Category Archives: Journolism

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About that “accountability journalism”?

On Monday, May 9th, I received the email pictured at the right from Annie McCain Madonia, Chief Advancement Officer for the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the non-profit owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer, saying:

As an Inquirer reader, you know the importance of quality, in-depth local news. Inquirer journalists are dedicated to keeping you informed and connected to the latest news in the Philadelphia area.

The Inquirer is owned by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which makes it the largest American newspaper owned by a nonprofit organization. This innovative ownership structure helps support investigative news and accountability journalism, new technology, and a newsroom of growing diversity and community impact.

Thanks to the support of individuals like you, The Inquirer has the resources to report on stories that impact and improve our communities. Will you join me in making a gift to support The Inquirer’s journalism, and double your impact with this match?

“Investigative news”? “Accountability journalism”?

Why, then, is there not a single mention on the Inquirer’s website, of a story which appeared an entire day ago concerning Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s failure to pay his taxes? Continue reading →

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Irony is so ironic: Ellen Pao uses her freedom of speech and of the press to attack freedom of speech and of the press

While the famous Pentagon Papers case, New York Times Co v United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), is more famously associated with the Times, The Washington Post was heavily involved as well. The petitioners argued that the government trying to prohibit “publication of current news of vital importance to the people of this country” was wholly wrong and a violation of the First Amendment, a position with which the Supreme Court agreed.

But now it seems that the very same Washington Post doesn’t like it when another privately owned company might choose to publish things with which the Post disagrees:

    Elon Musk’s vision of ‘free speech’ will be bad for Twitter

    Tesla CEO has used platform in ugly ways. Now he gets to shape the company’s policies.

    By Ellen K. Pao[1]Ellen K. Pao is a tech investor and advocate, the former CEO of reddit, and a cofounder and CEO of the diversity and inclusion nonprofit Project Include. | Friday, April 8, 2022 | 11:42 AM EDT

    Ellen K Pao, screen capture from her website.

    It takes a lot of money to become a board member of Twitter, but not a lot else apparently. With a large stock purchase, an abuser of the service — Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and the world’s richest man — has now essentially bought himself a warm welcome from Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. For those of us who care about equity and accountability, Musk’s appointment to such a prominent role at a platform that serves hundreds of millions of users daily is highly disconcerting — a slap in the face, even.

    Musk has been open about his preference that Twitter do less to restrict speech that many see as hateful, abusive or dangerous. Given his new influence, the way he himself has used the platform bodes ill for its future. Musk paid $20 million in fines to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and stepped down as Tesla’s chairman, after tweeting what the SEC said was misleading information about a potential transaction to take the company private; the settlement also required that any Musk tweets about the company’s finance be reviewed by lawyers. (He continues to flout SEC rules, failing to notify the agency immediately last month when he passed the threshold of owning 5 percent of Twitter’s shares. The 11-day delay in that declaration may have netted him $156 million, experts say — since shares shot up after investors learned of his purchases.)

    On nonfinancial subjects, Musk, who has nearly 81 million followers, often punches down in his tweets, displaying very little empathy. He called a British caver who helped to rescue trapped young Thai divers “a pedo guy” (beating a defamation suit over the slur but adding to his reputation as a bully). In February, he tweeted, then deleted, a meme comparing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler.

Let’s be truthful here: a lot of Twitter users compared Mr Trudeau to der Führer! The Prime Minister’s use of arbitrary and dictatorial orders to fight COVID-19 and to stifle protest aren’t exactly the actions one would normally attribute to a free and democratic government.

    Perhaps not coincidentally, allegations of incidents involving racism and sexism at Tesla have been common — standing out even by tech-world’s low standards. A female engineer who sued Tesla, claiming “unwanted and pervasive harassment,” reported that one area in a Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif., was known to women as the “predator zone.” Black workers have claimed that White workers at that same factory referred to another area as “the plantation.” Like many trolls, Musk says his critics — both those on Twitter and those who sue him — should be more “thick-skinned.” He used that phrase in message to factory workers, some of whom had raised concerns about racial harassment.

After a couple more paragraphs in which the author tells us what a scumbag Mr Musk is – and I am not a fan of Mr Musk myself – we get to this:

    Musk calls himself a “free-speech absolutist,” but like many “free speech” advocates, he willfully ignores that private companies are free to establish some limits on their platforms. He hasn’t learned from the folks who left Facebook and subsequently raised alarms about the harms the platform can cause teenage girls and other users. Or even from Dick Costolo or Evan Williams, former CEOs of Twitter, both of whom eventually realized how pervasive and harmful online harassment is. (“I wish I could turn back the clock and go back to 2010 and stop abuse on the platform by creating a very specific bar for how to behave on the platform,” Costolo said in 2017.) Co-founder Williams even went on to build a new company for sharing information, Medium, because he regretted the way Twitter, Facebook and other platforms had turned into free-fire zones. Lots of tech leaders — though not Musk — are turning against “free speech” models that end up letting the loudest, most extreme and hateful voices win, driving others off the platforms.

No one sees everything on Twitter; people see the tweets of those they follow, or tweets to which one of their followers responds or likes or retweets. But it’s simple: if Miss Pao thinks that “the loudest, most extreme and hateful voices win, (and are) driving others off the platforms,” then Twitter might lose users and the company lose value; Mr Musk has bet against that, and it is his money!

Of course, Twitter has, itself, driven off users, through its censorship of conservative views.

The Post itself did not say what Miss Pao wrote; the editors simply provided space for her to express her view independently. But one has to wonder: just how closely do the views of the editors of the Post adhere to Miss Pao’s opinion?

