsylvania, for instance, averages 44 inches of rain and 38 inches of snow per year, Massachusetts 49 inches of rain and 47 inches of snow, Kentucky 48 inches of rain and 11 inches of snow, and Georgia 50 inches of rain plus an inch of snow. California gets just 22 inches of rain and 7 inches of snow. Missing three inches of rain is no big deal in the east; in California, it’s a serious problem.

    The state’s dilemma underscores the difficulties of rapidly transitioning to cleaner power resources, as the U.S. and many countries are now pledging to do in response to concerns about climate change. A California law passed in 2018 requires the state to decarbonize its power grid by 2045.

There’s a lot more at the original, but our most liberal state is already feeling the effects of the green policies it wants to impose, and those things have just barely begun.

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The Patricians like Will Bunch really don’t understand reality

It was the photo accompanying the column by The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch that really caught my eye. Mr Bunch, very much a leftist who has “some strong opinions about what’s happening in America around social injustice, income inequality and the government,” according to his own Inquirer biography blurb, lamented that so many of the #BlackLivesMatter demonstrators of 2020 were well-off white people:

Black Lives Matter marches of 2020 were surprisingly white and educated. Is that why results have been so mediocre?

We’ve never seen anything like the George Floyd protests that gained momentum 16 months ago — but that could be exactly why progress has stalled.

By Will Bunch | Thursday, October 14, 2021

Megan McNamara (right), 19, of Wayne, walks up Lancaster Avenue during The Main Line for Black Lives protest in Wayne, Pa. on June 4, 2020. David Maialetti, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer. Click to enlarge.

George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020. Over the next weeks, as the world watched the video of his death, the reaction was stunning and without precedent. Literally millions who saw the images of Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck felt it was impossible to remain silent.

But what was most remarkable about the June 2020 marches was how far they spread beyond Minneapolis and other big cities with histories of police brutality. In Norfolk, Nebraska, a small overwhelmingly white town of 24,000, some 300 people gathered on a street corner to voice their outrage. A march in a city with similar demographics — Sioux City, Iowa — triggered a confrontation with pepper-spraying police. In the Philadelphia suburbs, thousands of mostly white people — some pushing babies in strollers — marched down Lancaster Avenue through affluent Main Line suburbs, carrying signs like “White Silence is Violence.”

“I was shocked to see so many white kids out here,” Walter Wiggins — a 67-year-old Black man who’d been attending protest marches in his native D.C. since his parents took him to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington — told the New York Times, at a protest that researchers confirmed was majority white. “Back then, it was just Black folks.”

That remarkable spring, the same phrase was on many people’s lips: The world had never seen anything quite like this. And yet, more than 16 months later, the world also hasn’t seen dramatic changes from a global protest movement in which it is estimated some 15 to 26 million Americans took part by marching in solidarity.

Emphases in the original, and there’s much more if you follow the embedded link.

Normally, I don’t include photos from the Inquirer, due to copyright concerns, but this one, I believe, is an exception under Fair Use standards. It is just wildly amusing that Mr Bunch, or, more probably, an editor, selected a photo not just of white marchers, but of a red-headed, extremely fair white woman, showing off plenty of skin on that warm June day, to illustrate Mr Bunch’s point about so many BLM marchers being white. 🙂

Mr Bunch is disappointed that few of the radical police reform measures were passed, and that while some police department budgets were cut, most departments not only had their budgets restored, but “budgets for traditional policing are actually increasing.”

Why? Well, one reason might be that the homicide rate in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia continues to skyrocket. As of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, October 14th, the Philadelphia Police Department reported that there had been 435 murders in the City of Brotherly Love, tied for the eighth highest year on record, with 2½ months, 78 days, left in the year. The city is seeing an average of 1.5157 homicides per day, which, if that average holds, works out to 553 dead bodies littering Philly’s mean streets in 2021.

While the Police Department’s figures do not break down the victims by race, The Philadelphia Tribune, a publication for the city’s black community, reported that, in 2020, black victims accounted for about 86% of the city’s 499 homicide victims, and 84% of the 2,236 shootings. If there has been a serious uptick in the number of white victims this year, the Inquirer hasn’t reported on it.

