Author Archives: Dana Pico

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18th Century Technology: More devastation for print newspapers

As both of The First Street Journal’s regular readers know, I am old fashioned in that I like newspapers as my source of news. I started delivering the morning Lexington Herald and afternoon Lexington Leader when I was in the seventh grade. I use newspapers as my primary sources because, as a mostly conservative writer, using sources which are primarily liberal in orientation eliminates complaints about my choices of sources. And finally, because I am mostly deaf, television news doesn’t work well for me.

For me, the sad decline of newspapers is sad indeed, but, let’s face facts, they are, at heart, still 18th century technology.

Before I retired, I used to stop at the Turkey Hill in downtown Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, and pick up the newspaper to take to the plant. Liking a (supposedly) good newspaper, I bought The Philadelphia Inquirer rather than the Allentown Morning Call, which annoyed some of my drivers, because the Morning Call was the closest thing to a local paper, but hey, I was the one paying for it!

But, alas! like seemingly every newspaper, the Call had its financial problems, and, no longer independent, it became part of Tribune Publishing in 2000.

The Morning Call, rest of Tribune Publishing’s newspapers now owned by hedge fund Alden; CEO Jimenez is out

By Jon Harris | The Morning Call | May 25, 2021 | 5:44 PM EDT

The Morning Call, which has been covering the Lehigh Valley for more than 125 years, is now owned by the country’s second-largest newspaper owner: a New York hedge fund that has built its media empire — as well as a reputation for deep cost-cutting — in just over a decade.

Alden Global Capital late Monday completed its purchase of the roughly two-thirds of Tribune Publishing shares it didn’t already own, according to a flurry of filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Now privately held and under Alden’s umbrella are some of the country’s most storied newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and the New York Daily News.

The swift closing of the deal came after Tribune shareholders on Friday voted in favor of the transaction, after a competing bid from a Maryland hotel magnate never quite came together. Alden’s deal to buy Tribune for $17.25 a share was announced Feb. 16, but the hedge fund had been interested in acquiring the company since at least fall 2019. In November 2019, Alden bought out Michael Ferro’s 25% stake in the company and quickly built its ownership position to more than 31%.

Douglas M. Arthur, managing director of Huber Research Partners, who tracks the publishing industry, told The Morning Call on Monday that he expects Alden to run Tribune with an emphasis on the company’s finances.

“The current Tribune operating story appears fairly similar to what I believe one should expect once Alden gains control: deep cost cuts, a maximum emphasis on generating cash flow and growing the bottom line,” he said. “The current Tribune management team has been operating this way for several years; certainly its efforts seem to have accelerated as Alden has wielded more influence.”

An immediate change came at the top of Tribune: CEO Terry Jimenez, who was the sole member of Tribune’s board to vote against the Alden deal, “was removed” from his position, according to a regulatory filing.

There’s more at the original.

Alden likes to sell off assets, but what of it? The Lexington Herald-Leader, a McClatchy Company newspaper, outsourced it’s printing to a Gannett facility outside of Louisville in August of 2016, and put it’s building on Midland Avenue up for sale; four years later, the Fayette County Schools decided to buy it. In April of this year, the Inquirer shut down its $299.5 million, in 1992 dollars, Schuylkill Printing Plant, selling the place for a measly $37 million to developer J. Brian O’Neill, outsourcing its printing to, of all places, New Jersey.

And the Morning Call had already done the same thing, selling its building last year. Alden is doing little more than other newspaper companies, because the newspaper business itself hasn’t figured out how to move into the 21st century.

While the article in the Morning Call was at least somewhat circumspect, The Philadelphia Inquirer, owned not by Tribune Publishing but the non-profit Lenfest Institute, fired with both barrels:

Allentown nonprofits rally to the defense of the Morning Call newsroom

Across the United States, Alden Global Capital has pursued a business model that involves cutting staff to the bone and selling real estate at the publications it acquires.

by Harold Brubaker | May 25, 2021

The news in late 2019 that Alden Global Capital, a New York investment firm known for slashing staff at its newspapers, bought a large stake in Tribune Publishing Co. spurred efforts in Baltimore, Chicago, Allentown, and in other cities to recruit local owners.

Now, Alden is expected to acquire complete control of Tribune on Tuesday, after winning shareholder approval Friday. Advocates for local ownership of Allentown’s Morning Call, which runs one of the largest newsrooms in Pennsylvania, say they plan to keep fighting to save their newspaper despite the odds stacked against them.

“We are all disgusted by the news of what happened and concerned about the future, but we’re not going to give up,” said Kim Schaffer, executive director of Community Bike Works, an Allentown nonprofit that works with youths.

A strong local paper is crucial to the group’s work, said Schaffer, who is among nonprofit leaders brought together by NewsGuild union leaders in Allentown to drum up support for local ownership. .  .  .

Across the United States, Alden Global, which owns about 100 newspapers though the MediaNews Group, has pursued a business model that involves cutting staff to the bone and selling real estate at the publications it acquires.

“They have earned this moniker of being vulture capitalists. We’ve seen in city after city how they absolutely drain the resources of these properties,” said David Boardman, dean of Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication.

“While they say many of the right things in terms of the importance of local news and their commitment to it, their record indicates absolute disregard for it,” said Boardman, who is also chair of the Lenfest Institute, which owns The Inquirer.

