Category Archives: Freedom of Speech and of the Press

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I guess that Marc Rowan will keep his checkbook closed

Our constitutional rights under the First Amendment include the right of peaceable assembly, and this demonstration on the University of Pennsylvania campus in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia has been reported to be completely peaceful. But, in speaking their piece, the demonstrators, which included some Penn faculty, have exposed themselves to criticism of their message, and, unfortunately for the supporters of the Palestinians and Hamas terrorists, some of that criticism could come from deep-pockets donors. We have covered the backlash of deep-pockets donors against the outbreak of anti-Semitism on our college campuses, as recently as yesterday, but some people just don’t listen. From The Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s student newspaper:

Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine hosts College Hall protest, blocks main entrance

Continue reading →

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Sorry, Sarah Jones, but journalism really is a business just like any other You just aren't the super-duper special person you think your are

The serious layoffs at the Los Angeles Times have other 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. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias. — up in arms, not in the least part because they are seriously worried about being the next victims themselves.

Billionaires Are Journalism’s False Saviors

by Sarah Jones | Wednesday, January 24, 2024

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Times announced that it would lay off at least 115 journalists, 20 percent of the newsroom. The cuts would have been larger were it not for the newspaper’s union, which fought back and walked out of the office for one day last week in protest. The cuts follow a previous round of layoffs last June, meaning the Times has lost around one-third of its staff in under a year. The same day, Time announced cuts of its own. Condé Nast was already on the way to cutting 5 percent of its workforce when also on Tuesday, members of the company’s union walked out after the company proposed significant layoffs and downsized its original severance offer. Earlier, Univision announced significant cuts and the company that owns Sports Illustrated laid off most, perhaps all, unionized staff, which could kill the storied magazine. The Washington Post slashed its newsroom late last year. Journalism’s fate was never assured, but now it looks bleaker every year.

Many of these companies had been purchased by billionaires who struck an altruistic pose. At one time, they said they believed in journalism, not the bottom line. When billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong purchased the L.A. Times in 2018, he “knew in my heart of hearts” that “we need to protect the newsroom … I came in there with an inner belief it’s all or nothing,” he said in 2021. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in part because it’s an “important institution,” the New York Times recently noted. “I said to myself, ‘If this were a financially upside-down salty snack food company, the answer would be no,’” he told the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., in 2018. Marc Benioff, the billionaire founder of Salesforce, told CNBC in 2019 that he bought Time to address “a crisis of trust.” He added that his magazine “can be a steward of trust … It’s one of the core values of Time: trust, impact, the core magazine itself, and that it’s about equality.”

Now altruism has worn thin. Plain business interests are taking over, and media workers are feeling the blow. The implications for them — and the public — are devastating. “In 20 years you truly will not be able to believe anything that you see or hear online — which will be the only place you see or hear things,” Jack Crosbie wrote at Discourse Blog. “Every person trying to learn more about the world around them will be forced to navigate a chaotic ecosystem of rage and deceit in search of one of the few honest or good-faith news-providers that still exist. Almost all of us will fail at this.” Billionaires aren’t rescuing journalism. They’re a threat to it.

A threat to journalism? If Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong hadn’t bought the Los Angeles Times, would that newspaper even exist today? If Jeff Bezos, the founder of amazon.com, hadn’t bought The Washington Post when the Graham family realized that they had to sell, would the Post exist today, and if so, in what form?

Dr Soon-Shiong is a billionaire, but not one of the super, super wealthy ones: with a guesstinated net worth of ‘just’ $5.4 billion, his family and he can’t keep just taking $50 million a year losses in keeping the Times afloat forever. Mr Bezos, on the other hand, is worth something on the order of $180.0 billion, so yeah, he could absorb, the Post’s losses more easily, at least if his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez doesn’t demand too many more ridiculous mansions and yachts, but even he has been demanding that his newspaper do something really radical like start to break even.

But here’s the part that Sarah Jones, the New York Magazine author of the cited article, just doesn’t quite understand: these august newspapers, both considered one of America’s five “newspapers of record,” were losing money before the billionaires bought them. It isn’t Mr Bezos’ or Dr Soon-Shiong’s fault that they are losing money!