The visceral, extreme reactions to the Floyd video, which inspired the rallying cry of “Defund the Police” amplified by a news media that prefers shorthand over nuance, ran into more complicated views on crime and law enforcement in the neighborhoods where — unlike for many of the marchers — policing is a day-to-day issue. Ground Zero has been Minneapolis itself, where in the immediate aftermath a supposedly veto-proof majority of city councilors pledged to end policing as we know it, to be replaced by a new department of public safety.

That hasn’t happened, in part because of pushback from middle-class Black homeowners concerned about rising crime. Last month, the Minnesota Poll of city residents found that while police reform is generally popular, a whopping 75% of Black Minneapolis voters do not want to see fewer police officers (the comparable number for white voters is 51%).

That’s hardly a surprise:

Surge in Minneapolis violence includes over 900 rounds fired from automatic weapons in 2021

by Jay Kolls | September 30, 2021 | 8:39 PM CDT | Updated: 10:21 PM CDT

The Minneapolis Police Department updated the Minneapolis City Council with new violent crime statistics Thursday, and the numbers show violent crime — including gun crimes — has continued to rise throughout the first three quarters of 2021.

Scott Wolfert, an MPD crime analyst, told city council members that 503 people have been injured by gunfire so far this year, which is an increase of 26% over last year. Homicides are up 16%, robberies are up 5% and aggravated assaults are up 2.6%, but the biggest surge has been the number of rounds fired by automatic weapons.

“So far, in 2021, there have been 78 ShotSpotter activations of automatic weapons with 935 rounds detected,” Wolfert said. “Compared to this same time in 2020, there were just five activations for automatic weapons and only 42 rounds fired through the end of September.”

Wolfert said the total number of detected gunshots fired so far this year is 20,611 — which is a 28% increase from 2020. And, Wolfert said, there have been 355 carjackings, up 35% from this time last year.

There have been 75 homicides in Minneapolis through October 15th, a city of 429,954, and puts the city on pace for 95 murders for the year. At the current pace, the city would see a homicide rate of 22.10 per 100,000 population . . . a rate which makes Philadelphia laugh, and say, “Hold my beer!”

Philly’s homicide rate stands at 34.49 per 100,000!

North Water Street near Clearfield Street, Google Maps streetview.

This is North Water Street, near East Clearfield Street in North Philadelphia, and if you click on the image to enlarge it, you’ll see how some Philadelphians have to live, with their rowhouses barred in, to protect themselves from intruders and thieves. Mr Bunch noted how the BLM protesters were overwhelmingly white, and overwhelmingly college-educated. The simple fact is that the BLM protesters mostly did not live where the crime problems are most serious, and it’s easy to be for fewer police when your contact with the police is almost exclusively in getting a speeding ticket rather than reporting a robbery, a break-in, or a shooting.

Mr Bunch concluded:

But the crisis that inspired the George Floyd protests — U.S. killings by police officers — has hardly abated. The Washington Post tracker of such deaths shows 654 so far in 2021, at a pace only slightly lower than previous years. After 16 months, it seems reasonable to ask: If the largest protest in American history only barely moved the needle, what on earth would?

Really, 654? As of October 15th, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, there have been 639 homicides in the Windy City alone, and Chicago’s homicide rate of 29.93 per 100,000 population is lower than Philadelphia’s.

Mr Bunch, who to judge by his Inquirer photograph, is very much a white man himself, laments that so many of the BLM protesters of 2020 were white, and wonders if that has contributed to the lack of movement toward their professed goals. But it also points out that Mr Bunch is himself quite probably very insulated from the way most black Philadelphians live their lives. A 1981 graduate of Ivy League Brown University, he’s lived the elitist’s urban dream, ten years a reporter for New York Newsday, and, for the past 26 years, with the Inquirer/Philadelphia Daily News. I don’t know his address, and wouldn’t publish it if I did, but it seems unlikely that he lives in Kensington or Strawberry Mansion or any of the other combat zones of the City of Brotherly Love.

We have noted it so many times: black lives really don’t matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer, given that the newspaper barely reports on them when a black person is killed. We have previously noted what I called the racism of the Inquirer, and have noted, many times, that unless a murder victim is an ‘innocent‘, someone already of note, or a cute little white girl, the editors of the Inquirer don’t care, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the murder of a young black man in Philadelphia is not news.

