Category Archives: Journolism

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At what point do purposeful omissions become deliberate lies? The Lexington Herald-Leader, the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, and the attempt to deceive the public

On 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.

I have done several searches, over time, to find the McClatchy Mugshot Policy written down as an official communique from the company, without success. I have found it specified in this tweet from Nicole Manna, who described herself as an “Investigative reporter for the @StarTelegram focusing on criminal justice. Dog mom. Florida native. Olive enthusiast. Tip me, please: nmanna@star-telegram.com”. I have reproduced the photo of the e-mail, and you can click on the image to enlarge it for easier reading.

The Kansas City Star, a McClatchy newspaper, noted in this article that “The Star’s parent company, McClatchy, announced this summer that it would stop publishing mugshots unless approved by an editor”, but while I was able to copy that much from a Google search, the article is “subscriber-only content”, so I cannot access it. My digital subscription to the Lexington Herald-Leader, another McClatchy newspaper, does not give me access to other company sites.

The Columbia Journalism Review published an article by Cory Hutchins on October 24, 2018, “Mugshot galleries might be a web-traffic magnet. Does that justify publishing them?“, asking if the publication of mugshots of accused but not convicted criminal suspects is ethical; this was before the McClatchy Mugshot Policy went into effect.

On October 20, 2021, the American Press Institute welcomed Kamaria Roberts to the fold, saying in part:

During her time at McClatchy, Roberts served as a co-chair to the news division’s first Advisory Team, which focused on diversity and inclusion efforts in newsrooms and in the content that they produce. In that role, she and nine other colleagues delivered significant recommendations of many consequential initiatives, including McClatchy’s mugshot policy and the company’s style change to capitalize Black in references to people and culture.

Without an official link to the policy from McClatchy itself, that’s the best documentation up with which I can come, but I believe it sufficient to prove the point.

I documented in “The Lexington Herald-Leader does race-based reporting” how the newspaper’s digital version of “2 died in a robbery, gunfight spree in Lexington. Shooter pleads in 1 case” declined to print the mugshot of Jemel Barber, who pleaded guilty to “one of two fatal shootings during a string of robberies and gunfights in Lexington,” while, in “Hour-long standoff at Stanton gas station leads to arrest of sexual assault suspect“, published only four minutes after the update on Mr Barber’s conviction, the paper did publish the mugshot, a very disrespectful looking photo, of Craig Worm, 50, an arrested but not convicted sexual assault suspect.

It was on that story that I left a comment noting that the Herald-Leader has been publishing the photos of white suspects, but not black convicted murderers. Peter Baniak, the editor, certainly has noted the point, as have reporters Chris Leach and Jeremy Chisenhall, but, as of Monday, November 22, 2021, the photo is still on the story.

The paper did not stop when notified: on Thursday, November 18th, the web edition had Christopher Leach’s story, “Kentucky woman ran to neighbor for help. Boyfriend charged over what happened next.“, with this photo of suspect Mark Anthony Hoover, while on Friday, November 19th, Mr Leach’s story “Corbin man charged after allegedly beating father with pipe” included this photo.[1]For documentary purposes, I have included both the original link to the picture as well as my download of it, stored on this site. I do this in case the paper deletes the photo.

This is hardly something that has happened in just the past week or so. I noted, half a year ago, that the Lexington Herald-Leader does not like posting photographs of accused criminals, even when the suspect is an accused murderer and is still at large, and publishing the photo might help the police capture him. something which ought to have triggered the “Is there an urgent threat to the community?” exception in the mugshot policy.

The McClatchy policy states that any exceptions to the general policy of not publishing mugshots “must be approved by an editor.” The newspaper lists four (non-sports) editors who might be responsible for taking such decisions:[2]This list may be out of date; looking at it, I noted that reporter Daniel Desrochers, who has moved on, is still listed, while Christopher Leach, a recent hire, is not.

  • Peter Baniak, Executive Editor and General Manager;
  • Deedra Lawhead, Deputy Editor, Digital;
  • Brian Simms, Deputy Editor, Presentation:, or
  • John Stamper, Deputy Editor, Accountability

So, who is approving printing all of the mugshots of white suspects, or white convicted criminals, yet not wanting those of black suspects or convicted criminals published?

