Look to your own house!

Let’s tell the truth here: most people at least occasionally complain about their employers and “those idiots up there,” their bosses. It’s just that when professional journalists do it, they get to combitch — not a typo, but a Picoism — about it to a wider audience.

Jenice Armstrong is a fairly privileged person, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and she has just complained about a lack of media coverage over the killing of a black mother of four in the City of Brotherly Love.

A mother of four got killed. It should have been big news.

If Kasheeda Jones had been white, and driving a minivan, her death could be national — or even international — news. But in Philly, it was just another Friday night.

by Jenice Armstrong | Thursday, January 25, 2024 | 7:00 AM EST

Kasheeda Jones’ life revolved around her close-knit family.

A 2004 honors graduate of University City High School, she briefly attended Cheyney University, hoping to become a TV weather personality, but left for financial reasons. Eventually, she became a corrections officer like her mother and worked in the prison system for 15 years. Along the way, she had four daughters — now ages 15, 12, 6, and 3 — and purchased a three-bedroom rowhouse on Gilbert Street in East Mount Airy.

A few paragraphs omitted here.

Kasheeda Jones was shot that night (November 17, 2023) on the 800 block of West Venango and transported by a private vehicle to Temple University Hospital, where she died. No arrests have been made, and police have no suspects.

I bet most people reading this right now didn’t hear about Jones’ death.

What happened to her went largely unnoticed outside of her wide circle of family and friends. News coverage of her killing was cursory — a couple of brief mentions in local outlets, nothing more.

It was that last paragraph which got me to fisk Miss Armstrong’s column, because neither of the two media stories the columnist referenced were in her own newspaper. A site search of the Inquirer’s website for “Kasheeda Jones” returned only Miss Armstrong’s column; there wasn’t a single news story on her killing which identified the victim by name. The columnist was right, at least as far as I am concerned: I didn’t hear about Mrs Jones death because the newspaper to which I pay $285.40 per year for a digital subscription didn’t cover it!

In something that absolutely pegs the irony meter, Miss Armstrong, who just hyperlinked Fox 29 News’ coverage of Mrs Jones murder, complained herself that Fox 29’s and reporter Steve Keeley’s coverage of crime “is disturbing.”

Don’t tell me that it’s a terrible wrong that Mrs Jones’ murder didn’t receive more attention from the media when you have combitched that someone else’s crime coverage is too strong or blatant or “disturbing.”

One wonders about WHYY’s Cherri Gregg’s statement that “it is not good reporting to simply repeat police accounts/ narratives, center reporting on an alleged suspect,” when that is exactly what most Philadelphia Inquirer crime reporting — when they report on it at all — is, as I have documented here and here and here. The Inky’s own Helen Ubiñas noted the same thing, in December of 2020, though apparently before publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ edict that the newspaper would be an “anti-racist news organization,” and the paper ceased noting the race of suspects and victims. Miss Hughes declared that the Inky was a “white newspaper” in a “black city”, and our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, serving the nation’s sixth largest city — my good friend, the Inky’s editorial writer Danial Pearson claims Philly is fifth largest because Phoenix cheats on its population numbers — and seventh largest metropolitan area, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, which frequently reports on “gun violence” in general, couldn’t be bothered to cover Mrs Jones’ murder . . . or at least didn’t want to publish it.

It matters, also, that if Jones had been white, and driving a minivan, her death could be national — or even international — news. But in Philly, it was just another Friday night.

In this, Miss Armstrong was absolutely correct. The newspaper had plenty of coverage in the senseless murder of Everett Beauregard, a white Temple grad, the paper paid more attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s five separate stories, a whole lot more than the two or three paragraphs most victims get. There was the murder of Samuel Collington, a white victim, allegedly murdered by a black juvenile in a botched robbery. The Inquirer then published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him. Five separate stories about the case of a murdered white guy. The Inquirer even broke precedent when it came to Mr Collington’s murder by including the name of the juvenile suspect in the case, and delving into his previous record.

We previously reported on the tremendous coverage of the murder of white homosexual activist Josh Kruger, while the killings of four “nobodies” were ignored.

We have noted, really too many times to note all of them, that The Philadelphia Inquirer is not really concerned about individual homicides in the City of Brotherly Love unless an ‘innocent,’ someone already of some note, or a cute little white girl is the victim. On Monday morning, it was reported that Josh Kruger, a freelance journalist of at least some note in Philly was murdered, which we noted here, and the left in Philly — Rue LandauInquirer reporter Ellie RushingJordan WinklerMayor Jim Kenney, the Liberty City Dems, state Senator Nikil SavalThe New York TimesWPVI-TVInquirer editorial writer Daniel PearsonCNNTaj MagruderMaggie Hart, and an untold number of other people are all mourning his death.

Yet what about the three people murdered early this morning, along with a fourth person critically wounded, in the Crascentville section of the city, and the ‘person of interest’ suspected in the killings? They are, as far as the media have told us thus far, not ‘somebodies,’ and there are few tweets about them, few messages I have seen, and, as far as I can tell, other than friends and family, nobody f(ornicating) cares. Mayor Kenney has said nothing about those four people, whom I assume to be black from this photo in the Inky. Mr Kruger was white.

Of course, the coverage of Mr Kruger’s murder dried up quickly after it was reported that Mr Kruger’s alleged killer, Robert Davis, said that he had been in a sexual relationship with Mr Kruger when he was only 15 years old, while Mr Kruger was 35. Once the story got into that politically incorrect accusation, everybody clammed up.

As a Black journalist, I’ve heard the complaint many times: that the media don’t cover the deaths of people of color with the same ferocity as they cover the deaths of white people. Many African Americans have a negative view of the media, according to a study released by the Pew Research Center. Unequal coverage is one of the reasons.

Well, guess what? This site, The First Street Journal, has been “cover(ing) the deaths of people of color with the same ferocity as we cover the deaths of white people,” and I’m a libertarian, conservative white guy. Then again, our ‘angle’ is that credentialed journolists — 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 — are hiding news that doesn’t fit Teh Narrative.

Thankfully, some Black journalists are trying to change that. Recently, members of the newly formed Philadelphia chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists met at The Inquirer to discuss the Pew findings and what can be done about them. It was hard to hear because many of us have devoted our entire careers to helping our newsrooms do a better job covering African Americans. Things have gotten better, but so much still needs to be done — not that Black people expect much to change anytime soon. Nothing was resolved that night, besides renewing our commitment to helping the industry right itself.

And therein we find the problem: much of the news about black Americans in general, and black Philadelphians more particularly, falls into categories that the politically correct coverage of the Inquirer doesn’t want to touch. Reporting on Mrs Jones’ murder would have exposed the fact that the victim was black, and the most frequent assumption that a black woman murdered in Franklinville, an area near the Philadelphia Badlands, will have been killed by another black person. Publisher Elizabeth Hughes said that the newspaper was going to be very careful in its coverage of crime, in its efforts to be an “anti-racist news organization,” would be “Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media,” which is the very thing which has kept stories on things such as Mrs Jones’ murder out of the Inquirer.

To Miss Armstrong I say: look to your own house! Don’t complain about the lack of coverage on a black mother of four in Philadelphia when your own newspaper, the place at which you work, actively discourages reporting on such killings. And consider whether the newspaper’s own editorial philosophy really helps the people of Philadelphia, and the profession of journalism.

The Los Angeles Times is on the road to failure If you give your potential customers less reason to buy your product, fewer people will buy your product!

As both of my long-time readers know, I love newspapers. I delivered the old Lexington Herald and Lexington Leader when I was in junior high and high school in Mt Sterling, Kentucky, I’ve read newspapers thoroughly, and, due to my seriously degraded hearing, I find it much easier to read the news than listen to it on television or radio.

Los Angeles County assistant district attorney Patrick Frey, who has been blogging as Patterico for a couple of decades now, has called the very liberally-oriented Los Angeles Times the Dog Trainer, as in the paper is fit only for getting your puppy to poop on it rather than the floor, and his site logo has a Los Angeles Dog Trainer newspaper declaring in its headline, “PATTERICO! Public Enemy #1”. He even had a category named Dog Trainer, though it hasn’t been added to since 2019. Maybe he got tired of reading it?

But this news saddens me:

L.A. Times to lay off at least 115 people in the newsroom

by Meg James | Tuesday, January 23, 2024 | 4:57 PM PST

The Los Angeles Times announced Tuesday that it was laying off at least 115 people — or more than 20% of the newsroom — in one of the largest workforce reductions in the history of the 142-year-old institution.

The move comes amid projections for another year of heavy losses for the newspaper.

The cuts were necessary because the paper could no longer lose $30 million to $40 million a year without making progress toward building higher readership that would bring in advertising and subscriptions to sustain the organization, said the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong.

And herein is the problem. Unlike Jeff Bezos, the multi, multi, multi billionaire founder of Amazon.com, with an estimated net worth of $180.0 billion, who bought and rescued The Washington Post for $250 million, Dr Soon-Shiong has a guesstimated net worth of a mere $5.4 billion. Mr Bezos, who is now demanding that the Post find a way to break even, could easily absorb the losses the Post has been experiencing — assuming that his new girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, doesn’t want a new mansion or yacht — but perhaps Dr Soon-Shiong doesn’t believe that he can.

It’s great when multi-billionaires buy a newspaper, as long as they don’t turn it into their personal toys, and are willing to accept the inevitable, that it’s going to keep losing money. If I had Mr Bezos’ money, I’d buy The Philadelphia Inquirer, and rescue it, make some changes to make it more even handed, but otherwise leave it alone, and accept the inevitable losses.

Perhaps I’m just projecting, but my thought is that calling a one-day strike to protest anticipated layoffs is a good way to put yourself on that layoff list, but hey, the Times employees are free people, and can do what they want. Some are now very free people! The chairman of the Times guild unit, Brian Contreras, is one of those newly freed people.

Among the editors included in the cuts were Washington bureau chief Kimbriell Kelly, deputy Washington bureau chief Nick Baumann, business editor Jeff Bercovici, books editor Boris Kachka and music editor Craig Marks. The Washington bureau and the photography and sports departments saw dramatic cuts, including several award-winning photographers. The video unit was hollowed out.

The Los Angeles Times is listed by Wikipedia as one of the five “newspapers of record” in the United States, which makes this news sadder still. But things like this are going to happen as newspapers respond to increased costs by lowering quality. The Times found out:

Soon-Shiong said he became increasingly dismayed by the lack of progress in readership and other decisions, such as last summer’s elimination of the print edition’s sports listings and box scores, which infuriated readers, leading to thousands of subscription cancellations.

“I was very upset when I learned, after the fact, that we took away sports scores,” Soon-Shiong said.

Really? Did he then reverse that decision?

Also see: Charlotte Klein in Vanity Fair,People Are Disgus-ted’: Why Washington Post Staff Walked Out

The Los Angeles Times is going to go broke, because Dr Soon-Shiong is doing the same thing again, writ larger. A reduction of “more than 20% of the newsroom” has to mean a cut in the quantity and quality of the newspaper’s journalism, unless someone wishes to contend that those 115 people being given their pink slips contributed nothing to the quality of the product. If elimination of the print edition’s sports listings and box scores — something I would point out to Executive Editor Richard Green that the Lexington Herald-Leader, which is heavily dependent upon University of Kentucky sports fans has also done — cost the newspaper “thousands of subscription cancellations,” how many more will subscriptions will be lost with 115 journalists laid off, which follows 70 getting canned last summer because the paper just isn’t worth that much to them?

Newspapers are, in the end, 18th century technology, updated with better presses and color photos, but still printed on paper with news that’s already old when it gets to readers. We have previously noted the decision of the Inquirer to sell its own $299.5 million printing plant for just $37 million, laying off 500 people, and the Herald-Leader’s similar action, outsourcing printing from downtown Lexington to outside of Louisville, which made the newspaper an hour older when delivered to readers, because the printing plant is a hour up Interstate 64. Then, later, the newspaper switched to having the dead trees edition printed in Knoxville, Tennessee, resulting in a print deadline in the early afternoon the day before!

The Times’ original stated:

Drastic changes were needed, (Dr Soon-Shiong) said, including installing new leaders who would focus on strengthening the outlet’s journalism to become indispensable to more readers.

Yet Tuesday’s actions are making the newspaper less “indispensable” to more readers. If you give potential customers less reason to buy your product, fewer people will buy your product. And that’s just what today’s newspapers are doing.

The left are aghast when conservatives use the same weapons liberals use.

It really didn’t take all that long for the Usual Suspects to slam former Harvard University President Claudine Gay’s resignation as the result of a vicious campaign by wicked Far-Right Extremists. Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose claim to fame is the creation of the 1619 Project on the history of slavery in the United States, tweeting about Dr Gay’s resignation: Continue reading

The only way to end protests which stop traffic is to not stop traffic for protesters.

The Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal came up with an absolutely brilliant idea, but one which will not work:

Tort Law vs. the Anti-Israel Protesters

If DAs won’t prosecute, victims can sue for false imprisonment.

By The Editorial Board | Thursday, December 28, 2023 | 6:49 PM EST

Idiots block traffic near LAX to demand Gaza ceasefire.

Normally we wouldn’t wish trial lawyers on our worst enemy. But as anti-Israel demonstrations grow increasingly lawless, the plaintiffs bar could help. Why not hit protesters who break the law and keep Americans from getting to their destination with a tort liability suit for false imprisonment?

On Wednesday anti-Israel protesters blocked access to JFK and LAX airports in New York and Los Angeles, respectively. The laws of New York and California, like most states, recognize the tort. While there is no precedent applying this tort to road-blocking protesters, it fits the offense. The purpose of these demonstrations is to block the road to keep people from getting to the airport — deliberately and against their will.

Continue reading

Once again, The Philadelphia Inquirer pegs the irony meter

I have previously written about the fact that the credentialed media rarely actually lie to us, but tend to conceal facts that might not fit in well with Teh Narrative. Did Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jonathan Zimmerman not know about Stan Wischnowski, or simply forget, or was he told not to mention him?

What universities can learn from former New York Times opinion editor James Bennet

There is a core lesson for higher education in the journalist’s recent essay: The best route to progress is a full and free dialogue — even when it hurts.

by Jonathan Zimmerman | Wednesday, December 27, 2023 | 8:08 AM EST

Earlier this month, I read the single sharpest criticism of the American university I’ve encountered in many years. And it wasn’t even about the American university.

It’s an essay that appeared in the Economist by former New York Times opinion editor James Bennet, who was forced out in 2020 after he published an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) calling for the use of the military against violent protesters. Bennet ran the op-ed not because he agreed with it (he didn’t) but because he believed the newspaper had a duty to provoke debate, and — most of all — because he thought his readers could come to reasoned conclusions about it.

That’s the foundation of the small-l liberal creed: Since none of us has a monopoly on truth, we need to let everyone determine it on their own. But in the era of Donald Trump, who thinks he’s right about everything, journalists started to imitate him. They knew the truth, especially about Trump, and their job was to make sure other people knew it, as well.

Continue reading

Journolism: The credentialed media don’t exactly lie, but they conceal politically incorrect facts

This site frequently references “journolism, the spelling ‘journolism’, or ‘journolist,’ as the case may be, which 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, and there are, with this posting, 148 stories tagged #Journolism. And here the credentialed media, or as Robert Stacy McCain sometimes refer to them as “Democrats with bylines,” go again!

Kentucky teacher fired after alleged inappropriate communications with students

by Beth Musgrave | Wednesday, December 20, 2023 | 4:58 PM EST | Updated: 6:10 PM EST

A Bullitt Central High School band teacher was fired after an investigation by school officials found he had inappropriate communications with students, according to a release from Bullitt County Public Schools.

Bullitt County is immediately south of Jefferson County, in which the city of Louisville is located.

School officials were first contacted in May 2023 by a former student who raised concerns about Rodney Stults.

That information was turned over to the Cabinet for Health and Family Services and the Shepherdsville Police Department.

An internal school investigation substantiated allegations Stults had violated the school policies regarding communications with students. Continue reading

What The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t tell us, tells us a lot How can you have a long report on the Philadelphia public schools without telling us how they are doing as far as actually educating students?

We have frequently mentioned the Edward T Steel Elementary School in Philadelphia, since then-mayoral candidate Helen Gym Flaherty used the school as a backdrop for telling voters how she ‘saved’ the school from ‘going charter,’ and kept it a public school.  In the still public Steel Elementary, which is ranked 1,205th out of 1,607 Pennsylvania elementary schools, 1% of students scored at or above the proficient level for math, and 8% scored at or above that level for reading. Maybe keeping it public didn’t work all that well? Continue reading

Crazy People Are Dangerous If you have one mental illness, does that make a second mental illness more probable?

Those of my (too few) readers who also read Robert Stacy McCain’s website, The Other McCain, will be familiar with his frequently used article title, Crazy People Ara Dangerous, but it seems very appropriate in this case. The euphemistically-described “LGBTQ+” Philadelphia activist Kendall Stephens has been charged with rape, involuntary assault, unlawful contact with minors, and indecent assault against people less than 13 years old, among other offenses:

Prominent trans LGBTQ+ activist charged with rape of minors in Philadelphia

By Olivia Land | Tuesday, December 19, 2023 | 11:02 AM EST

Kendall Stephens, mugshot by Philadelphia Police Department, via WPVI-TV.

A prominent LGBTQ+ activist in Philadelphia has been charged with allegedly raping two minors.Kendall Stephens, 37, was arrested Monday and charged with rape, involuntary assault, unlawful contact with minors, and indecent assault against people less than 13 years old, among other offenses, court documents revealed.

The exact details of the allegations against Stephens were not immediately available.

Stephens — who is a trans woman — had a preliminary arraignment in Philadelphia municipal court Monday evening, the court records showed.

She is due back before Judge Vincent W. Furlong on Dec. 29.

When I checked The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website for Kendall Stephens at 2:42 PM EST, there was still no story on this arrest or the charges against Mr Stephens. I do not know if the newspaper’s diligent reporters are digging for more information, or they are looking for the most politically correct way to word it. 🙂 I’m going to write the rest of this story below the fold. Continue reading

The Inky’s Editorial Board have weighed in: they think that genocide of the Jews is a subject for debate

This website has expended considerable bandwidth documenting the anti-Semitism on college campuses, the University of Pennsylvania in particular, and we have noted that, following the firing resignation of Penn’s President, Liz Magill, over her idiotic testimony in Congress, The Philadelphia Inquirer has been engaged in a half-hidden support of Dr Magill’s “context dependent” testimony, calling it a defense of free speech.

The newspaper’s Editorial Board had not opined on the subject until Thursday morning, but, as I had guessed, they came out along the same lines:

Despite Magill’s departure, Penn must stay the course on free speech issues | Editorial

It is essential that the university does not allow the recent chaotic series of events to further compromise its commitment to open expression and academic inquiry.

Continue reading