It’s easy to be a liberal when, to paraphrase the words of Robert E Howard, your life isn’t nailed to your spine, and, unless he has chosen to live near 52nd Street in West Philadelphia, Mr Bunch’s life clearly is not. If he did, he would be gobsmacked by the reality that working-class Philadelphians, white and Hispanic and black and Asian live with, every day. He just might have a different perspective if he lived and moved among the people he claims to champion.

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Anna Orso does not like being questioned! The Philadelphia Inquirer sure isn't happy with its journalism being examined

I can be on the critical side when it comes to the professional journalists, but I believe it only proper to let those journalists know when they have been mentioned, and thus I included Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Anna Orso in a tweet when I examined her article in yesterday’s Inquirer. A screen capture of the tweet is to the right. While I can embed tweets in my articles, screen captures work better, because people can delete tweets.

Miss Orso did not particularly like my tweet, and responded, via Twitter, “get a life”. I responded:

    Oh, I have one. I examined your story, and the flaws were obvious. These were things that should have been asked and examined.

    You are a professional journalist; do some actual journalism.

I don’t know Miss Orso, never having met her, and no longer living in the Keystone State, the chances would seem to be vanishingly small that I ever will; there is no reason for me to have anything personal against her. All that I can see is her written words, and what I saw was a story with some real flaws in it.

The First Amendment to the Constitution protects our freedom of Speech and of the Press. Those freedom include, to be blunt about it, the freedom to lie, and the freedom to shade the truth. Most journalists do not actually lie, but when it comes to The Philadelphia Inquirer, “the third oldest surviving daily newspaper in the United States in its own right,” publisher Elizabeth Hughes has already told us that the Inquirer was taking many steps to become that “anti-racist news organization” she wanted it to be, including:

  • Producing an antiracism workflow guide for the newsroom that provides specific questions that reporters and editors should ask themselves at various stages of producing our journalism.
  • Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime.
  • Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.
  • Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
  • Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
  • Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

Translation: Mrs Hughes wants the Inquirer to shade the truth if the unvarnished truth might ‘stigmatize’ certain ‘Philadelphia communities.’

In her story on the impact that the murder of Marcus Stokes had on E Washington Rhodes School, Miss Orso wrote, very specifically, that young Mr Stokes “was fatally shot in North Philadelphia on his way to school“, but the evidence, as printed in the Inquirer, indicates that he was not actually on his way to school. He was sitting, with five other young people, in a parked, and possibly disabled, car, many blocks away, fifteen minutes after he was supposed to be in his homeroom at school.

Miss Orso knew those facts; she is listed as either the sole or one of two authors in each of the articles I have cited. Did no one, including she, ever ask themselves any questions about why these young people, “including other Rhodes students“, were sitting in that car, ask themselves what they were doing there?

Miss Orso isn’t a stupid woman. She was graduated from Pennsylvania State University, a highly selective college, that doesn’t accept dummies. She isn’t inexperienced, having worked in journalism for seven years now, including four with the Inquirer.

Normally, an experienced editor would review a reporter’s story before the story was published. With all of the cutbacks through which the Inquirer has gone, perhaps that wasn’t the case in this instance, but with three major stories[1]At least three that I have seen; it is always possible that I have missed one, though I have been diligent about looking. published now on the killing of young Mr Stokes, it seems very unlikely that no supervising editor at all has read those stories. Yet all of them have made it through the process and been published, and no one there has raised serious enough questions to change things.

How does that happen?

One way it could happen is if no one at the Inquirer was paying anything more than glancing attention, and just wrote and passed on a story without any sense of inquisitiveness. That’s kind of difficult to believe, given that this writer, a 68-year-old retired fellow living three states away, whose last journalistic experience was with his collegiate newspaper, was able to spot the discrepancies from the very first story on the killing.

But another way it could happen is if the Inquirer was trying to engage not in reporting but propaganda. Miss Orso’s story has the effect of making young Mr Stokes out to be a wholly innocent victim, and perhaps that’s exactly what he was. But if he was a completely innocent victim, someone at the Inquirer should have been asking the questions and getting the answers as to why he was sitting in a car which was targeted in a deliberate assassination attempt; no one fires at least twelve rounds — “officers found 12 shell casings at the scene” — by accident. While it is possible that the shooter targeted the wrong vehicle completely, the Inquirer has not reported that, nor would such be consistent with the story that at least ten shots were fired at a vigil for the young victim. Mr Stokes might not have been the individual who was targeted, but the obvious conclusion is that at least some bad guy was involved.