But more important than the “who” is the “why”. The answer to that may be found in The Sacramento Bee, the lead McClatchy newspaper, which led the way on the no mugshot policy. While much of the current policy, as stated, can be found in this article, this paragraph includes something not in the stated policy:

Publishing these photographs and videos disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

It’s that last, “perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community,” that is the key. The Herald-Leader, or so it seems to me, does not want to perpetuate those stereotypes, and, whether intentionally or otherwise, seems to be trying to reverse those stereotypes. From the Bee again:

(T)he San Francisco Police Department earlier this month announced it will no longer release mugshots, unless the public is in imminent danger.

“This policy emerges from compelling research suggesting that the widespread publication of police booking photos in the news and on social media creates an illusory correlation for viewers that fosters racial bias and vastly overstates the propensity of Black and brown men to engage in criminal behavior,” Police Chief William Scott said in a statement.

I will admit it: I fail to see how publishing the facts “overstates” anything.

The Lexington Police Department’s Shooting investigations page reports, as of November 19, 2021, 120 non-fatal shootings in Fayette County. That page lists the race of the victims, something the Homicides page does not.

Of 120 shooting victims, 19 are listed as white, 11 as Hispanic, leaving 90 victims being listed as black. That’s an even 75.00%, in a city that the 2020 Census lists as being only 14.7% black. While the number of shootings which have resulted in arrests is really too low from which to draw numbers, we do know that most murders and attempted murders are intraracial, not interracial, in nature. In the vast majority of cases, white people kill other white people, and black people kill other black people. Unless there has been a substantial deviation from that norm, something which neither the Herald-Leader nor any other Kentucky media have reported, 75% of all shootings in the city having black victims means that a similarly high percentage of the shooters are black as well.

So what are the editors of that newspaper 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 percentage of the population in that area is very low, when you get to the city of Lexington, the numbers say that no, that’s not the case.

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.

 

References

References
↑1 For documentary purposes, I have included both the original link to the picture as well as my download of it, stored on this site. I do this in case the paper deletes the photo.
↑2 This list may be out of date; looking at it, I noted that reporter Daniel Desrochers, who has moved on, is still listed, while Christopher Leach, a recent hire, is not.
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Lock him up!

Aramis Murray, 30, is not your quintessential good guy. Despite his claim that it was self-defense, a jury in Fayette County convicted Mr Murray of murder:

    ‘Senseless act.’ Jury convicts man in Lexington murder despite self-defense argument

    by Jeremy Chisenhall | Wednesday, November 17, 2021 | 3:49 PM EST | Updated: Thursday, November 18, 2021 | 8:13 AM EST

    Aramis Murray, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

    A Fayette County jury on Wednesday convicted a man of murder in a Lexington shooting death despite the defendant’s claim that he fired in self-defense.

    Aramis Murray, 30, stood trial this week for murder in the death of 30-year-old Jason Lemer Smith in April 2018. Murray claimed self-defense, alleging that he believed Smith had a gun. But prosecutors said in court there’s no evidence to support Murray’s claim and this shooting was “another senseless act of gun violence.”

    The jury agreed with prosecutors and convicted Murray after several hours of deliberation Wednesday.

    Murray shot Smith on the front porch of Smith’s home, a residence on Corral Street where Murray had also been staying, according to court testimony. Prosecutors alleged that Smith was trying to confront Murray because Murray threatened his and Smith’s girlfriends with a gun. Murray had been arguing with the women and making threats to them all day, prosecutors said.

    Jurors had been told they could convict Murray of murder, second-degree manslaughter or reckless homicide if they found him guilty.

There’s more at the original. The mugshot in this article was not in the Herald-Leader website.

The Lexington Herald-Leader used to publish mugshots of accused criminals, and did so on April 23, 2018, before the adoption of the McClatchy Mugshot Policy. The newspaper used a slightly older mugshot, dated February 22, 2018, rather than the one taken the date of his reported arrest. The jail website also has mugshots of Mr Murray dated July 27, 2017, December 21, 2017, and December 28, 2017.

Mr Murray, it seems, had a bad habit of getting himself arrested. Sadly, whatever got him arrested on February 22, 2018, didn’t keep him behind bars on April 23, 2018, when he murdered Jason Smith. If he had been behind bars on that day, Mr Smith would (probably) still be alive today. More, Mr Murray would not be looking at spending the next 25 years of his miserable life, the sentence recommended by the jury, in prison. Lenient treatment, in the end, did Mr Murray no favor.