The New York Times, that paragon of freedom of speech and of the press, published OpEds celebrating Twitter’s banning of “misgendering” and “deadnaming” of transgender individuals, and even an OpEd entitled “Free Speech Is Killing Us. ”

The revolution which began with Rush Limbaugh and continued with the internet, and the ability of anyone to express his views more widely, ended the gatekeeping functions of the editors, and that’s something they just cannot stand. Now, anyone can say anything, without an editor to censor him. Twitter is, of course, the largest self publishing medium in the world, and now we have a part owner and board member who wants to issue less editorial restraint on users, and the credentialed media really, really, really don’t like that. Heaven forfend! Donald Trump might be allowed back on Twitter!

    Musk’s appointment to Twitter’s board shows that we need regulation of social-media platforms to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication. For starters, we need consistent definitions of harassment and of content that violates personal privacy. Most companies, I suspect, would welcome such regulations: They would give executives cover to do things they know should be done but which they are afraid to try, out of fear of political backlash or a revolt by some users. If platforms continue to push for growth at all costs — without such regulations — people will continue to be harmed. The people harmed will disproportionately be those who have been harmed for centuries — women and members of marginalized racial and ethnic groups. The people who benefit from unrestricted amplification of their views will also be the same people who have benefited from that privilege for centuries.

Freedom of speech and of the press is harmful, Miss Pao has just said. That she used her freedom of speech, and the Post’s freedom of the press to disseminate her view on the subject seems not to have occurred to her, or, if it did, she thought that what she said ought to be acceptable, and not deserving of censorship, or criticism.

Miss Pao, a child of privilege — her mother a researcher, her father a math professor, who was able to matriculate at Princeton, and, following that, go straight to Harvard Law School — is very, very concerned about “women and members of marginalized racial and ethnic groups,” sued — and lost! — a sex discrimination lawsuit against her former employer Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, yet, in an article attacking “incels,” or the “involuntarily celibate,” The Perverse Incentives That Help Incels Thrive in Tech, which she has linked on the main page of her website, she wrote, “We cannot allow employees to mobilize identity-based intolerance, much less against their own coworkers,” and yet she just attacked “the same people who have benefited from that privilege for centuries,” certainly identity-based intolerance on her part.

I get it: Miss Pao, specifically, and much of the left in general, do not like freedom of speech and freedom of the press when people of whom they do not approve use their First Amendment rights to express views to which the left are opposed.

References

References
↑1 Ellen K. Pao is a tech investor and advocate, the former CEO of reddit, and a cofounder and CEO of the diversity and inclusion nonprofit Project Include.
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The Washington Post makes itself ridiculous Democracy dies in political correctness

Seventy-six years after D-Day, British author J K Rowling enraged the left with her tweet suggesting that the word for “people who menstruate” is woman! Heaven forfend! Miss Rowling dared, dared! to suggest that menstruation is limited solely to women, that men can’t menstruate.

Yeah, I know: that’s pretty much what anyone would have said in the 20th century, and before, but last century’s people were just so unenlightened! Miss Rowling has been criticized as a TERF: trans-exclusionary radical feminist:

    So, first, a primer: TERF is an acronym meaning “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” While the term has become controversial over time, especially with its often hateful deployment on social media, it originally described a subgroup of feminists who believe that the interests of cisgender women (those who are born with vaginas) don’t necessarily intersect with those of transgender women (primarily those born with penises).

    To some feminists, that notion is obvious: the experience of having lived as male for any period of time matters. But some trans scholars and allies say that notion is in and of itself transphobic, since it means that trans women are somehow different from women, or that they’re not women at all.

And today we have the apparently very #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 Washington Post, kowtowing to modernism:

    Pregnant people at much higher risk of breakthrough covid, study shows

    By Amy Goldstein and Dan Keating | Thursday, March 31, 2022 | 6:00 AM EDT

    Pregnant people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus are nearly twice as likely to get covid-19 as those who are not pregnant, according to a new study that offers the broadest evidence to date of the odds of infections among vaccinated patients with different medical circumstances.

    The analysis, based on medical records of nearly 14 million U.S. patients since coronavirus immunization became available, found that pregnant people who are vaccinated have the greatest risk of developing covid among a dozen medical states, including being an organ transplant recipient and having cancer.

    The findings come on top of research showing that people who are pregnant or gave birth recently and became infected are especially prone to getting seriously ill from covid-19. And covid has been found to increase the risk of pregnancy complications, such as premature births.

There’s more at the original.

You know, I get it: the Post’s stylebook required “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women,” because it might just hurt some people’s precious little feelings, but I have to ask: how can the article authors, or the editors of the Post, expect readers to take this article, and the information it contains, seriously, when it was so obviously written unseriously? How many potential readers saw the headline, rolled their eyes, and just skipped it for something more intellectual, like the comics?

When I opened the article, there were 720 comments, and through as many as I skimmed, the vast, vast majority were commenting on the silliness of referring to “pregnant people”. One commenter, styling himself rwessel51, said, “I jumped from the headline straight to the comments.”

The information in the article was serious:

    The analysis found that the 110,000 pregnant individuals included in the study were 90 percent more likely to have been infected with coronavirus than the same number of people who were not pregnant. The next-highest risk — 80 percent greater — was among organ transplant recipients. The elevated risk among those two groups was higher than among patients with compromised immune systems, who had 60 percent greater odds of coronavirus infection.

People Women who were fully vaccinated either before or during their pregnancies had significantly less protection from contracting COVID-19, and more likely to have become seriously ill with the disease, than women who were not pregnant. That’s serious, and serious information, and much of it was just wasted because the Post descended into the silliness of political correctness.

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 Philadelphia Inquirer complains about television’s news coverage, while censoring the news themselves. Maybe the Inquirer ought to do some of that in-depth reporting themselves?

The maxim “If it bleeds, it leads” has long been a part of journalism. Many of the Google search returns for If it bleeds, it leads want to put that as something unique to television news broadcasts, but it long predates television news, and has frequently been used by newspapers as well.

We have often noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer, the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, doesn’t like to tell its readers the unvarnished truth, likes to censor what its readers see. The Inquirer only rarely reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. I’ve told the truth previously: unless the murder victim is someone already of note, or a cute little white girl, the editors of the Inquirer don’t care, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the murder of a young black man in Philadelphia is not news.  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 four separate stories; how many do the mostly black victims get?

And now, the Inquirer, with so few readers that circulation is paid for by a whopping 1.67% of what ought to be its metropolitan service area,[1]Full disclosure: even though I no longer live in the Keystone State, I am a digital subscriber to the Inquirer. and wants the public taxed to support it, is criticizing the media which do report the news the newspaper will not:

    A 35-year-old won’t let Tyrone Williams forget the day Action and Eyewitness News trucks rolled down his block.

    “I remember July 27, 1987, a Saturday, like it was yesterday,” Williams said, “because, at this time, I’m scarred for life from this stabbing.”

    Williams was 20 years old when a group of white men and teenagers attacked him and his family outside their Olney home. One of the attackers, he remembered, used the N-word before jumping his brother Barry and attempting to stab their mother. Williams was trying to protect her when a knife went into his torso, puncturing his lung.

    “I could’ve died,” Williams, now 55, recalled.

    His attackers targeted the family in a case of racist mistaken identity after they’d exchanged words with a different group of African American men and boys near the now-shuttered Fern Rock Theater, Williams said.

    There’s been trouble like this many times before. It’s just that no one bothered to report it. That was how Eyewitness News reporter Joyce Evans summed up coverage of the white-on-Black beating that put Williams in the hospital. When Action News’ Vernon Odom covered the same crime that evening, surviving footage described the area, then predominantly white, as “one of the town’s most racially explosive neighborhoods.”

There’s a lot more at the original, but this is the introduction to the story’s documenting that KYW-TV, Channel 3, the CBS local owned-and operated station, originated Eyewitness News in 1965, and WPVI-TV, Channel 6, the ABC local owned-and-operated station, began Action News in 1970.

    The institution of local broadcast news is a young one, but among the most ubiquitous in the United States. It’s a pair of routines that unfold each night: As Americans gather to wind down their days, the medium has worked to deepen racial tensions and reinforce racial stereotypes about communities of color.

    This format launched in Philadelphia, first with the birth of Eyewitness News in 1965, and then with Action News in 1970. Over the next few generations, the pervasive and seductive twin broadcasts would spread to stations across the country — and with them, negative narratives about neighborhoods that would effectively “other” certain groups based largely on race, class, and zip code.

    More than half a century later, the impact of this efficient and pioneering approach remains, but continues to be condemned as harmful, as critics call for a reimagining of stories that tell a fuller story of communities, one that more accurately captures the humanity and dignity of all who live there.

To what does the Inquirer object? It seems that local television stations do radical things like send cameras and reporters to local breaking news stories and, Heaven forfend! take pictures and video at the scene.

    There “when something blew up” could have been a tagline for the nightly programs that have defined local television news since 1965, when an up-and-coming Philadelphia news director named Al Primo rolled out the nation’s first episode of Eyewitness News.

    The new breed of local news would transform how Americans received the day’s headlines. It would even change the substance of the news itself. Before Eyewitness appeared on America’s small screens, local television news hardly existed, with national stories dominating the day’s headlines as anchors vied for spots at big-city network markets. And it was delivered largely behind a desk, by a suited white man in a series of passive sentences.

    Primo repackaged the day’s events as infotainment — a fast-paced series of vignettes delivered by a “news family,” complete with a male-female pair of attractive, bantering anchors and intrepid reporters interviewing sources on the scene.

    The station quickly climbed the ratings charts and inspired imitators nationwide. Soon, the networks were drawn to a new approach that hooked viewers with a mix of sensational headlines and emotional human interest stories.

Must’ve been what the audience wanted: the Inquirer itself reported that WPVI drew 287,000 viewers for it’s 6:00 PM local newscast, in February of 2018, and 163,000 for the 11:00 PM news show, while the newspaper had a circulation of 101,818 daily copies in May of 2019. WPVI, which has higher ratings than the other Philadelphia stations, is still only one of four.

Of course, local television news is free — although most people are paying for cable subscriptions — while newspapers cost money, but it would seem that a lot more people watch the local news than read the Inquirer. There is something to be said for providing your customers what they want.

    As local TV news ratings rose and ad earnings rolled in through the end of the 20th century, Philadelphia lost hundreds of thousands of white residents to the suburban locales seen in newcast commercials for four-door sedans, Ethan Allen bedroom sets, and real estate brokerages. Images of white families in tidy subdivisions and spacious homes broke up dispatches that more often than not cast the city and its Black residents in a negative light.

LOL! “(C)ommercials for four-door sedans, Ethan Allen bedroom sets, and real estate brokerages”? Kind of dripping with condescension there! Perhaps the author doesn’t believe that black Philadelphians might want Ethan Allen bedroom sets?

    Network executives had figured out how to extract news that entertained and attracted viewers with a familiar story line: An endless loop with scenes of dangerous urban streets.

    Most of the time, those cameramen were documenting crime in certain neighborhoods where poverty and decades of failed social policies had given way to higher rates of crime and population loss.

Note that the author was blaming “higher rates of crime and population loss” on “poverty and decades of failed social policies,” rather than the people, the criminals, committing the crimes! The not-so-subtle message: it’s not really their fault that they are out there shooting people.

Oddly enough, even though I grew up poor, I still knew that shooting people was wrong, and, amazingly enough, even though I owned a rifle and a shotgun as a teenager, I never shot anyone.