The Inquirer has expended enough bandwidth on the story that someone there needs to start digging more deeply, someone needs to ferret out the whole story. That story might not be one that the Inquirer’s reporters and editors would like, but that is the difference between propaganda and news, between journolism[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading and journalism.

References

References
↑1 At least three that I have seen; it is always possible that I have missed one, though I have been diligent about looking.
↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Lexington ties the 2019 record! Not a good record to tie

We noted, on October 5th, Lexington’s 29th homicide of 2021, and how Lexington was just one behind the then record of 30, set in 2019, but, of course, the record was broken again, with 34 in 2020. Well, that didn’t last long!

    Man dies after double shooting near Tates Creek High School in Lexington

    by Christopher Leach | October 14, 2021 | 12:10 PM EDT | Updated: 4:26 PM EDT

    One of two people shot outside a Lexington apartment building died, Lexington police said Thursday.

    Andre Holloway, 46, died at University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital where he was taken after the shooting, according to the Fayette County coroner’s office.

There’s more at the original. A previous article, published at 8:17 AM the same day, noted the double shooting, but Mr Holloway hadn’t been reported as having died at the time. Neither the Lexington Shootings Investigations page nor the Homicide Investigations page have, as of this writing, been updated to include this crime.

Thirty murders in 286 days works out to 0.104895 per day, or 38.29 for the year. If that rate holds, it will not only smash the record set just last year, but give the city a homicide rate of 11.71 per 100,000 population.

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The ‘journalism’ of The Philadelphia Inquirer

North Judson and West Clearfield Streets in North Philadelphia. Image from Google Maps.

We have said, many times, that black lives don’t matter, at least not to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which only reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love in which the victim is an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl is the victim.

However, sometimes the Inquirer tries to paint someone as an innocent victim, but the details of the story, stories in this case, just don’t add up.

    Gunshots took a 13-year-old who was friends with everyone. At his North Philadelphia school, it’s ‘utter devastation.’

    A teacher at E.W. Rhodes School said seventh-grader Marcus Stokes was bright with an infectious smile, and that his peers “really enjoyed being his friend.”

    by Anna Orso | Friday, October 15, 2021

    Four days after 13-year-old Marcus Stokes was fatally shot in North Philadelphia on his way to school, his fellow students came back to the classroom at lunchtime to set up a makeshift memorial.

    They hung up a picture of Marcus that their teacher, Marcella Hankinson, had printed at Staples, and they strung balloons of blue and white, his favorite colors. They placed candles and a single rose next to a teddy bear on his desk, and they scrawled messages to him on red sticky notes next to his picture.

    The death has left students and teachers at E.W. Rhodes School traumatized, fearful, and in a state of “utter devastation,” said Principal Andrea Surratt, who oversees the school that serves kids in kindergarten through eighth grade. It’s the first time a student was fatally shot in her four years at the helm, and it took place five blocks from the school, triggering an hour-long lockdown.

There’s more at the original.

West Clearfield Street, from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

The murder of Young Marcus Stokes happened at on North Judson Street, at the intersection with West Clearfield Street. If you look at the map, North Judson is not five blocks from the school, which is at 2900 West Clearfield Street, but eleven blocks. It’s just a hair over 1/3 mile between the two.

Anna Orso’s story says, further down:

    Investigators believe Marcus and five other young people — including other Rhodes students — were sitting in a parked car on the 3100 block of Judson Street before 9 a.m. on Oct. 8. A gunman approached the vehicle and fired shots into it, hitting Marcus once in the chest, authorities said.

Yet a previous Inquirer story stated that Mr Stokes was shot “just after 9 a.m.” That’s an important difference, because the E Washington Rhodes School website states “Breakfast will be served from 8:15 am to 8:45 am each day. All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.” If you read Miss Orso’s story carefully, she stated that Mr Stokes and five other E W Rhodes’ students were “were sitting in a parked car on the 3100 block of Judson Street before 9 a.m.”, not that the victim was actually shot before 9:00 AM. Miss Orso has to have been aware of the previous article noting that he was shot after 9:00 AM, because she was one of the two Inquirer reporters who wrote it!