This is the problem with the left’s continual complaints about “mass incarceration.” The really bad guys are almost always the people previously treated leniently by the system, the people who could have, and should have, already been behind bars for a lesser term. when they committed the acts that got them the big time sentences.

The mugshot? Why of course the newspaper didn’t print the photo of a convicted killer! The photo of an accused, but not yet tried or convicted suspect, a white suspect, is still up on the newspaper’s website, because they engage in race-based reporting.

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The Lexington Herald-Leader does race-based reporting A white man accused, but not convicted, has his photo published; a black man who has pleaded guilty to killing a man, no mugshot published

Jemel Barber. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Jemel Barber is not a nice guy. The Lexington Herald-Leader reported this afternoon that Mr Barber has pleaded guilty to manslaughter:

    2 died in a robbery, gunfight spree in Lexington. Shooter pleads in 1 case

    by Jeremy Chisenhall | November 16, 2021 | 7:44 AM EST | Updated: 4:16 PM EST

    A Central Kentucky man has pleaded guilty in one of two fatal shootings during a string of robberies and gunfights in Lexington.

    Jemel Barber, 22, pleaded guilty last week to manslaughter and second-degree robbery more than four years after he shot and killed 40-year-old Tyrece Clark, according to court records. He was initially charged with murder and first-degree robbery, but his charges were amended down after a plea agreement was reached.

    Barber told police after the deadly shooting on July 23, 2017, that he showed up at a Lexington motel with a rifle, intending to rob Clark of narcotics and/or money, according to court records.

    But Clark started shooting after Barber knocked on his door, Barber told police, so he shot back. The plea agreement was reached after attorneys disputed whether or not Barber could claim self-defense. Barber maintained that Clark was the aggressor and his attorneys continued to blame Clark as the court case played out.

Prosecutors recommended a sentence of 15 years on manslaughter, and 10 years on the robbery conviction; sentencing is scheduled for February 11, 2022. Not yet determined is whether the sentences will run concurrently or consecutively.

There’s more at the original, but what is not at the original is the convicted killer’s mugshot. The McClatchy Mugshot policy holds that:

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.

Mr barber, however, is not someone who has been arrested but not convicted; he’s guilty.

Nor was he a very nice guy prior to his latest arrest. The Fayette County Detention Center page on Mr Barber had five separate mugshots of the malefactor, dated September 28, 2017, November 14, 2017, February 14, 2018, April 19, 2018, and then his last arrest, on May 2, 2018. Born November 25, 1998, he was just 18 when he was first arrested, at least as an adult, and wasn’t yet 19 when arrested the last time. He was still 18 when he killed Tyrece Clark.

However, while the Herald-Leader kept Mr Barber’s mugshot out of their website, they applied their mugshot policy rather inconsistently in the next story:

    Hour-long standoff at Stanton gas station leads to arrest of sexual assault suspect

    by Christopher leach | November 16, 2021 | 4:20 PM EST

    Craig Worm, photo by Stanton Police department, and published in the Lexington Herald-Leader, November 16, 2021.

    A sexual assault suspect from South Dakota was arrested at a gas station in Powell County after a nearly hour-long standoff with police Tuesday morning, according to a Facebook post by Stanton Police Department.

    Police said they were called to Airport Market in Stanton just before 8:30 a.m. for reports of a man who was firing a gun inside the store. When police and deputies with the Powell County Sheriff’s Office arrived, they found a man with a handgun inside a vehicle.

    That man was later identified as Craig Worm, 50, of South Dakota, according to police.

    Worm asked to buy cigarettes before firing at the store’s ceiling and saying, “now call police,” the store owner told WAVE 3.

    Worm barricaded himself inside his vehicle for approximately one hour before surrendering, police said.

There’s more at the original, including Mr Worm’s mugshot.

Unlike Mr Barber, who has been accused of a serious crime, but not convicted of anything, the editors at the Herald-Leader decided to publish his photo, despite their concern about “those arrested but not convicted of a crime hav(ing) the photograph attached to their names forever”. Mr Worm could still be acquitted.

The difference? Mr Barber, now a confessed killer, is black, while Mr Worm, accused but still innocent until proven guilty of sexual assault, is white. If there is another distinction, it certainly isn’t obvious.

