Category Archives: Freedom of Speech and of the Press

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Journalism differences between the Lexington Herald-Leader and Philadelphia Inquirer. ** Updated! ** When a poor newspaper outclasses a wealthy one

The First Street Journal has twice reported on the mass shooting in Charles Young Park in Lexington, Kentucky. We also noted the murder of a 78-year-old man in North Philadelphia Tuesday afternoon.

But there’s a significant difference in coverage between two newspapers to which we subscribe, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Lexington Herald-Leader. The Lexington newspaper is, to put it frankly, dying. Staff have been cut, there have been three General Managers in just a few years, and the paper, which once covered most of eastern and southeastern Kentucky, is a mere shadow if its former self, almost entirely restricted to Lexington now, and print publishing only thrice a week. Continue reading →

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Could Daniel Pearson be a conservative? His politics are straight Democrat, but every once in a while he expresses conservative sentiments which are in line with civilized behavior

Zhontay Capers, photo via Fox 29 News.

I have thrice speculated that Philadelphia Inquirer columnist and sometime editorial writer Daniel Pearson might be a conservative. He really isn’t, but for a liberal, and especially someone on the staff of the Inky, he is not only willing to interact with people with whom he disagrees, unlike Will Bunch, but actually supports conservative ideas on occasion. The newspaper has frequently supported the George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney, but on this occasion he has dared to criticize Larry Krasner:

Krasner misses a chance to send a message against violence on SEPTA

by Daniel Pearson | Friday, August 7, 2026 | 7:01 AM EDT

On Oct. 26, 2023, Bernard Gribbin became the first city transit operator to die by gunfire while on the job. Family members called him “the best of the best,” and described the 48-year-old Army veteran as a man who loved Philadelphia, who proudly took out-of-town relatives on tours of the city when they came to visit, and who served the public by working as a bus operator — a demanding, underpaid, and utterly essential job. Continue reading →

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We should never release murderers until their victims come back to life!

Tuesday morning’s lead editorial in The Philadelphia Inquirer is a complaint that President Trump is fighting a war on the truth by claiming that the credentialed media often publish #FakeNews, while at the same time publishing, as an ostensibly ‘straight news’ story that is actually a sob story about a convicted murderer who wants to get out of prison. Continue reading →

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The Capitol kerfuffle is almost over My good friends at The Philadelphia Inquirer will be appalled

Zachary Rehl following his release from a wholly unjustified sentence, via Wikipedia Commons.

The January 6, 2021 protest at the Capitol building certainly got a bit out of control, but I have never seen it as anything more serious than a fraternity keg party that spilled out onto the streets, or perhaps University of Kentucky students burning a decrepit old couch in the middle of State Street after an unexpected UK football victory. The vindictiveness with which President Joe Biden and Republican-hating Attorney General Merrick Garland went after the protesters was wholly unreasonable.

On January 20, 2025, President Trump pardoned the vast majority of the Capitol kerfufflers, but there were 14 for whom he only commuted their sentences, and did not pardon their convictions. Now four remaining injustices have been corrected: Continue reading →

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Why do I pay $6.99 a week for a newspaper that hates our country? They hate Western civilization and, of course, Donald Trump!

My digital subscription to The Philadelphia Inquirer hits my bank account for $27.96 every four weeks, or $363.48 every year. The City of Brotherly Love is where the members of the Continental Congress met and finally declared our independence from King George and Great Britain 250 years and one day ago. Yet our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper used the Semiquincentennial primarily to trash the United States of America. Continue reading →

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Why do the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer hate America?

Why do the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer hate America?

In an editorial that reads suspiciously like it was primarily written by far-left columnist Will Bunch, I found this:

After all, it is difficult to be proud when masked federal agents kill U.S. citizens in broad daylight.