Miss Jones lamented that, “Plain business interests are taking over,” as though newspapers are somehow not businesses like any other. Yeah, I know: a lot of credentialed media people, basing their view on the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of the press, somehow think that they are not just special, but super-duper special, but, just like every other business, they have to produce a product that other people are willing to buy. And newspapers, facing the competition of a mostly free internet, have not been producing a product that enough people have been willing to shell out their hard-earned money to buy.

That’s partly because their greatness is a myth. In Soon-Shiong’s case, his business acumen was always a little unclear. He bought a controlling stake in Verity Health System, a California-based hospital chain, in 2017. He told employees he “was the last owner we were going to have,” Politico reported a year later, not long after the hospital chain announced it was in serious debt. It soon declared bankruptcy. “A big, rude awakening, from ‘I’m the savior’ to, ‘Maybe I’m going to keep my promise to you, maybe not,’” one hospital executive told Politico. There are troubling parallels to his management of the Times. He staffed up, expressing major national ambition. Workers are paying for the failure of his ambition.

Really? So Miss Jones is telling us that more journalists had jobs at the Times for awhile, because of Dr Soon-Shiong’s ambitions, but, Alas! his reach was greater than his grasp, and he just couldn’t realize his dreams. Where would the 115 laid-off staff have been during the last several years if he had not bought the Times? Baristas, anyone?

The situation is revelatory. Media layoffs tell us something about an owner’s business prowess, but they also show bigger forces at work. Though companies say layoffs are business decisions, there is an ideology underneath the jargon. Owners like Soon-Shiong sound noble at first, but ultimately they prioritize profit over the public interest. Their goals, then, are at odds with the purpose of journalism. Media workers can’t serve the public if there are no opportunities for them to do so. By cutting jobs in journalism, the ruling class cedes ground to the rabid right-wing media — whose benefactors are committed to an ideological project. The prospect of an emboldened right wing and a corresponding reduction in reputable news sources does not trouble them nearly as much as the loss of profit.

That Miss Jones is a fairly far left liberal is obvious from her article list on New York Magazine. But this site has expended considerable bandwidth on documenting how The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and a clearly left-oriented publication, has continually censored information that just didn’t fit Teh Narrative.

I’ve quoted more of Miss Jones’ article than I’d like, but there’s one more sentence from her concluding paragraph that deserves some real attention:

Journalism doesn’t function like a traditional business, nor should it; its objective isn’t profit but service.

Lots of businesses provide services: cleaning services, financial services, medicine. Miss Jones apparently believes that journalism is somehow different, and deserves your fealty and respect, perhaps more than roofers or concrete finishers or garbagemen. But her take on the difference raises the obvious question: if “journalism doesn’t function like a traditional business,” how can it be supported? Who pays the journalists — and sadly, journolists — if it’s not a business?

The answer is that journalism always has been a business, with reporters being paid, and printing presses run, by ordinary people subscribing to the newspapers and paying good money to consume the journalists’ product. Now? Print journalists are finding that fewer people are willing to shell out good money for their product when there are so many free sources of information on that internet thingy that Al Gore invented. I’m not a subscriber to New York Magazine, but found her article thanks to a tweet from someone I do not follow, but a couple of the other people I do follow, follow! That’s all thanks to another billionaire, Elon Musk, net worth $204.3 billion. Who would have even seen what she wrote, other than subscribers, without Mr Musk providing Twitter — I refuse to call it “X”! — for free?

I haven’t seen the calls yet, though it’s very possible that I have just missed them, for the government to subsidize or pay for, or even own, the newspaper industry. With Miss Jones most certainly not the only Democrat with a byline, as Robert Stacy McCain would call them, who believes that journalists are somehow special, somehow members of an elite and should-be-protected class, I expect such calls to be made.

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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 Landau, Inquirer reporter Ellie Rushing, Jordan Winkler, Mayor Jim Kenney, the Liberty City Dems, state Senator Nikil Saval, The New York Times, WPVI-TV, Inquirer editorial writer Daniel Pearson, CNN, Taj Magruder, Maggie 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.

“

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →