Category Archives: Journolism

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In telling the truth about its history, The Philadelphia Inquirer tells us that they will no longer tell the truth in the news

Screen capture, Philadelphia Inquirer website, February 17, 2022, 8:15 AM EST. Click to enlarge.

It began on Tuesday, February 15th, with the huge headline on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, “Black City. White paper. The summer of 2020 forced a reckoning for the country, Philadelphia, and its newspaper. But after perpetuating inequality for generations, can The Inquirer really become an anti-racist institution?”

The article, by Wesley Lowery, began with an editor’s note:

The following account of The Inquirer’s history, failed attempts at newsroom integration, and current efforts at internal reckoning is based on more than 75 interviews with current and former staff members, historians, and Philadelphians. Inquirer editors were uninvolved with the production of this piece, which was written by Wesley Lowery, an independent reporter. Lowery’s reporting was edited by Errin Haines, a Philadelphia-based journalist, and member of the board of The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which currently owns the paper.

The “Buildings Matter, Too” headline was published June 2, 2020 on page A12 of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Click to enlarge.

It’s pretty long, and gives us the history of the Inquirer as time passed, concentrating on the inclusion, or, more accurately, mostly the exclusion of black journalists and employees through time. The takeoff point was the article headlines “Buildings Matter, Too,” which thoroughly offended many black journalists in the Inquirer’s newsroom.

Cassie Haynes started the morning of June 2, 2020, as she does most mornings, with a copy of her hometown newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer. What she read that day horrified and enraged her.

For weeks, Black people in Philadelphia and across the country had protested amid dual pandemics. They had been traumatized and enraged by cell phone video showing a Black man, George Floyd, begging for his life as his windpipe was crushed beneath the knee of Derek Chauvin, a white police officer in Minneapolis. And the millions who poured into the streets did so despite a global public health crisis that was disproportionately ravaging Black communities.

That Tuesday morning, The Inquirer published on Page A12 a column by the newspaper’s Pulitzer-Prize winning architecture critic beneath the three-word headline: “Buildings Matter, Too.”

Two years earlier, Haynes, who is Black, cofounded Resolve Philly, a group that works with media outlets across the city to create community and solutions-oriented journalism. The Inquirer is one of their partners. Yet, here was the newspaper likening the value of her life to that of a few storefront windows. Her cofounder happened to have a meeting that morning with The Inquirer’s executive editor, Stan Wischnowski. Haynes said to tell him she was canceling her subscription.

“A few storefront windows”? The article has since been retitled:

Damaging buildings disproportionately hurts the people protesters are trying to uplift

“People over property” is a great as a rhetorical slogan. But as a practical matter, the destruction of downtown buildings in Philadelphia – and in Minneapolis, in Los Angeles and in a dozen other American cities – could be devastating for the future of cities.

by Inga Saffron | June 1, 2020

Does the destruction of buildings matter when black Americans are being brazenly murdered in cold blood by police and vigilantes?

That’s the question that has been raging on the streets of Philadelphia, and across my architecture-centric social media feeds, over the last two days as a dark cloud of smoke spiraled up from Center City. What started as a poignant and peaceful protest in Dilworth Park on Saturday morning ended up in a frenzy of destruction by evening. Hardly any building on Walnut and Chestnut Streets was left unscathed, and two mid-19th century structures just east of Rittenhouse Square were gutted by fire.

Their chances of survival are slim, which means there could soon be a gaping hole in the heart of Philadelphia, in one of its most iconic and historic neighborhoods. And protesters moved on to West Philadelphia’s fragile 52nd Street shopping corridor, an important center of black life, where yet more property has been battered. . . . .

“People over property” is great as a rhetorical slogan. But as a practical matter, the destruction of downtown buildings in Philadelphia — and in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and a dozen other American cities — is devastating for the future of cities. We know from the civil rights uprisings of the 1960s that the damage will ultimately end up hurting the very people the protests are meant to uplift. Just look at the black neighborhoods surrounding Ridge Avenue in Sharswood or along the western end of Cecil B. Moore Avenue. An incredible 56 years have passed since the Columbia Avenue riots swept through North Philadelphia, and yet those former shopping streets are graveyards of abandoned buildings. Residents still can’t get a supermarket to take a chance on their neighborhood.

A photo that accompanied the article was captioned:

The intersection of Ridge Avenue and Sharswood Street shows the blight that has plagued the area since the 1964 Columbia Avenue riots. The building has since been demolished.

Intersection of Ridge and Sharswood, August 2021, via Google Streetscapes. Click to enlarge.

And what’s there more recently? The building on the corner has been demolished, and it was, at least in August of 2021, when Google Maps made their most recent pass, a street with business locations with rolled down steel doors or bars across their windows, litter in the streets, and cars parked on the sidewalks.

Was it really racist to note, as Inga Saffron did, that buildings in heavily black areas had more than just front windows smashed but that some were burned out? Is it racist to point out that many of the buildings burned out and businesses destroyed housed black-owned businesses, or the places of employment of black Philadelphians?

When you need to go to work, to earn a paycheck, to pay your rent and put food on the table, if the business at which you worked has been damaged beyond near immediate reopening, then that building mattered to you!

The initial article cited followed the history of integration at the Inquirer, which was not rapid. However, the history as given is from the perspective of the 21st century, an attempt at holding the newspaper in the middle of the 20th accountable to today’s standards.

Much further down, the article notes how the staff meetings at the Inquirer went. Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski did not write the “Buildings Matter, Too” headline; that was the work of an unnamed copy editor, and approved by the editor who oversaw the print desk. Both editors submitted their resignations, but Mr Wischnowski refused to accept them.

The “newsroom’s journalists of color” were not happy, and organized a sick out. Then, by Thursday, June 4, 2020, Mr Wischnowski, who had been with the paper for twenty years, was telling his colleagues at the newspaper that he expected to lose his job. The subsequent Saturday evening, published Elizabeth Hughes announced that Mr Wischnowski had resigned. In other words, I have been right all along when I characterized his departure as being fired. Fortunately, Mr Wischnowski landed on his feet, and is now the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a position to which he was named on September 5, 2020, so he wasn’t out of a job for too long.