Alden acquired the Reading Eagle out of bankruptcy two years ago for $5 million. Employees had to reapply for their jobs as the company came out of bankruptcy with 111 jobs, down half from when it entered the process. Last year, Alden sold the Reading Eagle building in downtown Reading for $2.3 million.

I’m sorry, but is that a news report, or an editorial? When the Inquirer shut down its printing plant, 500 people lost their jobs. Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc, which owned both the Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, a tabloid ‘competitor,’ had 721 newsroom and editorial employees; by 2012, that was down to roughly 320. The Inquirer sold its building to developer Bart Blatstein, and most of the Philadelphia Media Network, then the owner of the Inquirer, Daily News, and philly.com, employees would be moved to the old Strawbridge’s department store on Market Street.

What Mr Brubaker, the article author detailed, was what the owners of the Inquirer had done almost a decade earlier.

I will admit it: I was very used to having grey smudged fingers from reading a print edition newspaper, but I’m also 68 years old. In 1990, the Inquirer had a print circulation of 511,000 on weekdays, and 996,000 for the Sunday edition. By 2019, that circulation was down by 80%. When my generation passes away, the last generation which was really used to print newspapers[1]Even I don’t read the print newspapers anymore. I live out in the sticks, and there are no newspapers delivered out here. All of my newspaper subscriptions are digital. will have gone to our eternal rewards, and where will print newspapers be then?

There should be a place for print media, even if those print media are online only. Television news, which seems to be doing well, simply does not do much in the way of in-depth coverage, something that print has, and can continue, to do. But my own preference for reading the news rather than watching it on television is pushed by my hearing impairment, and by my need, as a (struggling) writer to be able to copy-and-paste and continually review my sources. I can deride the consumers of television news as low-attention-span, but that isn’t quite fair; they are consuming what their abilities allow them to consume. But, whatever the solution to survival for newspapers in this country is, they haven’t found it yet.

References

References
↑1 Even I don’t read the print newspapers anymore. I live out in the sticks, and there are no newspapers delivered out here. All of my newspaper subscriptions are digital.
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Why do the left always want to run other people’s lives?

Twitter did not suspend or delete the account of Richard Marx:

But for “Freckled Liberty,” a Jewish-American libertarian, it was off to 12 hours in Twitmo!

Mrs “Liberty” is a 26-year-old married woman who spends kind of a lot of time on Twitter. She wants to have children, and has expressed reservations about the long-term effects of the various COVID-19 vaccines, as possibly impacting her fertility. We do not know the long term effects of the COVID-19 vaccines, because they haven’t been available long enough.

Now, Mrs Liberty has been pretty strong in pushing her position, but she has never, to my knowledge, said that other people shouldn’t be allowed to take the vaccines if they wish; she has been, like the libertarian she is, saying that it is a matter of personal choice.

Of course, the left don’t really like that. A guy named Tom, whose Twitter address is, laughably enough, @FreedomSeeker83, condemned her by saying, “Knowingly carrying a chance you can infect other with a disease that may kill when it can be prevented or mitigated is an NAP violation,” and “You have a moral obligation to mitigate risk where one can.”

Freedom: he keeps using that word. I do not think it means what he thinks it means.

I’ve said it before: I have taken the vaccine, and have reached the “fully vaccinated” stage. Taking the vaccine was my personal choice, as it should have been, as it should always be. Miss Liberty’s concerns are her own, and her choices are her own. That’s a big problem with the left: they believe that they should get to take decisions for everyone else, too.

Like Jonathan Edwards said in Sunshine, “And he can’t even run his own life, I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine!”

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On lying

Though I have refused to carry my vaccination record, as some form of #VaccinePassport, I have stated publicly that I did receive the Moderna vaccine shots, interestingly enough on April Fool’s Day and then Cinco de Mayo.

The Centers for Disease Control stated, on May 13th, that “fully vaccinated” people could dispense with face masks and “social distancing.” Now, I have been fighting as hard as I can Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) authoritarian dictates, not that fighting has done much good; he has gotten away with his illegal and unconstitutional actions. The Governor has stated that he will lift almost all of his COVID-19 executive orders on June 11th, and already lifted the mandatory mask order for those “fully vaccinated” when the CDC guidance was issued.

I, of course, had never worn a mask outdoors, and only did so indoors at the insistence of property owners.

But, with my status of being “fully vaccinated” not occurring until May 19th,[1]May 19th is special to me as well, because it is Mrs Pico’s and my wedding anniversary. For some unknown reason, she has put up with me for 42 years now! fourteen days after my second dose of the vaccine, I was presented with a dilemma on Sunday, May 16th. The Bishop of Lexington, and my individual parish, stated the same thing, that “fully vaccinated” parishioners could attend Mass indoors without a mask.

Now, I have not believed that a mask was necessary at all, and have noted before that the forecasts that Texas would see doom, doom, doom! for dropping its mask mandate on March 10th instead resulted in the Lone Star State seeing a precipitous drop in cases, but Mass, being held three days prior to achieving that mythical “fully vaccinated” status meant that if I attended Mass without a mask, I would be, in effect, lying to my pastor, to our church sister, and to the other parishioners, concerning my vaccine status. Yes, I wanted to, will always want to, fight the Governor’s illegal and unconstitutional restrictions, but the change in the regulations, which have always been political, also meant a change in the nature of telling the truth. Not wearing a mask previously was a political action, a statement of resistance, and it was not a statement of vaccine status. Once the CDC and the Governor took their actions, not wearing a mask also became a statement that one was fully vaccinated.

Thus, from May 13th through 18th, not wearing a mask indoors would be, for me, the public telling of a lie.

I chose not to lie!

Come June 11th, if the Governor has not lied — and if Mr Beshear told me that 2+2=4, I would check his math — wearing or not wearing a mask is no longer a point of truth-telling. But, until then, not wearing a mask can be interpreted as a public statement, “I have been vaccinated.” Concomitantly, wearing a mask when you have been fully vaccinated can be interpreted by others as a statement that you have not been vaccinated, and might be an #antivaxxer.

So, at Mass on May 16th, I wore a mask, and did not lie. On Sunday, May 23, which just happens to be one year since we were so graciously ‘allowed’ to return to Mass, I did not.

Attendance at Mass should not be a political act, but our Governor has made it one, and I have not missed Sunday Mass once since the Diocese of Lexington has reopened.

References

References
↑1 May 19th is special to me as well, because it is Mrs Pico’s and my wedding anniversary. For some unknown reason, she has put up with me for 42 years now!
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Did the China virus escape from a Wuhan laboratory?

I asked, last month, if it was time to start referring to COVID-19 as the “China virus” again. That was in response to the proposed “COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act,” which, at the time, included language:

SEC. 3. GUIDANCE.

(a) Guidance For Law Enforcement Agencies.—The Attorney General shall issue guidance for State and local law enforcement agencies on the following:

(1) The establishment of online reporting of hate crimes or incidents, and the availability of online reporting available in multiple languages.
(2) The expansion of culturally competent and linguistically appropriate public education campaigns, and collection of data and public reporting of hate crimes.

(b) Best practices to describe the COVID-19 pandemic: The Attorney General and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in coordination with the COVID–19 Health Equity Task Force and community-based organizations, shall issue guidance describing best practices to mitigate racially discriminatory language in describing the COVID–19 pandemic.

When the government wants to tell me how I must speak, it’s time for resistance! Fortunately, that section was deleted in the final version of the bill.

However, more and more evidence is cropping up that “China Virus” or “Wuhan virus” is exactly correct. From The Wall Street Journal:

Intelligence on Sick Staff at Wuhan Lab Fuels Debate On Covid-19 Origin

Report says researchers went to hospital in November 2019, shortly before confirmed outbreak; adds to calls for probe of whether virus escaped lab

By Michael R. Gordon, Warren P. Strobel and Drew Hinshaw | May 23, 2021 2:57 pm ET.

WASHINGTON—Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that could add weight to growing calls for a fuller probe of whether the Covid-19 virus may have escaped from the laboratory.

The details of the reporting go beyond a State Department fact sheet, issued during the final days of the Trump administration, which said that several researchers at the lab, a center for the study of coronaviruses and other pathogens, became sick in autumn 2019 “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness.”

The disclosure of the number of researchers, the timing of their illnesses and their hospital visits come on the eve of a meeting of the World Health Organization’s decision-making body, which is expected to discuss the next phase of an investigation into Covid-19’s origins.

Current and former officials familiar with the intelligence about the lab researchers expressed differing views about the strength of the supporting evidence for the assessment. One person said that it was provided by an international partner and was potentially significant but still in need of further investigation and additional corroboration.

Another person described the intelligence as stronger. “The information that we had coming from the various sources was of exquisite quality. It was very precise. What it didn’t tell you was exactly why they got sick,” he said, referring to the researchers.

An obvious point: there were no tests for COVID-19 at the time.

November 2019 is roughly when many epidemiologists and virologists believe SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the pandemic, first began circulating around the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where Beijing says that the first confirmed case was a man who fell ill on Dec. 8, 2019.

China has repeatedly denied that the virus escaped from one of its labs. On Sunday, China’s foreign ministry cited a WHO-led team’s conclusion, after a visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, in February, that a lab leak was extremely unlikely. “The U.S. continues to hype the lab leak theory,” the foreign ministry said in response to a request for comment by The Wall Street Journal. “Is it actually concerned about tracing the source or trying to divert attention?”

There’s more at the original, but one thing is obvious: the Chinese Communist Party is never going to tell any truth that doesn’t work to their advantage.

Even if the Wu Flu escaped from a Chinese laboratory, such isn’t conclusive evidence that it was a developed biological weapon; it could have been a virus that the Chinese discovered, on which they were doing research, and its release was a mistake. Indeed, I’m pretty sure that the release was a mistake, whether accidentally discovered or deliberately engineered, because it sure didn’t go as planned for the Chinese. A deliberate release would have been done by a Chinese traveler, sent to the United States specifically to attack our economy, and done simultaneously in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington.

The Biden administration has said that all credible theories of origin ought to be investigated by the World Health Organization and international health experts, but let’s face facts: any investigatio9n by the WHO will be politically compromised, and nothing that the Chinese Communists do not want seen will be allowed to be seen. This disease has been far more lethal politically than medically!

 

One side note on the politics. This morning on CNN’s New Day program, the hosts had on this ‘expert,’ lamenting that Los Angeles Lakers’ star player LeBron James would neither confirm nor deny that he had been given the vaccine, saying “it’s not a big deal.” Mr James, CNN’s ‘expert’ said, has more influence than Dr Fauci, and any indication or hint or anything that he hadn’t been vaccinated would lead to less vaccine acceptance among the black community, where vaccine hesitancy is already high. Mr James may or may not have been vaccinated, but he has the same right to privacy as anyone else.