And here we come to the crux of the newspaper’s complaint, at least the crux other than Philadelphians paying more attention to television news than the paper:

    Longtime Action News reporter Mike Strug, who joined the station in 1966 and went onto spend four decades in local television news, recalled reporting shifts spent sitting in a police vehicle at the corner of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, waiting for a crime to occur. The working-class, multiracial neighborhood has struggled with drugs, addiction, violence, and poverty for decades.

    The format didn’t often encourage reporters to return to the scene of the crime, follow up on root causes or the lives affected, or document the good in complex neighborhoods like Kensington— where, just like everywhere else, people live, work, and play.

If Mr Strug spent nights sitting in a police car at Kensington and Allegheny, waiting for a crime to occur, doesn’t that say that a lot of crime occurs in that area? The Philadelphia Badlands are notorious enough to have a separate Wikipedia entry, and the Inquirer itself reported, on August 17, 2020, on the open air drug market there:

    In Philadelphia’s Kensington district, home to one of the largest open-air drug markets in the United States, crowds of sellers and buyers flock to corners as if there never were a pandemic.

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

The newspaper even included a photo of what appears, from the back, to be a man injecting drugs right out on Kensington Avenue, in front of SEPTA’s Allegheny Station.

Here’s where the Inquirer’s introspection fails: if television news doesn’t do much in the way of follow-up on crime stories, is that not a niche that the newspaper itself should fill? What we’ve actually seen is the paper trying to make martyrs out of 12-year-old Thomas J Siderio, Jr, who opened fire on the police, including trying to get the officer who shot and killed the punk himself killed, by investigating and publishing his name after Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw refused to disclose it for the officer’s safety, and 13-year-old Marcus Stokes, whom the paper falsely said “was fatally shot in North Philadelphia on his way to school“, when, in actuality, he was sitting in a parked, and possibly disabled, car, eleven blocks from his school, a quarter of an hour after he was supposed to be in school.

What we should see are stories in the newspaper about those shot and killed, where they lived, what their families were like, and how they lived their lives, but those types of stories seem limited to white victims like Jason Kutt and Samuel Collington. As of 2:19 PM EDT on Tuesday, March 29th, the paper has no such story on 15-year-old Sean Toomey, another supposedly innocent victim, gunned down in what was probably a wayward shot from another crime.

Of course, if the Inquirer actually reported in depth on the victims in Killadelphia’s combat zones, it would find that most of the victims were bad guys themselves, gang-bangers or wannabes, and, to be brutally honest, mostly black. That is something that Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar and Published Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes absolutely do not want to publicize.

As of Monday, March 28th, there have been 495 people reported as having been shot in the City of Brotherly Love, 373 of the victims being black (of which 55 were reported as being Hispanic), 116 white (of which 18 were reported as being Hispanic), 4 (including one listed as Hispanic) Asian, and 2 listed as being of unknown race.

It’s difficult to ignore those numbers: in a city that’s only 38.27% non-Hispanic black, 64.24% of all shooting victims are non-Hispanic black. Black Philadelphians including those who are Hispanic constitute 75.35% of all shooting victims.

The Inquirer laments that local television news is actually covering the news, but doesn’t cover the news in depth. Yet the paper itself not only ignores many of the stories superficially, but declines to cover the crime stories in depth, because those stories just don’t fit Teh Narrative.

References

References
↑1 Full disclosure: even though I no longer live in the Keystone State, I am a digital subscriber to the Inquirer.
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NBC News caught doctoring photo of ‘Lia’ Thomas

And the credentialed media drumbeat to validate the claim that ‘Lia’ Thomas, the University of Pennsylvania swimmer who now identifies as a woman is actually a woman continues. Born William Thomas, and ranked #562 as a male during his first three seasons on Penn’s men’s swim team, he’s now ranked #1 as a female, and won the NCAA Championship in the women’s 500 yard freestyle event.

First Twitter permanently banned Mark Margolis for saying that the ‘transgendered’ were a very small fraction of the population, which is objectively true — the Williams Institute guesstimated it at 0.6% of the population, and that organization also claims a higher percentage of the population are homosexual, 4.5%, than the Centers for Disease Control’s much lower figure[1]The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either … Continue reading — and that ‘transgendered’ “have a mental disorder.”

And now we have this, from the New York Post, one of the few credentialed media sources which covers the subject honestly:

    NBC takes heat for airbrush of Lia Thomas

    By Jon Levine | March 26, 2022 | 8:02 AM EDT

    Doctored photo of Will Thomas. Click to enlarge.

    An image of controversial transgender swimmer Lia Thomas that aired on The Today Show was manipulated to make her appear more feminine, experts said.

    “The edited image has definitely undergone some sort of softening and smoothing effect,” Jonathan Gallegos, a former White House director of digital content for President Trump, told The Post. “It’s clear this job was not done by a professional. This level of skin smoothing is a hallmark sign of an amateur job.”

    “Wow. That’s really bad,” said a photographer who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals from trans activists.

    Thomas — a biological male — made headlines last week after blowing fellow female competitors out of the water to win the 500-yard NCAA title.

    The allegedly doctored image of Thomas ran on The Today Show and posted to Twitter on March 17. The touched-up photo removed facial lines, skin discolorations, notable red impressions on her face caused by goggles, and blurred the adam’s apple. The show later ran the original photo — warts and all — in a clip posted to Twitter on March 18.

Undoctored photo of Will Thomas. Click to enlarge.

There’s more at the original. Even the Post goes along with the silly stylebook of referring to Mr Thomas by his made-up name and the feminine pronouns.

The differences between the two photos is subtle, but it is there. The most obvious change is in the coloration, as though it went through a filter, but the obvious question is: why would NBC News, purportedly a reliable journalistic source, alter a photo? The obvious answer is to present him as slightly more feminine than he is.

The credentialed media are attempting to influence the debate over whether girls can be boys and boys can be girls by using language tilted toward the idea that yes, people can change their sex.

Well, no, they can’t.

In the year 2525, if man is still alive, some anthropologist studying the United States prior to the devastation of World War III, is going to come across the grave of Mr Thomas. The records having all been destroyed, he will take accurate and scientific measurements of the remains. The soft tissues having long since decayed away, he’ll be dealing with the skeleton, and, taking measurements of the hip structure, he will write down in his notes, “The subject was male.” Probing more deeply, he gets lucky, and extracts a bit of DNA, examines it, and determines from the chromosomes, “The subject was male.”

Such will be objective determinations, based purely on science. The current claim, that ‘Lia’ Thomas is a woman, is based upon the entirely subjective claim by Mr Thomas that he feels like a woman.

Mr Thomas can claim to be a woman all he wants; as long as his claim is personal, and doesn’t infringe on other people’s rights, more power to him.

But his claim, having been taken seriously, has infringed on other people’s rights. He has robbed some real women swimmers of trophies, and the opportunity to swim in events for which they would otherwise have qualified were he not in the competition. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson avoided the question of how she would define a woman because she knew that the question would come before the Court sooner or later, with sooner being more probable, and that will result in a legal decision which will impact other people.

Every bird, every reptile, and every mammal have the ability to distinguish between males and females of their own species. Only human liberals have managed to educate that ability out of themselves.

References

References
↑1 The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either stating that they were ‘something else’ or declining to respond. The Williams Institute previously stated that 3.8% identify as LGTBQ.
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A very minor omission in The Philadelphia Inquirer The difference between journalism and journolism

I use the term ‘journolism’ to refer to heavily biased reporting. It’s not a misspelling: my of 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. Many times biased journalism comes not from stating something false, but the omission of pertinent information, and boy, did Philadelphia Inquirer writers Ximena Conde, John Duchneskie, and Aseem Shukla do that here!

    Chart from The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 25, 2022. Click to enlarge.

    Philly had its largest one-year population decline since 1975: See charts that show the factors

    The drop in total population follows almost a decade of population growth for Philadelphia.

    by Ximena Conde, John Duchneskie, and Aseem Shukla | Friday, March 25, 2022

    Philadelphia lost almost 25,000 residents in a year, according to new census data looking at a full year of the pandemic released Thursday.

    The drop in total population between July 2020 and July 2021 is the largest one-year decline since 1975 and follows almost a decade of population growth for Philadelphia, which topped 1.6 million residents in 2020. The losses were driven primarily by the residents who moved out of the city, which exceeded the number of people moving into Philly.

    In the U.S. Census Bureau’s 12-month snapshot, Philly saw the highest disparity since 2001 between people moving in and those moving out. That difference led to a net loss of more than 28,000 residents, doubling what census numbers showed for the year prior.

There’s a lot more at the original, which you can read by following the link embedded in the headline.

The article gives some of the reasons for the city’s guesstimated population loss:

  1. A desire to flee crowded urban centers, something which will disappoint the global warming climate change activists, who see pushing more people into urban areas as a way to decrease CO2 emissions due to automobile traffic.
  2. Young adults moving back in with parents, in part due to the recession caused by responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Philadelphia persisted with restrictions after many other areas had dropped them, though much of that occurred after the data for this study was collected.
  3. More affluent residents leaving to second homes; the article makes no mention as to why such people wouldn’t be counted among current population numbers if they did not sell their city homes.
  4. City dwellers leaving cosmopolitan life in exchange for green space. The COVID-19 shutdowns and lockdowns produced a greater desire for having your own backyard.
  5. Immigration into the city decreased while President Trump was in office, but the article suggests that it will increase again now that Joe Biden is in office.
  6. A significant narrowing of the gap between live births and deaths.

The article writers noted that the population estimates are not as accurate as the actual census counts, so the data are at least questionable.

But despite the “few possible factors driving the Philly departures” given, one was conspicuous in its absence: the writers never mentioned Philadelphia’s huge crime rate! 2020, the first year of the panicdemic pandemic, saw the city’s homicide numbers jump from 356 in 2019 — which was already the highest since 2007 — to 499, good for second place all time, and only one short of the record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990. Then, in 2021, that record was blown to smithereens, with 562 murders.

The police were hobbled by a social and racial justice prosecutor who is more interested in finding malfeasance among the police than he is with prosecuting actual criminals, the idiotic #BlackLivesMatter protests which further alienated the population from the police, and the Inquirer itself, which, under “anti-racist” publisher Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes and new Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar, has editorial policies very much in tune with District Attorney Larry Krasner’s philosophy of soft-peddling crime stories because they might negatively impact and stereotype the black community in the city.

According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, there have been 115 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, March 24th, three more than the same date last year, meaning that Philadelphia is on a path to come very close to, and possibly exceeding, the 562 record. Fortunately, the latest man killed was a criminal attempting to rob a Dollar General store, shot dead by the store manager after the would-be robber made threatening moves with what turned out to be a toy gun in his jacket pocket.

As Robert Stacy McCain would say, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

    In other gun violence Thursday night, a 15-year-old boy was shot in the head and right side of his body around 9:10 p.m. in the city’s Wissinoming section, police said.

    The shooting occurred in the area of Mulberry and Devereaux Streets. The teen was taken by police to Jefferson Torresdale Hospital. He was reported in extremely critical condition.

    Police received preliminary information that two males suspected in the shooting also attempted a gunpoint robbery a short time earlier in Mayfair.

Philadelphians see stories like this every day, perhaps not in the Inquirer, but the local television stations carry the stories. In a city in which the quality of life is spiraling downward, in which the voters have just re-elected a softer-than-soft on crime District Attorney, in which Dollar General store managers feel the need to carry a firearm to protect his employees and himself because, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away, how is it that three well-educated and well-paid Inquirer reporters can simply omit the fact that Philadelphia is wracked with crime and violence as one possible reason that people are moving away?

Well, perhaps I’m being unfair in blaming the three reporters; it’s entirely possible that they did include it, but Editor Gabriel Escobar or one of his minions blue penciled it.[1]Yes, I know: I’m showing my age! But, whoever is responsible is showing the journolism of the Inquirer, while Mr Escobar and Miss Hughes and the Lenfest Institute which owns the paper scratch their heads, wondering why the newspaper is losing readers.

References

References
↑1 Yes, I know: I’m showing my age!
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The New York Times tells us that “America Has a Free Speech Problem”, without noting that they are part of the problem

In 1971, President Richard Nixon sought a restraining order to prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from printing more of the so-called “Pentagon Papers,” technically the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, a classified history and assessment of American policy and operations in the Vietnam war. The Times and the Post fought the injunctions in court, the Times winning in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). The Times was all about the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press.

So, the Times is all for Freedom of Speech and of the Press, right? Friday saw this from the Editorial Board:

    America Has a Free Speech Problem

    by The Editorial Board | Friday, March 18, 2022

    For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

    This social silencing, this depluralizing of America, has been evident for years, but dealing with it stirs yet more fear. It feels like a third rail, dangerous. For a strong nation and open society, that is dangerous.

    How has this happened? In large part, it’s because the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture. Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.

    Many Americans are understandably confused, then, about what they can say and where they can say it. People should be able to put forward viewpoints, ask questions and make mistakes and take unpopular but good-faith positions on issues that society is still working through — all without fearing cancellation.

There’s a lot more from the original, but either the Editorial Board have a very short memory, or they are hypocrites.

    Free Speech Is Killing Us

    Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?

    By Andrew Marantz[1]Andrew Marantz (@AndrewMarantz) is a staff writer for The New Yorker. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the … Continue reading | October 4, 2019 | 6:01 AM EDT

    There has never been a bright line between word and deed. Yet for years, the founders of Facebook and Twitter and 4chan and Reddit — along with the consumers obsessed with these products, and the investors who stood to profit from them — tried to pretend that the noxious speech prevalent on those platforms wouldn’t metastasize into physical violence. In the early years of this decade, back when people associated social media with Barack Obama or the Arab Spring, Twitter executives referred to their company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” Sticks and stones and assault rifles could hurt us, but the internet was surely only a force for progress.

    No one believes that anymore. Not after the social-media-fueled campaigns of Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump; not after the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va.; not after the massacres in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and a Walmart in a majority-Hispanic part of El Paso. The Christchurch shooter, like so many of his ilk, had spent years on social media trying to advance the cause of white power. But these posts, he eventually decided, were not enough; now it was “time to make a real life effort post.” He murdered 52 people.

That the editors of the Times considered this an important article is demonstrated by the title graphic, a bit more ornate than is typical. It was spread full sized across the screen, taking up both the width and depth of my fairly large-sized monitor. This was a can’t-not-notice display, something the editors use to grab your attention.

A couple more paragraphs down, and Mr Marantz said this:

    The question is where this leaves us. Noxious speech is causing tangible harm. Yet this fact implies a question so uncomfortable that many of us go to great lengths to avoid asking it. Namely, what should we — the government, private companies or individual citizens — be doing about it?

Mr Marantz’ article continued with several suggestions, which boiled down to one thing: the government should set up some sort of approved publication space to tell us the truth. What a great idea!

Mr Marantz’s OpEd piece followed, eleven months after, Chad Malloy’s[2]Chad Malloy is a male who believes that he is really a woman, and goes by the made-up name of ‘Parker Malloy.’ article claiming that a restriction on speech actually promotes freedom of speech:

    How Twitter’s Ban on ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech

    Trans people are less likely to speak up if they know they’re going to be constantly told they don’t exist.

    by Parker Malloy[3]While The First Street Journal’s Stylebook states that the pronouns and name appropriate to a person’s sex at birth are to be used, we do not change direct quotes, and in The New York … Continue reading | November 29, 2018

    In September, Twitter announced changes to its “hateful conduct” policy, violations of which can get users temporarily or permanently barred from the site. The updates, an entry on Twitter’s blog explained, would expand its existing rules “to include content that dehumanizes others based on their membership in an identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct target.” A little more than a month later, the company quietly rolled out the update, expanding the conduct page from 374 to 1,226 words, which went largely unnoticed until this past week.

    While much of the basic framework stayed the same, the latest version leaves much less up for interpretation. Its ban on “repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone” was expanded to read: “We prohibit targeting individuals with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”

    The final sentence, paired with the fact that the site appeared poised to actually enforce its rules, sent a rumble through certain vocal corners of the internet. To trans people, it represented a recognition that our identity is an accepted fact and that to suggest otherwise is a slur. But to many on the right, it reeked of censorship and “political correctness.”

    Twitter is already putting the policy into effect. Last week, it booted Meghan Murphy, a Canadian feminist who runs the website Feminist Current. Ms. Murphy hasn’t exactly supported trans people — especially trans women. She regularly calls trans women “he” and “him,” as she did referring to the journalist and trans woman Shon Faye in a 2017 article. In the run-up to her suspension, Ms. Murphy tweeted that “men aren’t women.” While this is a seeming innocuous phrase when considered without context, the “men” she was referring to were trans women.

There’s more at the original.

The policy to which Mr Malloy referred would apply to this site as well, as we do not lie here: males are males and females are females, and the sexes simply cannot be changed.

That, however, is not my point in this article. My point is that the Times very deliberately published OpEd pieces calling freedom of speech sometimes harmful — sometimes meaning when conservative opinions are expressed — and celebrating the silencing of some speech. Were I to submit this article to the Times, or any other organ of the credentialed media, for publication, it would be disallowed because I referred to Mr Malloy as Mr Malloy, while the stylebooks used by almost all organs of the credentialed media insist on using the honorifics, pronouns and names preferred by the ‘transgendered’ rather than doing something really radical and telling the truth.

Back to the editorial first cited:

    However you define cancel culture, Americans know it exists and feel its burden. In a new national poll commissioned by Times Opinion and Siena College, only 34 percent of Americans said they believed that all Americans enjoyed freedom of speech completely. The poll found that 84 percent of adults said it is a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem that some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.

    This poll and other recent surveys from the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation reveal a crisis of confidence around one of America’s most basic values. Freedom of speech and expression is vital to human beings’ search for truth and knowledge about our world. A society that values freedom of speech can benefit from the full diversity of its people and their ideas. At the individual level, human beings cannot flourish without the confidence to take risks, pursue ideas and express thoughts that others might reject.

    Most important, freedom of speech is the bedrock of democratic self-government. If people feel free to express their views in their communities, the democratic process can respond to and resolve competing ideas. Ideas that go unchallenged by opposing views risk becoming weak and brittle rather than being strengthened by tough scrutiny. When speech is stifled or when dissenters are shut out of public discourse, a society also loses its ability to resolve conflict, and it faces the risk of political violence.

Also see: William Teach: NY Times Is Suddenly Very Concerned Over Loss Of Free Speech

Really? Tell me more, please! As we previously noted, The Philadelphia Inquirer, in one of its first stories on Will Thomas, the male University of Pennsylvania swimmer who now claims to be female, calls himself “Lia,’ and swims for Penn’s women’s team, deleted all of the comments from readers noting that Mr Thomas is male, not female, documenting some of those deleted comments with screen captures. The Inquirer had previously closed comments on most articles but left them open on sports stories, and Mr Thomas’ swimming victories are sports stories.

Oops! I guess that didn’t work for them!

The Times’ Editorial Board can tell us all they want how they support freedom of speech and of the press, but the truth is that they support their freedom of speech and their freedom of the press. Editors and publishers in general absolutely hate the fact that the rise of the internet took away their ‘gatekeeping’ function, and now anybody can publish whatever he wishes, without having to first be approved by someone else.

References

References
↑1 Andrew Marantz (@AndrewMarantz) is a staff writer for The New Yorker. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.”
↑2 Chad Malloy is a male who believes that he is really a woman, and goes by the made-up name of ‘Parker Malloy.’
↑3 While The First Street Journal’s Stylebook states that the pronouns and name appropriate to a person’s sex at birth are to be used, we do not change direct quotes, and in The New York Times’ original Mr Malloy is referred to by his false name.
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The Patricians are just different from us! CNN's disgraced and fired President to get $10 million payoff to keep his mouth shut

The Patricians just aren’t like you and me. If you get canned for some reason — I’m retired now, so I’m beyond the ability of anyone to fire — you might, might! be able able to get a few hundred bucks a week in unemployment benefits. If you are terminated for cause, such as an inappropriate sexual relationship with a subordinate, something which could expose your company to a sexual harassment claim, you might not be able to get even unemployment compensation.

But life is different for the elites. From Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion:

Former CNN Chief Jeff Zucker to Get $10 Million Settlement, Agrees Not to Sue

“if WarnerMedia keeps their side of the deal, in the next week to 10 days, Zucker will receive a one-time payment of around $10 million”

Posted by Mike LaChance | Thursday, March 10, 2022 | 1:00 PM EST

CNN’s former president Jeff Zucker is getting a major golden parachute from his former employer, with the agreement not to sue them.

It’s a pretty good deal for a man who basically destroyed the network’s ratings and brand.

FOX News reports:

Ex-CNN chief Jeff Zucker to receive roughly $10 million from WarnerMedia, won’t sue: report

Former CNN boss Jeff Zucker has reportedly agreed to a deal with CNN parent company WarnerMedia over his swift exit from the network that will award him roughly $10 million in exchange for not suing after being forced to resign last month.

“Details of the confidential package are obviously being kept close to the vest, but sources tell us Zucker made the decision several weeks ago to accept what had been put on the table by his old bosses at the time of his cable news exit. What we do know is that, if WarnerMedia keeps their side of the deal, in the next week to 10 days, Zucker will receive a one-time payment of around $10 million,” Deadline’s Dominic Patten and Ted Johnson wrote, citing “sources.”

It seems that Mr Zucker’s girlfriend, who was not initially fired forced to resign, but quit a couple of weeks later, is also getting a golden parachute of a cool million.

As we have noted previously, Mr Zucker had a net worth of $60 million, plus an annual base salary of $6.3 million, before any bonuses — and how he could ever qualify for a bonus the way CNN’s ratings tanked is beyond me, but he certainly did get them — and Miss Gollust wasn’t exactly living paycheck-to-paycheck herself, with an estimated net worth of $5 million.

It seems that CNN has some dirty laundry the network wants desperately to keep out of the public’s sight. Given that the relationship between the two has been reported, by multiple sources, as an “open secret,” it has to be asked why CNN forced them out over that, rather than the ratings disaster the network had become.

Remember: the excuse for the resignation given was that Mr Zucker and Miss Gollust, both of whom are divorced, failed to report the relationship. But the head of human resources for CNN, Lisa Greene, is also an Executive Vice President, as was Miss Gollust, and the idea that someone who hobnobs with the network’s top brass didn’t know the “open secret” everyone else did is pretty difficult to swallow.

So, what does Mr Zucker know that CNN is so desperate to keep quiet?

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The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to make a 12-year-old punk who shot at police some kind of martyr.