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#MaskMandates and fewer fans in the stands Maybe if the Lexington Herald-Leader told the unshaded truth, the newspaper would have more subscribers

If there is one thing that keeps the Lexington Herald-Leader in business, it is the newspaper’s reporting on University of Kentucky sports. In our poor state, UK’s men’s basketball team has been a source of pride for decades, winning eight NCAA championships, the first in 1948. Rupp Arena, where the Wildcats play, was once the nation’s largest basketball venue.

Crowds were extremely limited last season, due to COVID-19 restrictions, and the team had an unexpectedly poor season. This year, with some veteran players returning, along with some experienced transfers and top freshmen, much is expected of the Wildcats.

The Herald-Leader has now noted that attendance has been unexpectedly low:

    Empty seats in Rupp Arena are sending UK a message. Is anyone listening?

    by Mark Story | November 15, 2021 | 4:14 PM EST

    One of the pressing questions this year as America’s mass-spectator sports moved out of 2020’s pandemic-inspired attendance restrictions is whether the crowds were going to come back en masse to the ballgames?

    Locally, University of Kentucky football fans have answered with an emphatic yes.

    In the 61,000-seat Kroger Field, UK sold out three of its four home Southeastern Conference games this fall — Florida (announced attendance of 61,632), LSU (61,690), Tennessee (61,690) — and just missed on its fourth vs. Missouri (58,537).

Skipping further down was the impetus for the story:

    While the sample size is small, attendance has so far this season been soft for UK basketball games in Rupp Arena at Central Bank Center.

    For the Wildcats’ 2021-22 exhibition opener against Kentucky Wesleyan, the announced attendance in Rupp — the number of tickets distributed to the event — was 17,133 in the 20,545-seat venue.

    The figure for the second exhibition, against Miles College, was 17,814.

You can follow the link to read the rest for yourself.

Mark Story, one of the newspaper’s sportswriters, suggested that part of the reason was worry over the COVID-19 panicdemic. But, in the end, he said that it was his guess that paying customers were disappointed in the cupcakes UK was playing in the early part of the season, and that we’d see something different when the hated University of Louisville Cardinals come to town on December 22nd.

But it was this photo, accompanying the article, which caught my attention. If I counted correctly, there are 38 fans depicted whose faces can be seen clearly, and only 17 cam be seen wearing face masks correctly. Several others can be seen with masks below noses, below chins, at least one with a mask hanging down from one ear, and others with no masks visible at all. Yet UK mandates the wearing of facemasks at all indoor sporting events:

    Among the policies, fans will be required to wear a face mask as they watch the game and move around Rupp Arena, regardless of vaccination status. The policy also applies to staff and vendors.

We have reported, more than once, that despite individual venues requiring the wearing of face masks, those ‘requirements’ are being honored in the breach. Just yesterday, at the Kroger on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky, despite this sign being posted by the interior door of the vestibule, requiring masks of all customers, around half, and possible more, of the customers were not wearing masks. Another sign, outside the exterior doors, said “Masks strongly encouraged for fully vaccinated individuals,” meaning that the signs were inconsistent with each other, but there was, of course, no attempt made that I saw, or have ever seen, to enforce either sign.

Kentuckians just don’t like those masks!

Mr Story’s story? While he mentioned the COVID-19 panicdemic possibly having something to do with lowered attendance, he never wrote the first word about the mask mandate potentially contributing to fewer fans in the stands.

This is just poor journalism, or typical journolism,[1]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 … Continue reading from the Herald-Leader. To have mentioned that the mask mandate might have possibly caused lower attendance would have wholly violated the paper’s editorial stand in favor of masks. Whether Mr Story actually mentioned it, and an editor removed it, or he simply ignored it due to what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal’s editorial stand, I do not know, but the newspaper is not telling the whole truth to its readers.

Media bias does not normally come in the form of outright lies to readers. Rather, it is far more likely to come from the choices of what facts to report, and what facts to conceal. In this case, the Herald-Leader omitted a major potential cause in reduced attendance, when that major potential cause contradicted its editorial stance. Perhaps Mr Story sneaked that in, with the photo chosen to illustrate the article, but no mention of the mask mandate was made in the story; the source I used to note the mandate came from WLEX-TV.

Newspapers are suffering from reduced readership all across the country; maybe if they told readers the unvarnished truth, they’d have more subscribers.

References

References
↑1 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.
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A few real journalists challenge the #woke journolism of the credentialed media

Bari Weiss is not a conservative; she’s very liberal in her politics, though just plain not #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 for the young wokes in The New York Times newsroom. Glenn Greenwald is not a conservative; he’s very much on the political left as far as an American would be defined, though he now lives in Brazil. And Andrew Sullivan is hardly a conservative, either.