Of course, if he decides to go to a restaurant or store or business in which the owner demands presentation of a ‘vaccine passport,’ and Mr James refuses to show one, I’ve got a big picture of him being turned away!

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Still not Killadelphia! Lexington sees its 17th homicide of the year

Lexington, Kentucky, which saw a city record of 34 homicides in 2020, is now half way to that total, with 7¼ months left to go in the year.

Victim of fatal shooting in Lexington early Saturday has been identified

By Karla Ward | May 22, 2021 | 1:06 PM | Updated: 2:26 PM EDT

Two separate shootings left one man dead and two women injured in Lexington early Saturday.

Lexington police Sgt. Wayne Terry said police were investigating a fatal shooting on Hillcrest Avenue, just off Winchester Road. The crime was reported just before 3 a.m., he said.

The Fayette County coroner’s office said Demonte Washington, 28, was pronounced dead at the scene at 3:33 a.m.

It was the 17th homicide of 2021 in Fayette County.

Terry did not have any information about a suspect, but he said “it appears to be an isolated incident.”

WLEX-TV updated their report at 7:03 PM, and said that the Lexington Police Department has a suspect in custody.

Seventeen murders in 142 days works out to 43 to 44 homicides for the year, if the rate continues to be the same. But hey, that’s way, way, way behind St Louis and Philadelphia!

It seems that the neighborhood doesn’t want the police defunded. From WKYT News:

It comes as no surprise to neighbors down the street. “This is the third shooting here in a couple of months,” one neighbor said. “Sometimes it sounds like two or three shots a night sounds like a lot, but in this neighborhood that’s just common place.”

Some say they’re worried about their kids playing outside. “We don’t come outside. We play in the backyard. We make sure we don’t ever play out front. It’s kind of a dumb thing around here.”

But they say the shootings don’t involve the neighbors themselves. Many people we talked to believe the nightlife is to blame.

That’s why they’re begging for more police in the area.

“I think that with everything that’s going on, we don’t have enough protection. We need to be protected from the people who are out here doing these things,” the neighbor said.

The shooting location is given as the corner of Winchester Road and Hillcrest Avenue. Winchester Road is heavily commercial in that area; the neighborhoods around Hillcrest Avenue are mostly starter homes, and are racially integrated.

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Journolism and the public’s “right to know”: let sleeping dogs lie! There are things investigative journalists do not want to investigate!

It’s sunny and 86º F outside, and Mochi is like the rest of the critters: sacked out. Click to enlarge.

OK, OK, it’s been a slow day at the farm, and I’ve been lazy. Mochi is on the couch on the screened in porch! And letting sleeping dogs lie is pretty much what today’s journolists,[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use … Continue reading er, journalists do.

Well, being lazy, and having seen an episode of Roku’s Murder House Flip, I wasn’t online when my good friend Robert Stacy McCain threw me a bone and published this!

Leif Halvorsen: The Only Kind of Mugshot the SJW Media Will Let You See

By Robert Stacy McCain | May 22, 2021 |

Say hello to Leif Halvorsen, who was convicted for killing of three people in Kentucky “in a drug-fueled shooting rampage” in 1983. In order to fight “systemic racism,” the Social Justice Warriors who run the McClatchy newspaper cartel have developed a policy against publishing mugshots of criminals, because of the negative impact the publication of such mugshots allegedly has on “marginalized communities.”

Our blog buddy Dana Pico of First Street Journal notes that the McClatchy-owned Lexington Herald-Leader is apparently not adhering to company protocols, because they published Halvorsen’s mugshot in a story about convicted murderers in Kentucky who may be eligible for parole under a new state policy. To illustrate that story, the Herald-Leader published the mugshots of Halvorsen and four other convicted murderers who, perhaps not coincidentally, shared a certain trait with him. Can you guess what that trait was? I think you can.

There’s much more at Mr McCain’s original, but he added something I hadn’t considered:

Obviously, not every local media outlet has surrendered to the kind of SJW (Social Justice Warrior) mentality that now controls the Lexington Herald-Leader, but as someone who spent more than 20 years in the newspaper business, I must ask this: What happened to “the public’s right to know”?

This was the phrase used by journalists for many decades to defend such controversial decisions as publication of the “Pentagon Papers,” and many other practices. Journalists demanded access to public records (so-called “sunshine laws”) because what government did, in the name of the people, and with taxpayer dollars, ought to be publicly known.

Certainly in matters of law enforcement, the identities of people arrested by police are a matter of public record, as are the mug shots of suspects. No ethical journalist would willingly become complicit in a deliberate effort to conceal such information from the public.

But of course, the unethical SJWs of the McClatchy cartel do not consistently apply their policy of suppressing facts about crime.

Mr McCain was an actual professional journalist, starting at a small Southern newspaper and eventually working for the Washington Times. That pretty much leaves my two years with the Kentucky Kernel in the dust! And his point is spot on: journalists have been using that phrase for as long as I can remember. Consider McClatchy’s statement of policy:

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.

There is a powerful meaning that the executives at McClatchy want to hide, but can’t quite: if “inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color,” it must mean at least one of two things:

  1. Either ‘people of color’ are arrested for the crimes they commit in a far greater percentage than are white people; or
  2. ‘People of color’ actually commit crimes at a far greater rate than do white people.

Logically, either 1 or 2 can be true, or both 1 and 2 can be true. But the only way that neither can be true is if the publication of mugshots does not disproportionately harm ‘people of color.’ Regardless of which, or both, are true, either one being true is something which ought to generate a whole lot of investigative journalism to find out why it is true.

The problem is that, as far as the executives at McClatchy, and journalists in general, are concerned, the belief is that number 2 is true. Oh, they want to believe that number 1 is the correct answer, which is why you see so many stories about police stopping cars driven by black Americans, but somehow that doesn’t explain why those stops have so frequently led to the discovery of illegally-possessed firearms or drugs.

The executives at McClatchy were quite blatant about it: publishing mugshots would harm communities of color because there would be a disproportionate number of mugshots depicting people of color. Today’s journalists do not want to investigate any of that, because they are afraid, deathly afraid, of the answers they would find. I noted, last year, in This is what Social Justice law enforcement gets us:

Simply put, (Larry) Krasner, who hated the police from the beginning, installed a form of ‘social justice’ law enforcement; he was tougher on the police than he was on criminals. He was oh-so-concerned that “disproportionately high numbers of minority males” were charged, convicted and incarcerated, without ever thinking to consider that perhaps, just perhaps, “disproportionately high numbers of minority males” were the ones committing crimes.

There are two kinds of crimes: crimes of evidence and crimes of reporting. If a man rapes a woman on the streets of Philadelphia, as far as the police are concerned, if it wasn’t reported, it didn’t happen. It is commonly assumed that most rapes go unreported, with some guesstimates being as high as 90% not reported. Crimes like robbery might go unreported if the victims do not trust the police or think it will do any good, or are fearful of revenge by the criminals. When your city is stuck with a District Attorney like Mr Krasner, who doesn’t believe in prosecuting criminals, or sentencing them harshly when they are prosecuted and convicted, what reason is there to report that you were robbed?

But murder is different: it is a crime of evidence. It isn’t easy to dispose of a dead body in a way that it won’t be found, especially if you haven’t carefully planned things. You’re looking at 100 to 300 pounds of dead meat, bone and fat, and something which will put off a strong and nasty odor after very little time. The vast majority of dead bodies get found.

I noted, just two days ago, that in St Louis, a city that is 45.3% black and 44.1% white, 68 out of the then-current 73 homicide victims were black, 53 males and 15 females, only three of the victims were white, and of the two known suspects, both were white. Out of the 34 identified suspects, 2 were white, 2 were Hispanic, and 30 were black. All thirty of the identified black suspects were accused of killing black victims.

The Social Justice Warriors simply have no answer for those raw, very raw, numbers. But one thing is certain: the executives at McClatchy don’t want you to know them. The editors of the Sacramento Bee, the newspaper at McClatchy’s headquarters, and the precursor to the McClatchy policy, put it more directly:

Publishing these photographs and videos disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

Stereotypes exist for a reason; they exist because there is usually an element of truth behind them.

For McClatchy, for Peter Baniak, Editor and General Manager of the Herald-Leader, and for the newsroom at The Philadelphia Inquirer,[2]If I seem to harp on those two newspapers, it’s because I have paid for subscriptions to them, so I read them most often. any consideration of the “public’s right to know” has been overshadowed by their desire to manipulate public attitudes, by their desire that the public not hold stereotypes which just might be accurate. The last thing they want to do is the investigative journalism to determine why those stereotypes exist, and just how true they might be, because, deep down, they believe those stereotypes themselves. They are the ones who cannot handle the truth, and they are deathly fearful of what might happen if you knew the truth.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ 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.
↑2 If I seem to harp on those two newspapers, it’s because I have paid for subscriptions to them, so I read them most often.
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Is there any reason not to just wall Philadelphia in, like Manhattan in Escape From New York?

I asked, on August 18, 2020, What Are Mayor Jim Kenney and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw Doing About Open Air Drug Markets in Philly? I had noted The Philadelphia Inquirer’s story about the open air drug market in the Kensington neighborhood, complete with a photo of a man shooting up outside the Market Street SEPTA station. I noted that, despite the Inquirer making it very public, the Philadelphia Police did nothing.

I kept checking the news, for weeks, and never found a story about the Philadelphia Police making a sweep of the area, to clean up the drug dealers and users.

The Inquirer even identified one of the drug users, and published her picture!

“The blocks [where drug dealing takes place] never closed,” said Christine Russo, 38, who’s been using heroin for seven years. She waited Friday near Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, at the heart of the city’s opioid market, while a friend prepared to inject a dose of heroin. “Business reigns. The sun shines.”

Just now much more help did the cops need?

Well, here it is, nine months later, and the Inquirer is on the same beat:

Business and Bloodshed

Even as pandemic lockdowns ease, Kensington’s heroin economy thrives, along with the endless gun violence it fuels. And the neighborhood’s pain is plainer than ever.

By Mike Newell | Friday, May 21, 2021

As he looks out over the chaos at the corner of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues — the sprawling homeless encampments, the people injecting heroin and nodding off in the street, the dealers, the trash, the suffering — this is what Flac sees: Money.