The article noted that, in November 2020, Miss Hughes named Gabriel Escobar, a longtime Inquirer journalist who was previously Mr Wischnowski’s deputy, the new executive editor. The article then lamented that while Mr Escobar “is the first Latino journalist at the top of the masthead,” “To date, a Black journalist has never run the paper.”

Now comes Lisa Hughes, the publisher, again making her promise to turn the Inquirer into an “anti-racist” newspaper:

    From the publisher of The Inquirer: An apology to Black Philadelphians and journalists

    A More Perfect Union’s first chapter showed how The Inquirer has historically failed the Black community and journalists who fought for change.

    by Elizabeth H Hughes | Wednesday, February 16, 2022

    Two years ago we made a pledge to become an anti-racist organization. An important part of that work requires an unflinching examination of ourselves and our approach to journalism, past and present. This work had a marked beginning but has no fixed end. It is in many ways a daily duty, for all of us.

    This endeavor requires honesty. In that light, we must recognize that The Philadelphia Inquirer has historically failed in its coverage of the Black community — in a city where Black people have been integral since before the founding of the republic. We must also recognize that as an institution, we have failed Black journalists who for decades have fought, often in vain, for us to be more representative and inclusive.

    The journalistic examination of The Inquirer by Wesley Lowery published this week puts our failings in brutal relief. The reporting shows not only that we have not done right — it reveals, starkly, that we have done wrong. Black voices in the story — inside and outside the newsroom — articulate forcefully the harm we have inflicted over decades.

    It is worth noting that the story focuses primarily on the modern Inquirer — taking specific note of the racist headline published in 2020 and an offensive editorial published in 1990 — but it does not delve deeply into its long past. First printed just three months after Andrew Jackson was inaugurated president, The Inquirer has been a chronicler of life in the city for almost two centuries, and any historic assessment would doubtless find many more faults.

    An acknowledgment of our failings is not sufficient. We also apologize — to the Black residents and communities of Philadelphia, to the Black journalists of The Inquirer past and present, and to other communities and people whom we have also neglected or harmed.

    We recommit ourselves to the anti-racist mission we set in the summer of 2020, which has already yielded important changes. If there is skepticism of what we have done, or what we can or will do, we have earned that as well. We recognize that the judgment of our efforts will not be based on the promises we make, but on the actions we take, and the policies and practices we put in place to improve our journalism.

“Improve (their) journalism”? According to the Philadelphia Police Department, two more people were murdered in the City of Brotherly Love on Wednesday, but there isn’t a single story about either killing on the newspaper’s website main page, or its Crime & Justice page. As we noted last month, the concept of “anti-racism” means, as far as the Inquirer’s journolism is concerned, to censor the news when the news could be seen as reflecting poorly on minority communities.

No, “journolism” was not a typo: 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. And to Miss Hughes, formerly the publisher of New York Magazine, telling the truth about the heavily black-on-black homicides in the Inquirer’s home city would be harmful to the black community.

I have to ask why that is, because, let’s tell the truth here: everyone already knows that the vast majority of homicides in Philadelphia are the killings of black people by other black people. Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas, wrote, in December of 2020, “What do you know about the Philadelphians killed by guns this year? At least know their names,” saying:

    The last time we published the names of those lost to gun violence, in early July, nearly 200 people had been fatally shot in the city. By the end of 2020, that number more than doubled: 447 people gunned down.

    Even in a “normal” year, most of their stories would never be told.

    At best they’d be reduced to a handful of lines in a media alert:

      “A 21-year-old Black male was shot one time in the head. He was transported to Temple University Hospital and was pronounced at 8:12 p.m. The scene is being held, no weapon recovered and no arrest.”

    That’s it. An entire life ending in a paragraph that may never make the daily newspaper.

That was then, and this is now: such stories, when they are printed at all, don’t say ‘A 21-tear-old black male’ but just a ’21-year-old male’ was killed. To identify the victim by race would be to, as the Sacramento Bee once said about publishing mugshots, “perpetuat(es) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.”

Translation: to the publisher and editors of the Inquirer, telling the truth is racist! To Lisa Hughes and Gabriel Escobar and, apparently, to much of the newsroom, to be ‘anti-racist’ is to censor the news, to not tell Philadelphians and the other subscribers to the newspaper a truth that they already know, but a truth that the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading just can’t handle. How is that journalism rather than journolism?

The originally cited article said:

Several longtime staffers made a point to defend Wischnowski — noting his longtime service to the paper and that he had been uninvolved in writing the headline itself — and that his resignation did not have the unanimous support of the room, even among those pressing for more racial equity.

“It was a knee-jerk reaction,” said reporter Mensah Dean, who is Black. “Everyone got real, real woke, real fast.”

The truth simply did not matter! Mr Wischnowski didn’t write the catchy headline — and aren’t headlines supposed to grab the readers’ attention, to get them to read the articles themselves? — and he apparently didn’t give his approval for it, but he also didn’t fire the two people who were actually responsible for it.

Mentions of Black Philadelphia appeared in the white papers primarily through the lens of crime. To read The Inquirer then would leave one wondering if Black people ever were born, ever died, if they lived lives in between — or if they simply sprouted, fully grown, in the city streets to call for civil rights, seek elected office, and commit various criminal infractions.

That, of course, was what Miss Hughes told us in her previous column, that the Inquirer was:

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

Miss Hughes did something really radical in that: she told us the truth, that the Inquirer would no longer tell the truth, not if that truth might offend some people.

I admit it: I prefer the print medium, because it takes the space to publish more information than the broadcast media normally do, and, with my poor hearing, it’s simply easier for me. But television news, due to the visual nature of the medium, publishes mugshots, publishes photos, and doesn’t have the luxury of hiding the truth the way newspapers can. But when I see what our major newspapers are doing, I cringe.

If I had a billion dollars, I would do what Jeff Bezos did when he bought The Washington Post: I would buy The Philadelphia Inquirer — and no, it wouldn’t cost a billion dollars, probably not even $50 million — and re-establish it as a news organization that told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That’s what the city sorely needs.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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The truth shall set you free . . . from your job

UPenn Women’s Swim Team, via Instagram. It isn’t difficult to pick out the one man male in a women’s bikini top. Click to enlarge.

The First Street Journal has previously published five articles on Will Thomas, the male swimmer who claims to be female and swims for the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s team under the name ‘Lia’ Thomas. With a lot of different stories published in the Washington Examiner, New York Post, and OutKick, about teammates critical of his participation on the team, I cautioned, “I have to wonder: has it always been the same (anonymous) teammate who has been the source for these stories? This has sort of jumped out at me as I have read these stories.”

Well, that question has been answered, surprisingly enough, in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

    16 Penn swimmers send letter saying teammate Lia Thomas has an unfair advantage

    The players’ names are not signed on the letter, but it appears to reveal a division in the team less than two weeks away from the Ivy League championship meet.

    by Ellie Rushing | Friday, February 4, 2022

    Sixteen members of the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team have sent a letter to school and Ivy League officials speaking out against transgender teammate Lia Thomas’ participation in the upcoming championship meets. They also ask the university and league to not take legal action against the NCAA if it adopts a policy barring Thomas’ eligibility.

    The letter — penned by Nancy Hogshead-Makar, former Olympic swimmer and CEO of Champion Women, on behalf of 16 unnamed Penn swimmers and their families — appears to reveal a division in the team less than two weeks away from the Ivy League championship meet.

    The players question the fairness of Thomas’ participation, and say that she is taking “competitive opportunities” away from other members of the team.

    Thomas is a 22-year-old transgender woman who holds the fastest times of any female college swimmer in two events this season. She has been on gender hormone therapy for more than two years and has followed all NCAA eligibility requirements. Her times make her a favorite for the NCAA championship in March.

There’s more at the Inquirer original. Note that while our Stylebook specifies that the ‘transgendered’ will be referred to by their birth names and the pronouns appropriate to their biological sex, the Inquirer, and most of the credentialed media have chosen to refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their assumed names and preferred pronouns. We do not alter the direct quotations of others.

What we are seeing here is more than just the idea that ‘transgendered’ athletes are the sex they claim to be, rather than the sex they actually are, but the self-censorship of people who fear the consequences of doing something radical like telling the truth. The Inquirer reported, three days earlier, that “several” team members issued a letter of support for Mr Thomas; the number of teammates who signed the letter was not revealed:

    Members of the Penn women’s swimming and diving team have issued a statement in support of their transgender teammate, Lia Thomas.

    “We want to express our full support for Lia in her transition,” the statement said. “We value her as a person, teammate, and friend. The sentiments put forward by an anonymous member of our team are not representative of the feelings, values, and opinions of the entire Penn team, composed of 39 women with diverse backgrounds.”

    This is the first official public message of support for Thomas from the Penn women’s swim team. An anonymous member of the team had previously criticized Thomas and the university’s decision to allow her to swim to the Washington Examiner, the Daily Mail, and Fox News.

    Tuesday’s statement was not signed, but a Penn representative told ESPN that it was from “several” swimmers.

There’s more at the original, but one thing is obvious: releasing the names of the “several” team members who signed the letter supporting Mr Thomas also reveals which teammates did not sign the letter. The Washington Post reported:

    A Penn spokesman told ESPN that Tuesday’s statement was sent on behalf of “several” Quakers swimmers. On Thursday, the parent of a Penn swimmer, who did not want to be identified for fear of retaliation against their daughter, said in a telephone interview that they estimated the letter supporting Thomas was sent on behalf of only “two or three” swimmers.

Back to the first article cited:

    “We fully support Lia Thomas in her decision to affirm her gender identity and to transition from a man to a woman. Lia has every right to live her life authentically,” the letter reads.

    “However, we also recognize that when it comes to sports competition, that the biology of sex is a separate issue from someone’s gender identity. Biologically, Lia holds an unfair advantage over competition in the women’s category, as evidenced by her rankings that have bounced from #462 as a male to #1 as a female. If she were to be eligible to compete against us, she could now break Penn, Ivy, and NCAA Women’s Swimming records; feats she could never have done as a male athlete,” they wrote.

Oddly enough, I have been unable to find a link to the text of the original letter. But here’s the money line:

    Penn’s women’s team roster lists 41 members. The 16 teammates did not identify themselves in the letter, stating that they “have been told that if we spoke out against her inclusion into women’s competitions, that we would be removed from the team or that we would never get a job offer.”

In other words, sit down and shut up, or you’ll be punished for speaking out.

This is the tyranny of political correctness: if those sixteen teammates, at an Ivy League school, identify themselves, they’ll be punished. Though the letter does not say so, as far as I know, their grades could suffer as liberal professors might mark them down. Some of the slights that the left give to those who just aren’t #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading enough to think that girls can be boys and boys can be girls aren’t just slights, but career-trashers. Remember: the #woke pushed liberal columnist Bari Weiss out at The New York Times and politically liberal Stan Wischnowski out as executive editor at the Inquirer, because they just weren’t #woke enough.

Me? I’m retired, and have no career from which to be fired, so I can do something really radical like tell the truth.

I’ve yet to see it mentioned anywhere else, but when you have part of the team supporting Will Thomas and another part, at least 16 teammates out to 41, or 39%, opposed, Mr Thomas has become a locker room cancer. At least some of the team considered boycotting a January 8, 2022, meet against Dartmouth, but eventually decided against it. At least one team member has complained that Mr Thomas still has male genitalia and this is causing stress for some of the team.

If Will Thomas wants to claim he’s a woman, that’s his business. But when institutions like the University of Pennsylvania start enforcing his delusions, when the NCAA allows his beliefs to determine his athletic status, it starts to become other people’s business, as he is being allowed to exercise a competitive advantage over biological women.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Neither the rules nor honesty apply at CNN If we can't expect CNN to follow its own internal rules, how can we trust their reporting?

As we learned on Wednesday, Jeff Zucker, who was fired resigned as President of the Cable News Network and the chairman of WarnerMedia’s news and sports division over a “romantic relationship with another senior executive at CNN”, said:

As part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, I was asked about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague, someone I have worked with for more than 20 years. I acknowledged the relationship evolved in recent years. I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong.

CNN, of course, wanted to hold Donald Trump’s feet to the fire, and had now-disgraced attorney Michael Avenetti on the boob tube at least 122 times when he was representing Stormy Daniels, to attack our 45th President. As Robert Stacy McCain noted, MSNBC had Mr Avenetti on at least 108 times as well.

Mr McCain also noted the New York Post’s story:

Rumors about Zucker, 56, and (CNN’s Executive Vice President and chief marketing officer Allison) Gollust’s affair have been circulating in the media world for years, but the pair have repeatedly, and vehemently, denied they were in a relationship when asked numerous times by Page Six.

Zucker was allegedly so brazen about his relationship with Gollust, he moved her into the same Upper East Side building where he lived with his then-wife of 21 years Caryn Zucker before the two divorced, sources said.

So, the President of CNN, and an Executive Vice President, who had the whole network incessantly pounding on President Trump over his honesty, were themselves dishonest about a relationship they were required to report. Mr Zucker, who should have been canned years ago over CNN’s lousy ratings, was finally shown the door over an affair.

But what about other people at CNN?

Female employees at CNN are furious that chief spokesperson Allison Gollust is keeping her job after “lying” about her affair with newly resigned CEO Jeff Zucker “for years,” sources told The Post.

“Why is she allowed to keep her job?” a CNN insider railed.

“CNN is supposed to be a transparent news network. How does she get away with lying about their affair for so long?”

Early Wednesday, Zucker sent a memo to colleagues announcing he’d be retiring after his relationship with Gollust came to light during CNN’s probe into Chris Cuomo. He called the relationship “consensual” and told staff that he wished he’d disclosed it sooner.

Gollust released a statement shortly after saying that she and Zucker had been professional colleagues for over 20 years but their relationship “changed during COVID.”

One insider called the comments “a total lie.”

“They’ve been together for years,” the source dished.

Katie Couric in her memoir Going There, had said that Mr Zucker and Mrs Gollust “were joined at the hip,” while Mr Zucker was at NBC, which he left nine years ago.

If this was such a widely-known ‘secret,’ why didn’t anyone say anything? For Mr Zucker and Mrs Gollust to have been required to report the relationship when it began, there had to have been human resources regulations on the subject. Did no one in human resources know about this, or did no one in human resources care about this? How many people were in on this “open secret”, and why did no one say anything until an outside party investigation of Chris Cuomo lead to the discovery of Mr Zucker’s and Mrs Gollust’s relationship?

If Mr Zucker and Mrs Gollust had reported the relationship, as they were required to do, what would have happened? CNN would have had to set up certain restrictions on responsibility, presumably taking Mrs Gollust out of a direct reporting line to Mr Zucker. Since we cannot assume that neither Mr Zucker nor Mrs Gollust was unaware that the relationship needed to be reported, the only reasonable consideration for not doing so was that it could have changed the professional relationship between the two, and neither wanted for Mrs Gollust to cease being Mr Zucker’s closest business confidant.

Remember NBC’s Matt Lauer, and the infamous ‘secret button’ which locked the door to his office so the targets of his affection couldn’t escape? If it existed — Mr Lauer claims that it didn’t — who installed it? Did Mr Lauer have the technical skills to do it himself? Ronan Farrow, who discovered and reported Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct, claimed that Mr Lauer’s behavior toward women was an “open secret” at NBC.

At some point it has to be asked: if all of these people knew about the behavior of these media big wigs, why did no one ever report it? And why should the public trust the reporting of people who have not been honest themselves?

The New York Post reported, “Three top CNN executives will form an interim leadership team at the network and assume Zucker’s duties until WarnerMedia’s pending merger with Discovery is complete,” but that ignores the obvious question: who among those three were aware of the affair, of this supposed ‘open secret,’ and tolerated it anyway?

If CNN cannot be trusted to follow and enforce its own rules, and this only came to light, allegedly, after Chris Cuomo’s lawyer went scorched earth on the network, just how can news consumers trust anything CNN reports, ever? As Mary McCarthy famously said about writer Lillian Hellman, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” That is how we should regard CNN.

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What does it say when CNN is getting beat out by the Hallmark Channel and the Food Network? In any sane business environment, Jeff Zucker and his minions would have been fired years ago

The Cable News Network, or CNN, was launched on June 1, 1980, by Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld, the world’s first 24-hour news network. Now a part of WarnerMedia, it’s being spun off by parent AT&T T: (%). From The Wall Street Journal:

    AT&T Sets WarnerMedia Spinoff Plan and Lowers Its Dividend

    Shareholders will get 0.24 shares in new media company and reduced annual dividend of $1.11 a share

    by Drew FitzGerald | Tuesday, February 1, 2022 | 6:07 PM EST

    AT&T Inc. said it would roughly halve its dividend payout and divest itself of its WarnerMedia division through a spinoff that would give shareholders 0.24 share for each AT&T share they own, a move that would complete its retreat from the entertainment business.

    The spinoff is part of AT&T’s planned deal to combine WarnerMedia with Discovery Inc., DISCB: (%) a merger that is expected to close in the second quarter. AT&T plans to use the transaction to refocus its remaining assets on its core telecom operations.