Thomas J Siderio Jr

I have previously noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t like reporting on the not good guys who get gunned down in the City of Brotherly Love, but when an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl gets killed, the paper is full of stories. I noted when the Inquirer and reporter Anna Orso tried to make an innocent victim out of young Marcus Stokes. In her story on the impact that the murder of Marcus Stokes had on E Washington Rhodes School, Miss Orso wrote, very specifically, that young Mr Stokes “was fatally shot in North Philadelphia on his way to school“, but the evidence, as printed in the Inquirer, indicates that he was not actually on his way to school. He was sitting, with five other young people, in a parked, and possibly disabled, car, many blocks away, fifteen minutes after he was supposed to be in his homeroom at school.

Miss Orso knew those facts; she is listed as either the sole or one of two authors in each of the articles I have cited. Did no one, including she, ever ask themselves any questions about why these young people, “including other Rhodes students“, were sitting in that car, ask themselves what they were doing there?

Miss Orso isn’t a stupid woman. She was graduated from Pennsylvania State University, a highly selective college, that doesn’t accept dummies. She isn’t inexperienced, having worked in journalism for seven years now, including four with the Inquirer.

Now, the Inquirer is trying the same thing with Thomas Siderio, Jr, the 12-year-old shot by the police after Mr Siderio opened fire on them:

    South Philly community mourns TJ Siderio, 12-year-old fatally shot by Philadelphia police officer

    Friends and family mourned mourned TJ this week, holding each other up as the waves of grief often took them off their feet.

    by Rodrigo Torrejón | Thursday, March 10, 2022

    Some would call him Tommy. Others Tom Dog. But most in Thomas Siderio’s tight-knit constellation of friends and family just knew him as TJ.

    A name was important, Pastor Mandell Gross said Thursday morning at Lighthouse Baptist Church in South Philadelphia. It was important during TJ’s short life. And it was important as dozens of TJ’s loved ones gathered at his funeral to say their final goodbyes.

    One by one, Gross asked the young people there, TJ’s friends, to say their names. Though he lamented the reason the community had gathered, Gross told the young people there to mourn the loss that they must try to come together in brighter days too. In TJ’s name.

At that point, the paper included a photo of Mr Siderio, one obviously taken several years earlier.

Four plainclothes officers were in the area, due to the high crime rate in the neighborhood. When they spotted Mr Siderio, who was visibly armed, they illuminated their unmarked car, the boy then shot at the officers, and took off running. One officer was injured in both eyes from flying glass, one remained in the vehicle with him, and two others got out to pursue the perp.

    A lawyer for TJ’s father previously disputed the accusation that the child fired the gun, calling it “egregious speculation” that has not been confirmed by evidence. Video and audio recordings analyzed by The Inquirer show that the gun that police say TJ tossed after shooting into the police car was found five doors down — or roughly 60 feet — from where he was fatally shot.

Sixty feet equals twenty yards, a distance a physically fit 12-year-old boy, who was already at a dead run, could cover in two seconds, but the Inquirer does not mention that.

The sappy article concluded:

    Next to his casket was a sign with a final, loving message from his parents, Thomas Siderio and Desirae Frame.

The elder Mr Siderio, inmate number NS5455, is behind bars at the State Correctional Institute Coal Township, three years into a sentence with at least two more years to serve on gun charges stemming from a murder in 2017. He has prior convictions for resisting arrest, assault, and the attempted theft of a motorcycle. He wasn’t there to have kept his son from running with a bad crowd and carrying a weapon, but, then again, as a convicted felon, he might not have been the best role model.

    “Rest In Peace TJ my son. Love Daddy and Mommy always and forever.”

    After the short sermon finished Thursday morning, the pallbearers gathered to carry TJ to his final resting place at Fernwood Cemetery. Most of the pallbearers were young, just a few years older than TJ.

    They were the friends that became TJ’s family on the streets of South Philadelphia. And with TJ’s face on their chests, the friends gathered for one last picture together, holding the young boy’s memory in their hearts.

An alleged but unconfirmed photo of Thomas Siderio Jr.

Give me a break! Young Mr Siderio was armed, with a stolen laser-sight equipped 9mm Taurus semiautomatic handgun, and he responded to the police lights by raising the weapon and firing it at the cops. This is not the sweet little angel the Inquirer has tried to make him out to be!

What was 12-year-old Mr Siderio doing out on the street, armed and ready to kill? Where was his mother, that she allowed him to have a stolen firearm, that she allowed him to go out into the streets armed? The newspaper’s Editorial Board has already opined that the killing of a young, gun-toting punk who opened fire on police young Mr Siderio should “should make every Philadelphian outraged,” blaming the city for not having safer and saner recreational outlets for boys like Mr Siderio, and blaming the state government for not passing virtue-signaling gun control laws that infringe on the constitutional rights of law abiding citizens but do absolutely nothing to stop criminals, blaming everybody but his father, who provided such a poor role model, and his mother, who didn’t supervise her son, and the boy himself, who knew he was breaking the law, and who took a shot at the police.

Let me be plain about this: had young Mr Siderio gotten away, he’d still be out on the streets, still be carrying a firearm, and still be a menace to every law-abiding citizen in the city. In just two days, March 8th and 9th, 13 people were shot in the city, and three of them died, all of them black males, but the Inquirer didn’t care enough about any of them to have a single story on any of them. I guess there wasn’t anything there out of which the newspaper could portray the victims as somehow innocents or heroic.

Young Mr Siderio is no hero, and he is no martyr. He was a young punk who thought he was a big, tough man, and had he escaped, would almost certainly amassed a long and violent criminal record. It is unfortunate that the manner of his death will cost a good police officer his job, and possible criminal charges, but the odds are high that Philadelphia is better off with Mr Siderio having gone to his eternal reward.