“All I see is money, money, money. Ain’t nothing but money down here,” he said, waving at the intersection. “This is one of the few places in America where you can wake up Monday flat broke and on Tuesday you can have $10,000 in your pocket.”

Flac, who manages heroin-dealing operations on a number of corners in Kensington, and who asked to be identified by his nickname because his business is illegal, is a cog in the vast machinery that is Kensington’s drug trade — the largest open-air drug market on the East Coast, if not in the nation.

He is launching a new venture at K & A: a heroin-dealing operation across from the Allegheny El Station, the latest addition to his portfolio of corners around the neighborhood, where some blocks reap as much as $60,000 a day in heroin sales.

Flac says he is only following the riches. Since the temporary closure of the Somerset El stop two months ago, the growing crowds of people who use drugs and live on the street have been moving up Kensington Avenue. There are more customers at Allegheny now, more money to be made, and Flac and his supplier want to plant their flag.

“Every day is a party out here,” he said. “Every day is a good day.”

It’s a major story in the Inquirer, one which took a lot of legwork. There are photos of drug dealers, and Mike Newell, the reporter whose bio says, “I’m an enterprise reporter. I find stories about cops and crime, people and politics, and everyday life that tell a bit about a changing city,” was able to find, talk to, and identify the dealers, dealers who are apparently so unafraid of the cops that they were willing to talk to a reporter.

Of course, Mr Newell would claim some sort of journalist’s privilege and never identify or testify against the dealers if they were arrested.

Flac is upper management. According to his crew, he’s running the operation for a drug supplier with access to heroin sold on the best corners in the neighborhood. Flac, who says he’s out on bail for a gun charge, will oversee the squad of shift managers, dealers, runners and lookouts. Eventually, the aim is to match sales on some of the other “gold standard” blocks — many millions a year.

In other words, the cops could lock up “Flac” in a heartbeat; he’s already out on bail. Mr Newell already has the information needed for the police to get him off the streets, but you know that he won’t give that to the cops. Mr Newell already identified him, in the story, as having a Lincoln Town Car.

The Inquirer story tells readers just how useless it would be to raid the area and arrest all of the drug dealers:

“You can try locking people up — that ain’t going to stop nothing,…tomorrow there is going to be another group taking our place. It’s like trying to cover the sky with a finger,” said “Bebo,” who manages heroin-dealing operations on a Kensington corner.

Well, maybe so, but is that any reason not to try?

The Inquirer, which routinely prints stories bemoaning “gun violence,” its euphemistic term that allows the paper not to mention that there are bad people picking up guns and shooting other, usually also bad, people, tells us about the violence there:

With more customers comes more competition. More than ever, violence follows the markets.

In a 1.9-mile stretch covering the narrow streets along Kensington Avenue, near McPherson — an area smaller than Old City — police have identified 80 corners with open-air drug markets.

In 2020, in that same grid, the heart of the drug markets, 40 people were killed and 178 were shot and wounded.

The escalating bloodshed is overwhelmingly driven by disputes among drug rivals fighting for the profits to be made, said Capt. Pedro Rosario, the commanding officer of the 24th police district in Kensington.

“There’s a lot of great people that live on these blocks,” said Rosario, walking down the narrow blocks by McPherson. Even with the captain there in his uniform, the sales didn’t stop. “And right now, they’re basically prisoners in their own homes.” . . .

Rosario, the police captain, says that with such an overwhelming amount of drugs on the corners — and with gun violence in the district nearly tripling since 2017, when the opioid crisis exploded — it often feels like the best his patrol officers can do is displace dealers from one corner to the next, providing neighbors temporary relief.

A transit hub like K & A, with its ceaseless streams of customers pouring off the El, becomes a battleground. In 2020, two people were shot and killed at the intersection, and two more were wounded. This year, two people have been shot and killed on the blocks near K & A and five others have been wounded. All of the cases are drug-related, Rosario said. And in recent weeks, after a spike in shootings, nearly a dozen more patrol officers have been redeployed to the intersection.

To do what? Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw could set up a huge sweep, and arrest every drug dealer there. The Philadelphia Police Department is the fourth largest in the nation, with 6,300 officers. The manpower is there to sweep through Kensington and arrest all of the bad guys. If more manpower is needed, the Pennsylvania State Police could provide it. And when the drug dealers arrested are replaced the next day, sweep up the next crew as well, then the next, and then the next.

The Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) is the nation’s fourth largest police department, with more than 6,300 sworn officers and 800 civilian employees. Our mission is to make Philadelphia one of the safest cities in the country.

The police department partners with communities across the city to:

  • Fight crime, the fear of crime, and terrorism.
  • Enforce laws while safeguarding people’s constitutional rights.
  • Provide quality service to all Philadelphia residents and visitors.
  • Recruit, train, and develop an exceptional team of employees.

There sure isn’t much evidence that the Police Department’s “What we do” statement is true, not if the Inquirer can send reporters down there and get drug dealers to talk to them with seeming impunity. Of course, with softer-than-soft on crime District Attorney Larry Krasner having just won his primary election, it’s understandable that the police might not bother; his office wouldn’t prosecute them anyway.

As of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, May 20th, the Philadelphia Police reported that there had been 199 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love, up from 144 on the same date last year, and as the article made clear, most of the homicides in the city are related to drugs and gangs. I get it: the Democrats who have controlled the city for longer than Elizabeth II has been Queen of England are all social justicy, but at some point, doesn’t someone have to realize that their policies have not worked?