Mr Bunch, oops, sorry, the Editorial Board somehow failed to mention that Renee Good tried to run over an ICE agent with her car, or that Alex Pretti was pulling a gun in a struggle with law enforcement agents. Both are stone-cold graveyard dead now because they just couldn’t think Pretti Good. If they had been exercising their constitutional right to peaceably assemble to protest immigration enforcement, they’d still be alive today. Continue reading →

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The ‘transgendered’ would find their lives far simpler if they’d stop trying to make their beliefs other people’s business

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” ― George Orwell, 1984

Living on a rural farm, in a small, mostly rural county, in a very politically conservative state, I only rarely see the ‘transgendered.’ I saw one such gentleman pretending to be a lady, as a customer, in the Corto Lima restaurant in downtown Lexington several years ago, and another such gentleman working as a waiter in the now-several-years-closed Applebee’s on Bypass Road in Richmond. I thought such was humorous, because neither one came anywhere close to ‘passing’ as a real woman, but I had no interactions with either of them. They were doing what they wanted to do, in a manner which had no impact on me at all. Unlike the “Party’s” most essential command, I accepted the evidence of my eyes. Continue reading →

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The truth has a conservative bias. That's why the left want to restrict your freedom of speech and of the press.

My good friend Jeffery[1]I do know his last name, but as he has tried to keep that private, I shall not publish it here, whether under that name, or his subsequently adopted screen names of Jethro Bodine or, currently, Elwood P Dowd, on William Teach’s fine site, The Pirate’s Cove, once made a claim, “The truth has a liberal bias,” sometimes expressed as “The facts have a liberal bias,” something I have seen elsewhere. It seems, however, that whatever they might say, our friends on the left are afraid, really afraid, of the truth, because the truth, the facts, actually have a conservative bias!

It was just over four years ago that we wrote about The New York Times publishing an article by a member of their own Editorial Board, Greg Bensinger, telling readers of that august supporter of Freedom of the Press that it was bad, bad, bad that Elon Musk was trying to buy Twitter, and that his promise to make the social media service an “inclusive arena for free speech” and that “Twitter Under Elon Musk Will Be a Scary Place.”

Mr Bensinger was by no means alone in that, as Brynn Tannehill of The New Republic told us that Mr Musk’s “idea of ‘free speech’ will help ruin America“, Taylor Lorenz, Amanda Marcotte, CNN’s Kara Alaimo, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Helen Ubiñas, as well as did the newspaper’s Editorial Board, and even 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry all exercised their freedom of speech and of the press to tell us that other people exercising those same rights without restrictions is harmful.

We pointed out that The New York Times gave OpEd space to Chad Malloy[2]Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker Malloy.” to claim that restrictions on speech actually promoted freedom of speech. They also published articles claiming that Free Speech is killing us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. The Times told us how wonderful it was that Jeff Bezos was able to deplatform Parler, a not-very-good conservative alternative to Twitter following the banning of several conservative voices, but lamented that some of those who lost their speech on Parler migrated to other platforms.

And today? There were riots in Belfast, Northern Ireland, following the attempted beheading of a Scotsman by a Sudanese asylum seeker, and the Usual Suspects complained not about the attack, but about Twitter not censoring people writing about it! There’s more of that here and here and here.

The United Kingdom’s Secretary for Northern Island Hilary Benn said, following the knife attack in Belfast:

Social media companies have a very heavy responsibility. It’s why we’re going to bring forward new powers next week to make it clear that social media companies need to take down illegal content, particularly when we are facing circumstances such as the ones we’ve seen in Northern Ireland over the last two days.

It’s simple: our good friends on the left are afraid, deathly afraid, that if the people in general have the information Our Betters would rather not see disseminated, people might, horrors! draw conclusions from that information of which the left would disapprove!

That’s why The First Street Journal publishes the truth! That’s why we publish the photos and mugshots of criminals, regardless of race, because do not adhere to stupidity like the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, and why we maintain our own Stylebook, which mandates actual truth in names, titles, and pronouns. The left want to obscure the truth, because yes, the truth has a conservative bias.

References

References
↑1 I do know his last name, but as he has tried to keep that private, I shall not publish it here
↑2 Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker Malloy.”
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Killadelphia: I confess to being unable to see how a victim’s race makes him either more or less dead.

On Sunday, November 28, 2021, Temple University student and a fellow with Philadelphia City Commissioner’s Office, Samuel Sean Collington, 21, was robbed and then murdered near the school in North Philadelphia. Mr Collington was a white victim, murdered by a black juvenile named Latif Williams in a botched robbery. On Thursday, December 2, 2021, The Philadelphia Inquirer published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him.

On Thursday, September 22, 2022, recent Drexel graduate Everett Beauregard, 23, was senselessly murdered, shot in the neck.

Now there’s another senseless murder of 22-year-old William Schmidt, a Penn State student, in South Philly:

A Penn State student was shot to death in South Philadelphia, police said

The victim lived just steps away from where he was killed.

by Michelle Myers and Andrew Kitchenman | Sunday, June 7, 2026 | 1:59 PM EDT

A 22-year-old Penn State student died after being shot a half block from his home in South Philadelphia early Saturday, police said.

Police said officers from the 1st District responded at 1:32 a.m. to a radio call for a person with a gun on the 1900 block of Durfor Street. They found William J. Schmidt lying in the street with a gunshot wound to the chest, police said.

Schmidt was returning home from a local bar where he had been watching the NBA Finals with friends, according to his father, 6abc reported.

Surveillance cameras captured video that appeared to show the moments before the shooting, 6abc reported. A man can be seen throwing a cell phone in one video, and seconds later, another man ran around a corner with Schmidt chasing him, before the gunman turned around and shot him, according to another video.

There’s more at the original.

Note that there was video, but the newspaper simply referred to the suspects as “a man”, “another man”, and “the gunman”. Now, on Wednesday, 6ABC released images of the suspects, and though they do not describe the suspects, we can see that the suspects are black males. Perhaps the newspaper, the day after Karmelo Anthony, a black male, was convicted of murdering Austin Metcalf, a white teenager, the Inquirer doesn’t want to fan any flames of racial hatred. Those who love to fan the flames of racial hatred have been decrying the fact that Mr Anthony was convicted at all, but at least as I am typing this, the Inky has neither any stories on the trial or the Usual Suspects among the columnists pontificating on the subject.

But that doesn’t mean the newspaper won’t have any stories about a black man being murdered by a white criminal!

Brooklyn man is convicted of fatally stabbing a Philly dancer at a gas station

Dmitriy Popov faces up to 25 years in prison for killing O’Shae Sibley at a Brooklyn gas station in 2023.

by Rob Tornoe | Tuesday, June 9, 2026 | 4:38 PM EDT

A Brooklyn man has been convicted in the killing of beloved Philadelphia dancer O’Shae Sibley, who was stabbed to death at a New York City gas station in 2023.

Dmitriy Popov, 20, was convicted of manslaughter as a hate crime and other charges related to “taunting, stabbing, and killing” Sibley, which included “hurling homophobic and anti-Black slurs,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement.

Sibley, 28, was a gay Black man, while Popov, who was 17 at the time of the killing, is white. Popov, who was tried as an adult, faces up to 25 years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for June 30.

The reporter, Rob Tornoe, went out of his way to tell us that there was a racial aspect to the killing. More, as the newspaper has been celebrating homosexual “Pride” month, Mr Tornoe had to tell us that the victim was homosexual. I’m not certain how Mr Sibley being black or homosexual makes him either more or less dead.

I do not celebrate the conviction of Karmelo Anthony, because he is a young man who had his whole life ahead of him. He got stupid, killed another young man with his whole life ahead of him, all due to a fight which should never have been a fight. Austin Metcalf is stone-cold graveyard dead, and Mr Anthony, when he gets out of prison in 17½ to 35 years will be a hardened criminal, with no future other than the next crimes he’ll commit. He’ll wind up back in prison, or dead.

The conviction was necessary, but no one is better off for it.