But, if you didn’t know that the shooting itself didn’t take place until after 9:00 AM, perhaps, just perhaps, you wouldn’t figure out that no, young Mr Stokes was not on his way to school. He should have been on his way, but it is obvious that he wasn’t.

Also in the earlier story which Miss Orso co-wrote with reporter Chris Palmer was this statement:

    (Chief Inspector Frank) Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it.

Miss Orso had to know that those kids weren’t driving to school, but she still wrote that the victim was “on his way to school”.

The Inquirer published the picture of the vehicle in question, a Plymouth PT Cruiser, not a particularly large vehicle, one in which six people aren’t normally going to cram just to have a chat or pray the rosary. Sunrise was at 7:03 AM on that day, and the weather was unseasonably warm, yet the photo of the vehicle shows all of the windows closed. What, some might ask, were six kids doing, sitting in a parked car with the windows rolled up 15 minutes after they were supposed to be in school? If the police know, if Miss Orso knows, such has not been revealed to readers of the Inquirer.

Back to the first cited article:

    Homicide Capt. Jason Smith said officers found 12 shell casings at the scene, and investigators have recovered some surveillance footage showing a possible suspect fleeing. No one has been arrested. Smith said detectives have not determined a motive but don’t believe Marcus was the shooter’s intended target. He did not elaborate.

So, who in the vehicle was the intended target? When you read about an intentional ‘hit’ like this, the most common answers which leap to mind are ‘rival gang member’ or ‘rival drug dealer’. Other characterizations could come to mind, but few would guess ‘community organizer’ or ‘Baptist youth minister.’ And the fact that we haven’t been told that the possibly intended target was a community organizer or Baptist youth minister, which is the kind of information which would have been disclosed if true, leads one to believe that ‘rival gang member’ or ‘rival drug dealer’ is the more probable guess.

Who is Anna Orso? Her Linkedin biography tells us that she has:

    spent the last seven years as a reporter in Philadelphia covering mostly general assignment and breaking news. I’m currently a member of the Justice and Injustice team at the Philadelphia Inquirer, which is part of its broader News Desk. My coverage is focused on issues related to public safety and policing.

She isn’t someone three months out of a small college journalism program, but earned her Baccalaureate degree in “Print Journalism, sociology/ criminology” in 2014. Yet she wrote a story in which her statements contradicted what has been previously published, contradicted the timeline, and contradicted the map. She made young Mr Stokes into an innocent victim, when what has been published about this crime throws doubt on that notion.

An actual journalist would have looked at the points I have made, and done something really radical like investigated more deeply and more thoroughly. Who knows? Perhaps young Mr Stokes really was an ‘innocent,’ but if he was, Miss Orso didn’t do much in answering the obvious questions around the time and place of the shooting. Was the Inquirer really so desperate to paint him as a boy doing nothing wrong, just going to school on a Friday morning, that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, dig for the truth?

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Are journalists today trying less to inform public minds than steer public opinions?

As we have previously noted, McClatchy’s mugshot policy is:

Publishing mugshots of arrestees has been shown to have lasting effects on both the people photographed and marginalized communities. The permanence of the internet can mean those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever. Beyond the personal impact, inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness. In fact, some police departments have started moving away from taking/releasing mugshots as a routine part of their procedures.

To address these concerns, McClatchy will not publish crime mugshots — online, or in print, from any newsroom or content-producing team — unless approved by an editor. To be clear, this means that in addition to photos accompanying text stories, McClatchy will not publish “Most wanted” or “Mugshot galleries” in slide-show, video or print.

Any exception to this policy must be approved by an editor. Editors considering an exception should ask:

  • Is there an urgent threat to the community?
  • Is this person a public official or the suspect in a hate crime?
  • Is this a serial killer suspect or a high-profile crime?

If an exception is made, editors will need to take an additional step with the Pub Center to confirm publication by making a note in the ‘package notes‘ field in Sluglife.

Jacob Heil, uncredited photo in the Lexington Herald-Leader, February 22, 2019. Photo cropped by DRP. Click to enlarge.

On Wednesday, October 13th, we pointed out that the Lexington Herald-Leader kept publishing the courtroom photo of Jacob Heil, the 21-year-old former University of Kentucky student charged with reckless homicide and driving under the influence of alcohol for killing 4-year-old Marco Lee Shemwell while his family and he were standing beside Cooper Drive near Scoville Drive. Mr Heil allegedly veered off the road, striking the boy and killing him.

The photo of Mr Heil that the Herald-Leader has been using was a press pool photo, and in it, he is wearing a face mask. However, the very first line of the text in this story, published on February 22, 2019 — before the McClatchy Mugshot Policy went into effect — in which Mr Heil’s full face photo is shown, in a full width of the story format.

Remember: the McClatchy policy states, “The permanence of the internet can mean those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever,” and Mr Heil has not yet been convicted of any crime! He is not an urgent threat to the community, he is not a public official or suspect in a hate crime, is not a serial killer or the suspect in a high-profile crime. Why, then, is the newspaper festooning its website with his courtroom photo?

Jymie S. Salahuddin, 53, from Lexington station WTVQ.

In an article by Herald-Leader reporter Karla Ward, also published on October 13th, Lexington man sentenced to 21 years in prison for cocaine trafficking, the newspaper declined to print the publicly available photo of a convicted felon. Since federal law requires that Jymie S. Salahuddin, 53, serve at least 85% of his 262 month sentence, he will not be eligible for release for 18½ years, when he would be 71 years old. I’m not certain how an 18-year-old mugshot would harm an elderly convict on his release. Mr Salahuddin is not a charged but not convicted person, but one who pleaded guilty. It’s not like the paper needed to save bandwidth; they included a stock photo of jail cell bars.

So, now we come to this:

Kentucky man sentenced to jail for involvement in Capitol riot

By Christopher Leach | Wednesday, October 13, 2021 | 3:44 PM EDT

A man from Cave City has been sentenced for his involvement in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Robert Bauer, a Kentucky resident, was identified through photos of himself during the Capitol riot, according to the FBI. This photo was included in a criminal complaint filed against him. PHOTO VIA FBI. Click to enlarge.

Robert Bauer, 44, was sentenced to 45 days in jail, 65 hours of community service and $500 restitution, the Louisville Courier Journal reported.

As part of a deal with prosecutors, Bauer pleaded guilty to a charge of parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building, according to court records. Bauer originally faced four charges for his involvement in the riot that injured hundreds of police officers.

The judge could have sentenced him to a maximum of six months in prison, a fine of no more than $5,000 and supervised release of no more than one year, according to court records.

The plea agreement document shows that Bauer agreed to the plea in late June.

In other words, as an old UK professor of mine, Gerard Silberstein, used to say, not much of a much. Yet, unlike Mr Salahuddin, whose crimes were so serious that he will spend at least 18½ years behind bars, the Herald-Leader decided to publish Mr Bauer’s photograph.

And while Mr Bauer now stands convicted, the Newspaper published his photo on January 15, 2021, January 30, 2021, and March 3, 2021, all when he was charged but not yet convicted of anything.

The McClatchy Mugshot Policy was put into effect the previous summer, so all photos were in violation of the policy.

So, what might be the distinguishing difference in these photos published and not published? There’s one very obvious one: Messrs Heil and Bauer are white, while Mr Salahuddin is black.

Thud!

Could that be it? Could it really be that simple? Remember, the McClatchy Mugshot Policy is based on two ideas:

  • Those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever; and
  • Inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color.

At the very least, these statements could mean that editors, even just subconsciously, think that publishing photos of white suspects is simply not as harmful as publishing those of black suspects. But, at a more pernicious level, it could mean, as the Sacramento Bee, the lead McClatchy newspaper, put it, publishing mugshots:

  • Perpetuat(es) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

If that’s the case — and that last part was left put of the McClatchy policy in general — then might some McClatchy editors, at some papers, think that publishing photos of white suspects or convicted criminals while not doing so for black suspects or convicted criminals could actively steer the public away from such stereotypes, and thus be considered, at least to the left-inclined mind, an affirmative good?

If you suspect that I used the adjective “affirmative” deliberately, to bring Affirmative Action to your mind, you’d be right!

Journalists tend to have an elevated opinion of their place in society; the constitutional protection of freedom of the press has led many of them to think that they are some sort of super-duper constitutional guardians. Is it that much of a further leap for some of them to think that their role in society is to guide society into what hey would see as rightthink?

But journalists can only be respected when they tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That is sadly lacking among today’s journolists.