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The Lexington Herald-Leader breaks policy and publishes a mugshot of a criminal suspect Could it be that because, once again, the accused is white rather than black?

We have previously noted the Lexington Herald-Leader’s double standards when it comes to posting the mugshots of criminal suspects. The Herald-Leader is supposed to follow McClatchy Company’s standards, as they are listed in the photo to the right.

THC snacks, sex acts: KY woman allegedly abused baby while video chatting with inmate

By Jeremy Chisenhall | May 20, 2021 | 8:15 AM EDT | Updated 12:55 PM EDT

A northern Kentucky woman is accused of letting her toddler eat marijuana snacks and performing sexual acts in front of the child while on video chat with her incarcerated boyfriend, according to the Boone County sheriff’s office.

Jessica Ahlbrand, 22, was arrested Wednesday after investigators reviewed multiple video chats between Ahlbrand and her boyfriend, who is an inmate at the Boone County Detention Center. During the video calls, Ahlbrand said she couldn’t find her marijuana “snacks” and allegedly suggested an 18-month-old child had eaten them.

She showed her boyfriend photos of the child who “appeared to be under the influence and incoherent,” according to the sheriff’s office. The two laughed at the photos.

During the same May 10 video call, Ahlbrand allegedly went into the baby’s room and performed sex acts on herself in front of the child, according to the sheriff’s office’s statement. Ahlbrand and her boyfriend had another video call on Saturday, during which she allegedly performed sex acts on herself in front of the child again.

Ahlbrand was charged with sexual abuse involving a victim under 12 and criminal abuse involving a victim under 12, according to jail records. She was taken to the Boone County Detention Center and held on a $250,000 bond.

Then, further down, the article has the following image from Facebook, complete with the mugshot of Miss Ahlbrand:[1]As of 9:57 PM EDT on Thursday, May 20, 2021, Miss Ahlbrand’s mugshot was still posted on the Herald-Leader’s website. Update! As of 7:05 AM EDT, on Friday, May 21, 2021, Miss … Continue reading

Now, I have to ask: under which of the three criteria listed in the McClatchy policy, was Miss Ahlbrand’s mugshot posted in the Herald-Leader:

  • 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?

Miss Ahlbrand doesn’t appear to be an urgent threat to the community; her alleged crimes were of a personal nature, and there is nothing in either the Herald-Leader article or the BooneCounty Sheriff’s Department Facebook page to indicate that she has been released. The Sheriff’s Department stated that Miss Ahlbrand is “currently lodged at the Boone County Detention Center and is currently held on a $250,000 cash bond. That was posted at 7:18 PM on Wednesday, May 19th, so it is possible that she subsequently made bail.

Miss Ahlbrand is not a public official, nor charged with a hate crime.

Miss Ahlbrans is not a serial killer suspect, and, as far as a “high profile” crime is concerned, it sure doesn’t seem to be.

The McClatchy policy states that:

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.

I shall assume, therefore, that an editor approved it. According to the Herald-Leader, the article author, Jeremy Chisenhall, is a reporter, not an editor. That leaves:

  • Peter Baniak, Executive Editor and General Manager;
  • Deedra Lawhead, Deputy Editor, Digital;
  • Brian Simms, Deputy Editor, Presentation:, or
  • John Stamper, Deputy Editor, Accountability

to have approved the publication of Miss Ahlbrand’s mug shot.[2]I left out the two Sports Editors, whom, one would assume, wouldn’t be involved in this. Who did so, and why? Looking at the McClatchy criteria, I fail to see where Miss Ahlbrand fits.

Oh, but wait, I can see one way in which she fits.

Beyond the personal impact, inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness.

At least to judge by her photograph, Miss Ahlbrand is not a person of color, though it is at least arguable that the crime of which she is accused is indicative of mental illness.

Is that it? Is the Herald-Leader on some kind of crusade, conscious or otherwise, to publish the mugshots of white suspects, but not of non-whites? I do not know, because, brilliant as I am, I still cannot read other people’s minds. But make no mistake here: such is at least a reasonable conclusion based on the empirical evidence.

References

References
↑1 As of 9:57 PM EDT on Thursday, May 20, 2021, Miss Ahlbrand’s mugshot was still posted on the Herald-Leader’s website. Update! As of 7:05 AM EDT, on Friday, May 21, 2021, Miss Ahlbrand’s mugshot is still posted with the story. I had notified the Herald-Leader, the article author, Jeremy Chisenhall, and the Editor, Peter Baniak, via Twitter, of this inconsistency at 10:12 PM EDT on Thursday.
↑2 I left out the two Sports Editors, whom, one would assume, wouldn’t be involved in this.
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Apparently it’s racist not to hire a ‘professor’ to teach racism.

We have previously mentioned the train wreck known as Teen Vogue. If you click on an article, you’ll now get a blurb, saying “Politics, the Teen Vogue way,” which makes me ask: weren’t Vogue and Teen Vogue supposed to be about fashion and makeup? You can check out this story to get a clue about the intellectual heft of Teen Vogue.

Campus Cancel Culture Freakouts Obscure the Power of University Boards

This op-ed argues that university boards are really in control of many core functions on college and university campuses.