    After the spinoff, AT&T said it expects to pay an annual per-share dividend of about $1.11, down from its most recent $2.08 level. The new payout would cost the company just under $8 billion a year, down from the roughly $15 billion it paid out in 2021.

    AT&T is one of the most widely held U.S. stocks, and the company has historically offered one of the largest regular dividend payouts on the market. Based on Tuesday’s closing price, it had an 8.52% dividend yield. By comparison, rival Verizon Communications Inc. VZ: (%) had a dividend yield of 4.81% based on Tuesday’s prices.

    Shares of AT&T fell 4.2% to $24.42 on Tuesday. The stock has lost about one-third of its value since AT&T agreed to buy Time Warner Inc. in October 2016, while the S&P 500 index has doubled during the same period.

There’s more at the original.

Now, with a net worth of $60 million, and an annual base salary of $6.3 million, you’d think that Jeff Zucker, the current president of CNN Worldwide and Chairman of WarnerMedia News, would be a top, top performer; you’d think that CNN would be dominating the ratings in the 24-hour news network business, right? You wouldn’t think that it was getting stomped by Fox News and MSNBC, would you?

Well, it is, and it gets worse: CNN gets beat out by the Hallmark Channel, which shows reruns of Reba and the Golden Girls, along with really cheesy romance movies, and the Food Network, which is basically cooking shows and silly cooking competition games. Home and Garden Television (HGTV), which is 95% reruns, beats CNN.

CNN has had more than just ratings problems. The network took the absolutely brilliant journalistic decision to have its number one host, Chris Cuomo, interviewing his brother, then Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY), for the better part of a year over the Governor’s response to COVID-19. Then, when the Governor got in trouble over sexual harassment claims, his younger brother Fredo Chris was giving him advice and access to defend himself, all of which got the younger Mr Cuomo fired. Maybe, just maybe, if CNN had followed responsible journalistic ethics, and not allowed Chris to interview Andy all of those times, this wouldn’t have been a problem.

One of the younger Mr Cuomo’s producers, John Griffin, 44, was then fired after he was indicted for trying to lure minor girls, one only 9 years old, to his home for sexual subservience training. There’s no indication that anyone at CNN knew about Mr Griffin’s alleged activities, but it was another public relations black eye, for a network which has had a lot of them.

Under any sane business plan, Mr Zucker and all of his executive vice presidents would have been fired, and would have been fired several years ago; that they haven’t makes me wonder just what pictures Mr Zucker has of his bosses. There’s really no excuse for the kind of failure that CNN has been.

No wonder AT&T wants to get rid of WarnerMedia!

___________________________________________

Updated! 4:00 PM EST

Looks like I spoke too soon, From The New York Times:

    Jeff Zucker Exits CNN After Relationship With Senior Executive

    The relationship came up during the network’s investigation into the former anchor Chris Cuomo. “I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t,” Mr. Zucker wrote in a memo to colleagues.

    by Michael M Grynbaum | Groundhog Day, February 2, 2022

    Jeff Zucker resigned on Wednesday as the president of CNN and the chairman of WarnerMedia’s news and sports division, writing in a memo that he had failed to disclose to the company a romantic relationship with another senior executive at CNN.

    Mr. Zucker, 56, is among the most powerful leaders in the American media and television industries. The abrupt end of his nine-year tenure immediately throws into flux the direction of CNN and its parent company, WarnerMedia, which is expected to be acquired later this year by Discovery Inc. in one of the nation’s largest media mergers.

    In a memo to colleagues that was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Zucker wrote that his relationship came up during a network investigation into the conduct of Chris Cuomo, the CNN anchor who was fired in December over his involvement in the political affairs of his brother, former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York.

    “As part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, I was asked about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague, someone I have worked with for more than 20 years,” Mr. Zucker wrote. “I acknowledged the relationship evolved in recent years. I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong.”

There’s more at the original.

So, he completely trashed CNN’s brand, but he’s been fired resigned because he was copulating with a subordinate? How much of this was known to AT&T, and did it push the decision to divest from WarnerMedia?

Allison Gollust, CNN’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Mr Zucker’s co-copulator, and who kept her job, said:

    Jeff and I have been close friends and professional partners for over 20 years. Recently, our relationship changed during Covid. I regret that we didn’t disclose it at the right time. I’m incredibly proud of my time at CNN and look forward to continuing the great work we do everyday.

So, at a time when a lot of people were locked down, and when all sorts of other improper relationships were publicized, Mr Zucker and Miss Gollust were happily screwing away — both are divorced — and neither of these two highly paid executives thought, ‘hey, maybe we need to do the right thing here, policywise’? They could have disclosed it, obviously knew that they needed to disclose it, but did not until it was discovered during the investigation into the conduct of Chris Cuomo? Does this explain CNN’s wholly unprofessional decision to allow Chris Cuomo to keep having his brother on his show?

Then there’s the obvious question: if this was only discovered during the investigation into Mr Cuomo’s behavior, yet it started “during Covid,” whatever that means, just who else at CNN knew about it, and kept his mouth shut?

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44 murdered in Philly in January . . . which is actually an improvement!

Well, January is over, and the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page has the numbers: as of 11:59 PM EST on January 31st, 44 people had lost their life’s blood in the city’s mean streets. That’s a pretty horrible number, but it’s better than last year’s total of 50 in January.

44 homicides ÷ 31 days = 1.4194 per day, x 365 days in the year = 518.0645 projected killings, if that rate is maintained throughout the year. That would be well short of the record of 562, set in 2021, but above 2020’s 499, and the old record of 500 set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990.

It’s still too early in the year to really draw any conclusions from the numbers: the 50 in 2021 worked out to a projected homicide total of 588.7097, which was well above the final numbers, while the 38 killings in January of 2020 worked out to a projected 448.6452 for the year, which was well under the carnage for the year.

But it’s still the same old, same old at The Philadelphia Inquirer: neither the newspaper’s website main page, nor its specific crime page, indicates a single story, even a brief few paragraphs, on any of the five homicides committed since Thursday, January 27th,[1]The Current Crime Statistics page is only updated during normal business hours, Monday through Friday, so we do not get reports on the end of the day on Friday and Saturday. which leads me to conclude one thing: all of the victims were young black males, because the “anti-racist news organization” into which publisher Elizabeth Hughes has turned the nation’s third-oldest continuously published daily newspaper, to report the unedited truth would, in itself, be racist.

What has anti racism really become? At least in Philadelphia, it has become the acceptance of an urban black culture in which the killing of young black men by other young black men is just plain expected, and the Inquirer goes right along with that.

References

References
↑1 The Current Crime Statistics page is only updated during normal business hours, Monday through Friday, so we do not get reports on the end of the day on Friday and Saturday.
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More journolism from the Lexington Herald-Leader Are the editors taking their decisions based upon race?

No, that’s not a typo in the article headline; journolism has a real meaning. 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.

We noted, on January 27th, that what my best friend used to refer to as the Lexington Herald-Liberal was perfectly fine with ignoring the McClatchy Mugshot Policy when it came to white people accused of crimes, but seemed to decline to do so for black defendants. And here they go again:

    State trooper injured in shooting released from hospital; Lexington man charged

    by Karla Ward | Saturday, January 29, 2022 | 1:23 PM EST | Updated: 4:11 PM EST

    LeeQuan Taylor, photo by Kentucky Department of Corrections, via WCHS-TV.

    A 22-year-old Lexington man is charged with attempted murder of a police officer in connection with a shooting that injured a Kentucky State Police trooper in Harrison County Friday afternoon.

    Kentucky State Police said in a tweet Saturday afternoon that the trooper, whose name has not been released, was recuperating at home after being released from University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital.

    Aside from the attempted murder charge, LeeQuan T. Taylor is charged with first-degree assault and possession of a handgun by a convicted felon. He was taken to the Bourbon County Regional Detention Center after his arrest Friday night.

There’s more at this link.

LeeQuan Taylor, photo by Bourbon County Detention Center, via Fox56. Click to enlarge.

The Bourbon County Detention Center released a more recent mugshot of the accused.

The Bourbon County photo was included in the Fox56 story, originally posted at 12:58 PM, and updated at 2:57 PM, well before the Herald-Leader story was updated, so it was available to Karla Ward, the reporter. The newspaper’s story about the arrest of Burl Hollen is still available, and despite the paper being notified, both by comment on the story and via Twitter of their use of the mugshot of a white defendant, the photo is still on the story. The story on Mr Hollen does not indicate that he has a past criminal record.

Yet Saturday’s story on the capture of Mr Taylor noted that he is a previously convicted felon, which means, at least according to the Herald-Leader’s reporting, worse than Mr Hollen; Mr Hollen is innocent until proven guilty, while Mr Taylor, though innocent until proven guilty in the shooting of the state trooper, is guilty of felonies in the past. One would think that, if the editors of the newspaper were going to make an exception to the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, it would have been for Mr Taylor, not Mr Hollen. But, as I have noted in the past, Mr Taylor is black, while Mr Hollen is white.

Is that really the difference?

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The Lexington Herald-Leader and journalistic ethics

In The First Street Journal, I frequently refer to journolism. 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.

The McClatchy Mugshot Policy states:

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

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

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

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

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

So, if a rape suspect was arrested in Madison County, someone who cannot be an urgent threat to the community, since he’s now in custody, someone who isn’t a public official or suspect in a hate crime, a serial killer or suspect in a high-profile crime, One would assume that the Lexington Herald-Leader wouldn’t publish his picture, right?

    Screenshot from Lexington Herald-Leader

    Kentucky State Police assists Madison County Sheriff’s Office with arrest of rape suspect

    by Christopher Leach | Thursday, January 27, 2022 | 7:23 AM EST

    Troopers with Kentucky State Police in Estill County arrested a suspect accused of sexual assaulting a minor on Tuesday, according to the Madison County Sheriff’s Office.

    Burl Hollon, of Waco, was charged with two counts of rape, two counts of sodomy and two counts of sexual abuse. He is being lodged at the Madison County Detention Center.

    No other details have been released about Hollon’s case. The sheriff’s office conducted the investigation while KSP made the arrest.

The mugshot there? That’s a screenshot taken from the Herald-Leader original, and it’s most certainly a police mugshot, taken from the Madison County Sheriff’s Facebook page.

Now, I have no sympathy for the accused, but not yet convicted, Mr Hollen. The Facebook page states that he has been accused of:

  • Rape, 1st Degree – Victim <12 years of age
  • Rape, 2nd Degree – No Force
  • Sodomy, 1st Degree – Victim <12 years of age
  • Sodomy, 2nd Degree
  • Sexual Abuse, 1st Degree – Victim U/12 years
  • Sexual Abuse, 3rd Degree

Just the first charge:

    KRS § 510.040. Rape in the first degree.
    (1) A person is guilty of rape in the first degree when:
    (a) He engages in sexual intercourse with another person by forcible compulsion; or
    (b) He engages in sexual intercourse with another person who is incapable of consent because he:
    1. Is physically helpless; or
    2. Is less than twelve (12) years old.
    (2) Rape in the first degree is a Class B felony unless the victim is under twelve (12) years old or receives a serious physical injury in which case it is a Class A felony.

Class A felonies in the Bluegrass State can result in prison sentences of 20 to 50 years, or life imprisonment.

If convicted, Mr Hollen should receive the maximum sentence allowable under the law; the only way he should ever leave prison is in a hearse.

But I noticed, as I have before, that the Herald-Leader, which very much eschews publishing the mugshots of photos of black persons accused of, or even convicted of, serious crimes, certainly seems less reticent when it comes to publishing the photos of white suspects.

According to the Lexington Police Department’s shootings investigations page, there have been nine non-fatal shootings in the city . . . and eight of the victims have been black. In 2021, with 134 shootings reported, there were 20 victims who are white, and 12 more listed as Hispanic, which leaves 102 victims listed as black. That’s 76.12%, in a city in which just 14.2% of the population are black. The lead McClatchy newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, stated that publishing mugshots and crime videos, “disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.”

So what are the editors of the Herald-Leader doing? Whether intentionally or otherwise, the paper’s coverage of crime and their choices in which photos to use appear to be aimed at persuading readers that the perpetrators of crimes in the region are primarily white. While in the eastern Kentucky areas of the Herald-Leader’s circulation area, that’s probably true, given that the non-white percentage of the population in that area is very low, but when you get to the city of Lexington, the numbers say that no, that’s not the case.

To not “perpetuat(e) stereotypes”, the newspaper would print no mugshots at all; printing a disproportionate percentage of mugshots in which the accused are white is an active attempt to not just avoid stereotypes, but to skew the public’s perception in an inaccurate direction.

Part of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics states:

    Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Journalists should be honest and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.

  • Never deliberately distort facts or context, including visual information. Clearly label illustrations and re-enactments.

What the editors of the Herald-Leader are doing is distorting the facts, using visual information.

This is journolism, not journalism, this is the skewing of information to produce a false impression. If the editors are aware of what is being done in the newspaper and website they control, they are deliberately lying to their readers; if the editors are somehow not aware of what they have been doing, then they are not competent in doing their jobs, and need to be replaced.

It’s easy enough to just tell the truth. If the editors are concerned that publishing mugshots “disproportionately harms people of color,” then they should stop publishing all mugshots. In that manner, while they would not be telling the whole truth, they would not be distorting the truth. But what they have been doing recently is a distortion of the truth, and rotten journalism.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch is horrified that some Democrats want to actually fight crime!

Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard, hard left columnist, really hates the police and radical things like, oh, people having to obey the law!

You can already see it: the distinguished Mr Bunch is more worried about “mass incarceration”, “wrongful convictions,” and “police brutality” than he is about actual crime in the streets. The hysterical, boldfaced parts of his comments? Those are in Mr Bunch’s original; I did not add them.

Have there been brutality cases and wrongful convictions? Yup, sure have; no system of law enforcement is now, or ever will be, perfect. But those cases are far, far, far fewer than criminal acts on the streets. Mass incarceration? No; the problem there is that not enough people have been incarcerated! As we noted yesterday, there have been a lot of cases in which far more serious crimes have been committed by men who could, and should, have been behind bars for less serious crimes, but crimes, though less serious than rape or murder, were still treated too leniently.

Has Mr Bunch forgotten about Latif Williams, who (allegedly) murdered Samuel Collington near Temple University, in a botched carjacking? He had been released by a soft-headed judge on an unsecured bond, but could have been in custody when Mr Collington was killed, a crime which incensed the Inquirer so much that they published Mr Williams’ name, even though he is a juvenile?

Has Mr Bunch forgotten about Hasan Elliot, whom District Attorney let slide on probation violations and drug charges, before he killed a Philadelphia Police Corporal?

Oh, wait, I’m sorry: there is little evidence that Mr Bunch would be all that upset about a police officer being killed.

    That both political parties tripped over each other in racing to hire more and more cops, lengthen prison sentences, and wage an over-the-top “war on drugs” made it all the more stunning in the spring of 2020 when millions of Americans took to the streets after the police murder of George Floyd to demand radical change. For a remarkable — and remarkably brief — moment, most Democrats rushed to embrace a new world order in which cops wouldn’t just operate under stricter rules but policing itself would be downsized in favor of social services.

    The poster child of this pivoting ideology was arguably the then-Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden. He was a key architect of the 1994 federal crime bill that put a U.S. stamp of approval on mass incarceration, but when taking office in 2021, President Biden promised “to root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system and to enact police reform in George Floyd’s name.”

    But the echo of 2020′s bold promises had barely died down when the murder rate spiked across much of America, driven heavily, experts increasingly believe, by rage and ennui over the endless COVID-19 pandemic. Terrified by fear that the activists’ chants of “defund the police” would cost their party the 2020 and 2021 elections, top Democrats are now scurrying back to the old playbook by calling for more cops.

Does anyone think that maybe, just maybe, the public actually want more cops on the street, more police protection, when Philadelphia fell just one murder short of its all-time record in 2020, the year of the summer of riots and hate, and then completely blew that record out of the water in 2021? Might it just be possible that the public, in Pennsylvania, might be a bit more concerned now that the City of Brotherly Love is slightly ahead of the homicide pace it set last year?

    Pennsylvania’s Democratic candidate for governor, Attorney General Josh Shapiro is leading the way. The veteran Montgomery County politician needed no big push to stand with officers — the controversial Philadelphia Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police donated $25,000 to Shapiro’s 2020 AG campaign — and the lack of a primary challenger has allowed him to drift to the center-right, months before the general election.

    “We need more police … more police with time to form relationships in the community that they serve,” Shapiro said last month in West Philadelphia. Although Shapiro tempers his remarks with a call for community policing and calls for other services besides law enforcement, his emphasis on more cops — including a plan for hiring bonuses of $6,000 for new recruits — have grabbed headlines early in his campaign.

There’s more of Mr Bunch’s cry of outrage at the original, but Josh Shapiro has already won a statewide election, and, one would presume, has at least some idea what Pennsylvania’s voters might want. The Attorney General even cut District Attorney Krasner out of the loop with significant gun and drug trafficking charges, at least in part because he thought that Mr Krasner wouldn’t prosecute the (alleged) malefactors seriously.

    Look, no one is disputing that the increase in murders — including a record in Philadelphia last year, with horrific headlines about little kids struck by stray bullets or the Asian woman pushed in front of a New York subway train — demands full and prompt attention from our political leaders. But is there any evidence that hiring more cops is the answer? Especially when many high-profile killings — involving domestic violence or road rage — happen in places and ways that defy traditional police methods.