But these three journalists have one thing in common: they stand for freedom of speech and accuracy in journalism!

    When All The Media Narratives Collapse

    In case after case, the US MSM just keeps getting it wrong.

    by Andrew Sullivan | Friday, November 12, 2021

    The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.

    But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.

    And these mass deceptions have consequences. We are seeing this now in the Rittenhouse case — a gruesome story of a reckless teen with a rifle in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. The impression many got from much of the media was that a far-right vigilante, in the middle of race riots, had gone looking for trouble far from home and injured one man, and killed two, in a shooting spree.

    Here’s the NYT on August 26, the morning after the killings: “The authorities were investigating whether the white teenager who was arrested … was part of a vigilante group. His social media accounts appeared to show an intense affinity for guns, law enforcement and President Trump.” Rittenhouse’s race is specified; the race of the men he killed and injured were not (they were also white).

    Almost immediately, the complicated facts became unimportant. The far right viewed Rittenhouse as a hero — which he surely wasn’t. He had no business being there with an AR-15. The MSM and far left viewed him as a villain, appalled that he was being elevated, in Jamelle Bouie’s words, “as a symbol of self-defense.”[2]I have my own criticism of Mr Bouie’s work here. (Another NYT article, painting Rittenhouse as a MAGA fanatic, did note at the very bottom of the page: “Supporters of Mr. Rittenhouse said he was being attacked by the mob and acted in legitimate self-defense.” So they did have a caveat.)

    But notice how the narrative — embedded in a deeper one that the Blake shooting was just as clear-cut as the Floyd murder, that thousands of black men were being gunned down by cops every year, and that “white supremacy” was rampant in every cranny of America — effectively excluded the possibility that Rittenhouse was a naive, dangerous fool in the midst of indefensible mayhem, who, in the end, shot assailants in self-defense. And so when, this week, one of Rittenhouse’s pursuers, Gaige Grosskreutz, admitted on the stand that Rittenhouse shot him only after Grosskreutz pointed his pistol directly at Rittenhouse’s head a few feet away, it came as a shock.

There’s much more at the original, and I absolutely encourage reading it. Mr Sullivan goes into many examples of recent journalistic ‘errors,’ and notes what we wicked reich wing conservatives have been saying for years now: the mistakes the credentialed media make all seem to be on one direction, the direction which feeds into the narrative of the American political left, of the American Democratic Party.

Was Kyle Rittenhouse “a naive, dangerous fool in the midst of indefensible mayhem, who, in the end, shot assailants in self-defense”? While I have never called him a “naïve, dangerous fool,” I have said, “Young Mr Rittenhouse helped to create the situation by traveling to Kenosha and appearing on the scene with a firearm. That does not mean it wasn’t self-defense; it seems pretty clear that it was. But he should never have gone there, certainly not armed.”

    We all get things wrong. What makes this more worrying is simply that all these false narratives just happen to favor the interests of the left and the Democratic party. And corrections, when they occur, take up a fraction of the space of the original falsehoods. These are not randos tweeting false rumors. They are the established press.

The trial of Mr Rittenhouse reminds me of that of George Zimmerman. Mr Zimmerman should never have followed Trayvon Martin, and certainly should have backed off when dispatchers told him to do so, but that did not give Mr Martin the right to assault him. Local law enforcement knew that Mr Zimmerman’s actions were legal self-defense, but political pressure pushed the state of Florida to appoint a special counsel and prosecute him anyway. It was really no surprise that Mr Zimmerman was acquitted, because the state had no case. The left waxed wroth, but they’d had their trial, and the jury exonerated Mr Zimmerman. Prosecutors in Kenosha surely knew, unless they are just boneheadedly stupid, that they didn’t have much of a case, but my guess — and it really is a guess — is that they were unwilling to take the political heat for dropping the charges against the defendant; they’re leaving it up to a (supposedly) anonymous jury.

But, as Mr Sullivan noted, the liberals in the credentialed media — even ones who masturbate during Zoom meetings — can’t escape their own narrative that he simply must be guilty!

This is why I have so often referred to ‘journolists’ as opposed to journalists. 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 have noted, many times, how publisher Elizabeth Hughes has openly admitted that her goal is to filter reporting, filter (supposedly) straight news stories, in The Philadelphia Inquirer through a political sieve, rather than report the unvarnished facts.

Newspapers can, and should, have editorial and OpEd sections; with word count and column inch limits having been mostly replaced by nearly unlimited bandwidth, there should be more, not less, of such sections. The credentialed media ought to be perfectly free to engage in expressions of opinion. But for the credentialed media to regain lost credibility, they need to report the news as straight news, and not report opinion as fact.

That’s the difference between journalism and journolism.

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.

↑2 I have my own criticism of Mr Bouie’s work here.
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The Lexington Herald-Leader makes another exception to the McClatchy Mugshot Policy . . . for a cute (?) white girl * Updated! *

Emily Darnell lives in Paducah Kentucky, at the far western end of the Bluegrass State. A story about a non-lethal stabbing, a domestic violence episode in the county seat of McCracken County, wouldn’t normally attract much interest in the Lexington Herald-Leader, but in this very ordinary case, it was ‘important’ enough for one of the newspaper’s reporters to write about it himself:

    Kentucky woman charged after boyfriend stabbed during fast food argument

    by Christopher Leach | Tuesday, November 2, 2021 | 7:39 AM EDT | Updated: 7:44 AM EDT

    A Paducah woman has been charged with second-degree assault after allegedly stabbing her boyfriend in an argument over fast food, according to the city police department.

    Police were called to a home on Goodman Street at 11:05 p.m. Sunday where they found a wounded man walking away from the home, according to a department Facebook post. He accused his girlfriend, Emily Darnell, 23, of stabbing him with a kitchen knife.

    According to police, the victim said he was asleep when Darnell woke him up, wanting to go to a fast food restaurant. The man declined and went upstairs to get away from Darnell.

There are a couple more paragraphs in the original.

Ordinarily this is not a story which would have caught my attention, other than Miss Darnell’s mugshot; the photo to the right is a screenshot of the picture at the bottom of the referenced story, taken at 9:14 AM EDT. We have noted, many times, that the Herald-Leader follows the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, but is very is inconsistent in its application:

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.

According to the Paducah Police Department, Miss Darnell “was arrested on a charge of second-degree assault/domestic violence and booked into McCracken County Regional Jail”, but no note has been made, anywhere that I could find, which stated that she had been convicted of anything. She had been previously arrested, on May 3, 2020, for “menacing” and Indecent Exposure, 2nd degree, but I found no records of a conviction.

So, I have to ask: under the three conditions that editors for McClatchy Company newspapers are supposed to ponder when publishing mugshots, was Miss Darnell’s arrest considered? Is she an “urgent threat to the community”? Is she “a public official or the suspect in a hate crime?” Is she “a serial killer suspect or a high-profile crime?” The policy states that an editor has to approve the decision to print such.

What my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal refused to print the mugshot of a previously convicted felon arrested for shooting two people in Lexington, a local teacher accused of raping a minor, and even accused murderers still on the loose, yet they had to show the mugshot of a woman who is not local, and has been accused of a domestic violence assault.

Would I be alone in thinking it’s because she’s a cute (?) white girl?

————————————–

Benjamin William Call, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Update: 12:55 PM EDT

Sometimes it really gets too funny. At 11:55 AM EDT, the Herald-Leader published the story “Judge won’t lower bond for man accused of fatal assault in Lexington parking garage,” about the request of the attorney for Benjamin Call, accused of beating John Tyler “Ty” Abner to death. As usual, I looked up Mr Call’s mugshot, a matter of public record, and published it here. Yet, as of 12:51 PM EDT, the newspaper’s website still has Miss Darnell’s mugshot attached to the story about her, despite me having notified both the Herald-Leader in general, and reporter Christopher Leach individually, via Twitter, of their odd choice to publish her mugshot.

The article on Mr Call being denied a bail reduction from $750,000 to $150,000 noted that Fayette District Court Judge Lindsay H Thurston stated:

    This court cannot ignore the seriousness of the allegation that has been placed against you. It is murder. It is a Class A felony. It is the most serious allegation in the Commonwealth.

Yet the Herald-Leader is doing what little it can to protect Mr Call’s privacy. Editor Peter Baniak needs to do a better job.

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If you won’t pay for the newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer thinks that you should be taxed to support it anyway.

It is well known by both of this website’s regular readers that I like to cite newspapers as my sources. Part of the reason is that I am mostly deaf; I simply don’t get my news from television, because it is much easier for me to read the news than listen to it. And newspapers usually cover stories in greater depth than television stations.