By Asheesh Kapur Siddique[1]Asheesh Kapur Siddique is an assistant professor in the Department of History at UMass Amherst. | May 19, 2021

Do American universities lack ideological diversity? Are they bastions of left-wing thought and hostile to conservatives? In early April, the Crimson, the student newspaper of Harvard University, published an article asserting that the university’s conservative faculty are “an endangered species,” which quickly animated establishment concerns about the alleged lack of ideological diversity on American college campuses. But the right is not underrepresented in higher education; in fact, the opposite is true: The modern American university is a right-wing institution. The right’s dominance of academia and its reign over universities is destroying higher education, and the only way to save the American university is for students and professors to take back control of campuses.

Conservatives continually cite statistics suggesting that college professors lean to the left. But those who believe a university’s ideological character can be discerned by surveying the political leanings of its faculty betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how universities work. Partisan political preferences have little to do with the production of academic knowledge or the day-to-day workings of the university — including what happens in classrooms. There is no “Democrat” way to teach calculus,[2]Actually, there are plenty of people who believe that there is racism in the teaching of mathematics. nor is there a “Republican” approach to teaching medieval English literature; anyone who has spent time teaching or studying in a university knows that the majority of instruction and scholarship within cannot fit into narrow partisan categories. Moreover, gauging political preferences of employees is an impoverished way of understanding the ideology of an institution. To actually do so, you must look at who runs it — and in the case of the American university, that is no longer the professoriate.

Faculty once had meaningful power within higher educational institutions. In 1915, faculty at American universities organized themselves into the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which championed academic freedom and significant faculty participation in the administration of appointments, peer reviews, and curriculum — a principle that came to be known as “shared governance.” Though it was resisted by administrators and boards of trustees for much of the early 20th century, the shared governance model was cemented within the modern university in the post-World War II era. This was especially apparent in the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, issued jointly by the American Council on Education, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, and the AAUP, which specified that faculty, administrators, and boards of trustees formed a “community of interest” that should share responsibilities to produce well-governed institutions.

But from the mid-1970s on, as the historian Larry Gerber writes, shared governance was supplanted as the dominant model of university administration as boards of trustees and their allies in the offices of provosts and deans took advantage of public funding cuts to higher education and asserted increasing control over the hiring of the professoriate. They imported business models from the for-profit corporate world that shifted the labor model for teaching and research from tenured and tenure-track faculty to part-time faculty on short-term contracts, who were paid less and excluded from the benefits of the tenure system, particularly the academic freedom that tenure secured by mandating that professors could only be fired for extraordinary circumstances.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique, from his UMASS Amherst page.

There’s more at the original, but you can tell that Dr Siddique is a loony leftist when, on his personal website, that his “preferred gender pronouns are he / him / his / himself.”

Dr Siddique is so very concerned that colleges and universities, though the teaching staff are filled with liberals, are normally governed by boards of trustees, and those trustees are frequently representatives of the business, financial and legal communities. He doesn’t seem to understand: the boards of trustees aren’t there to teach, but to keep the school running. That means seeking donations and strong financial management.

The corporate capitalist regime that controls American university boards today has manufactured the current crisis of higher education by inflating tuition to compensate for state funding cuts while passing on the debt to students; hiring contingent rather than tenure-line staff to pay teachers less while withholding the security of academic freedom; and appointing administrators who are ultimately accountable to the regime.

Well, yes, of course: these are things necessary to keep colleges running. But Dr Siddique’s biggest complain is the one he put in parentheses, as though it was some kind of aside:

Case in point: The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees recently declined to appoint Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones to a tenure-track position following conservative outcry over her work on the 1619 project, documenting the history of slavery in the U.S. As one board member told NC Policy Watch, “This is a very political thing. …There have been people writing letters and making calls, for and against. But I will leave it to you which is carrying more weight.”

Let’s be honest here: Mrs Hannah-Jones does not have her doctorate, normally a requirement for a tenure-track position. More, he scholarship in writing her 1619 Project has been seriously questioned:

In the fall of 2019 the World Socialist Web Site interviewed four leading historians who had major problems with the 1619 Project. This included the leading historians of the American Revolution and the Civil War. Brown University’s Gordon Wood, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the American Revolution, “couldn’t believe” that Hannah-Jones had argued that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery.[49] Princeton’s James M. McPherson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for work on the Civil War, stated that he was “disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery.”[50]

It’s a rather amusing take to think that the people of Massachusetts, who did not keep slaves, would have been the primary instigators of the American Revolution to protect slavery.[3]There were a few, with the emphasis on ‘few,’ New Englanders who benefitted from the slave trade, in that some of the slave ships were owned by New Englanders. More, slavery was perfectly legal in the British Empire, with the slave trade encouraged. Great Britain did not abolish slavery until 1833, more than half a century after our Revolution began, and our independence was won.

Is it any particular wonder that the University of North Carolina declined to award her a tenure-track position? UNC is like any major state university; it depends in part on alumni and supporter donations. Perhaps the Board of Trustees didn’t think it would be particularly helpful to alienate potential and continuing donors to have a tenure-track professor telling them how racist they were, or to have a faculty pushing the critical race theory.

References

References
↑1 Asheesh Kapur Siddique is an assistant professor in the Department of History at UMass Amherst.
↑2 Actually, there are plenty of people who believe that there is racism in the teaching of mathematics.
↑3 There were a few, with the emphasis on ‘few,’ New Englanders who benefitted from the slave trade, in that some of the slave ships were owned by New Englanders.