Here is where Mr Bunch really veers into the weeds. The high-profile cases might not be affected, but the vast majority of murders, in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in St Louis, are low-profile, so low-profile that they rarely make the pages of Mr Bunch’s newspaper, the killings of the young black males who are blowing each other away with such alarming frequency. Those are the murders which would be reduced if lower-level crimes were treated seriously, if the gang-bangers who could have been locked up for lesser crimes had been locked up, had been treated seriously.

Of course, as I’ve said before, black lives don’t really matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer. And the price for doing things the way that Will Bunch wants would be measured in the blood in the city’s mean streets.

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The Karening of the left

The media were all atwitter — pun very much intended — about a story by National Public Radio’s Nina Reines[1]The wife of Dr H David Reines goes by Nina Totenberg, but simply because she has not shown respect to her husband by taking his last name does not mean that The First Street Journal will show similar … Continue reading which claimed that Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch was refusing to wear a facemask around Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who is a Type I diabetic, and thus at greater risk of serious symptoms if she contracts COVID-19, and that Chief Justice John Roberts had asked Mr Gorsuch to mask up.

The Justices themselves refuted the story, first with a joint message from Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch, and then from the Chief Justice. The much nicer Dana has more on this in Patterico’s Pontifications.

Despite the fact that the lovely Mrs Reines’ report has been discredited, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Helen Dunne[2]The wife of Michael Dunne goes by Helen Ubiñas, but simply because she has not shown respect to her husband by taking his last name does not mean that The First Street Journal will show similar … Continue reading has run with it anyway.

    After NPR’s longtime Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg highlighted his behavior in a story this week, there was a lot of righteous outrage directed at Gorsuch.

    On social media, people called him all kinds of names: selfish, childish, petty. No argument here, and I suspect the pointed backlash spoke more to the sheer exhaustion from people tired of vaccine opponents and anti-maskers as the pandemic stretches into a third year.

So, it’s that the left are tired of people who don’t fall into line with their views. Got it!

Mrs Dunne continued to tell us about the denials of Mrs Reines’ story by Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch, and the Chief Justice, which is confirmation that she knew about those denials when she wrote her story, and then proceeded to tell her readers that she just didn’t believe them, saying “the statements read like textbook damage control”.

    Plus, “warm colleagues and friends” don’t need to be asked, by anyone, to do what needs to be done to protect one another. And they sure don’t need clarifying statements.

If someone has lied about them, they most certainly do.

    In an opinion piece for CNN, Kara Alaimo wrote that Gorsuch’s behavior was a shocking display of male entitlement.

    Agreed, and let’s take that a step further: It’s white male entitlement, because as it happens, Sotomayor, a fellow Puerto Rican, is the only woman of color on the bench. And, whew, the optics!

What a bunch of bovine feces! Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch are equals on the Court.[3]Justice Sotomayor, appointed by President Barack Obama, is senior to Justice Gorsuch, appointed by President Trump, but that seniority does not confer any difference in rank. The Chief Justice … Continue reading

    But while all eyes and ire seemed to land on Gorsuch, mine lingered longer on the other justices, because from the hallowed grounds of the White House to the more common spaces of our everyday workplaces, bad behavior can’t exist without enablers, not easily anyway. Even when — perhaps especially when — the enabling comes in the form of silence or inaction.

At which point, Mrs Dunne then includes the obligatory slam on President Trump.

    That problematic colleague at your office couldn’t continue to be a problem if the enablers didn’t dismiss or downplay their behavior.

    And as such, Gorsuch wouldn’t be able to act so coldheartedly without the implied or explicit consent of his fellow justices, including Sotomayor apparently, who — if that statement is any indication — gave him a pass to keep the peace. (But then the burdened are often expected to set aside their own comfort and safety.)

Yes, the ‘burdened’ are expected to take care of themselves! Mrs Dunne, and the left in general to a large extent, seem to believe that such ‘burdens’ can be shifted onto other people. Using her logic, even if COVID-19 somehow disappeared, every American ought to wear a face mask, all the time, during flu season, because who can know which passerby or office colleague is immunocompromised? Every adult ought to have to wear a facemask around children during RSV season, in the RSV can be a hospitalization-serious event.

Heck, why wait until flu and RSV seasons; viral and bacterial infections can occur at any time during the year, so, according to Mrs Dunne’s reasoning, we ought to all wear masks, all the time, because someone more susceptible to whatever might come along.

    But then, from supermarkets to the Supreme Court, we now live in a world where we continue to make adjustments and accommodations for people who have no regard for the greater good, who have to be asked and begged and cajoled to do the right thing because we value the appearance of harmony over the intentional practice of collective humanity.

What is the “greater good” of which the author writes? To me, individual rights and the preservation of such are the greater good, while Mrs Dunne seems to be rather opposed to anyone who has ideas of which she disapproves. She didn’t like it when Kyle Rittenhouse was not sent to jail for refusing to let armed thugs chase him down and beat him to death.

According to Mrs Dunne, it’s not just the guy who refuses to wear a diaper on his face who’s boorish, but everyone else who fails to wag their fingers and scold him is complicit, is enabling, as well. That some of us might support his right, and our rights, to not wear a mask in public seems not to have occurred to her. Mrs Dunne’s first name really ought to be Karen.

References

References
↑1 The wife of Dr H David Reines goes by Nina Totenberg, but simply because she has not shown respect to her husband by taking his last name does not mean that The First Street Journal will show similar disrespect to him.
↑2 The wife of Michael Dunne goes by Helen Ubiñas, but simply because she has not shown respect to her husband by taking his last name does not mean that The First Street Journal will show similar disrespect to him.
↑3 Justice Sotomayor, appointed by President Barack Obama, is senior to Justice Gorsuch, appointed by President Trump, but that seniority does not confer any difference in rank. The Chief Justice outranks the Associate Justices, which gives him some executive authority over the Court and its functions, but he is not the supervisor of the other Justices.