More, I have been an adamant defender of the First Amendment, and its protection of freedom of speech and of the press. The government should not have any control of, or censorship authority over, the media, whether it’s a big corporate entity like The Washington Post,, or an individual blog like The Pirate’s Cove.

Which makes this begging OpEd in The Philadelphia Inquirer all the worse:

    A call to action as a key deadline looms for the federal proposal to help local news

    Support for the sustainability of local journalism, what should be viewed as the very glue that helps hold our democracy together, may be seen as expendable as the Build Back Better act is finalized.

    by Jim Friedlich[1]Jim Friedlich is CEO and executive director of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit organization that owns The Inquirer. | Saturday, October 30, 2021 | 6:00 PM EDT

    Deadlines are a fact of life for the reporters, editors, web producers, visual journalists, and others at the heart of America’s free press. But today we face a deadline of a different sort. The number of newsroom employees in the United States has fallen by almost 60% since 2000. Since 2004, over 2,100 newspapers — including 70 daily papers — have stopped publishing altogether.

    In the next few days, Congress will decide the fate of a federal bill called The Local Journalism Sustainability Act, designed to help reverse these trends.

    The Local Journalism Sustainability Act has been the subject of earlier advocacy by The Lenfest Institute, the nonprofit owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Earlier versions of the bill included proposed tax credits for consumers buying news subscriptions, for small businesses advertising in local news publications, and — most critically — for news organizations hiring and retaining journalists.

    This provision is now part of the Build Back Better bill, the major legislation pushed by the Biden administration. The current version of the bill has jettisoned the subscription and advertising tax credits to reduce cost to the American taxpayer. But the bill retains its most important and direct support, a refundable payroll tax credit of up to $25,000 per journalist to help local news organizations hire and retain reporters and editors, the lifeblood of local news coverage and the democracy it helps sustain.

There’s more at the original, but let me be the first to say: not just no, but Hell no! How can newspapers be independent of the government if they are going to require government largesse to operate? How can we trust coverage, by the Inquirer or any other credentialed media organization, if those media are dependent upon $25,000 for every journalist’s and editor’s salary?

No, Uncle Sam would not be paying the salaries directly, but tax credits would come right off the news organizations’ tax liabilities, and would be very much reducing the newspapers’ costs of employing people.

Mr Friedlich noted that, over the past 17 years, over 2,100 newspapers, including 70 daily newspapers, have gone out of business. To quote from the source he linked:

    When the 127-year-old Siftings Herald in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, printed its final edition on Sept. 15, 2018, there were only 1,600 subscribers in a community of 10,000 residents. The community was one of the poorest in the state. For decades, the paper had been published daily, Monday through Friday. But as both subscriber and advertising revenue dropped, publication was first reduced to two days a week in 2016, and then in early September 2018, the owner, the Gatehouse chain, announced the simultaneous closure of the Siftings Herald and two other papers in nearby counties. A former editor, now a columnist at the Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, took note of the closures, writing, “The watchdogs of school boards, city councils and quorum courts are gone. The chroniclers of high school sports teams are missing. To say that this is a sad thing for these counties is to understate the case.”

    For more than two centuries, newspaper editors and reporters, more often than not, served as arbiters of our news, determining what made front-page headlines read by millions of people in this country. They were the prime, if not sole, source of credible and comprehensive news and information, especially for residents in small and mid-sized communities.

If there were only 1,600 subscribers in a community of 10,000 residents, it’s pretty obvious: the majority of the community didn’t care enough to subscribe. Whatever value the residents of Arkadelphia saw in the Siftings Herald, it wasn’t enough to actually pay for it. What Mr Friedlich is asking is that people who don’t care enough about a particular newspaper to subscribe to it should have to pay for it anyway, through their taxes.

In 2019, Ralph Cipriano of Philadelphia: magazine wrote of the Inquirer:

    As of May 7th, the circulation of the daily Inquirer, which once stood at 373,892 copies in 2002, was down to 101,818.

Using the same metric as was used to describe the Siftings Herald, to which only 16% of the residents subscribed, with a circulation of 101,818 daily copies, in a city of 1,603,797 souls, the Inquirer is doing much worse, with only 6.35% of Philadelphians buying it.[2]Full disclosure: I do pay for a digital subscription to the Inquirer.

And it’s actually worse than that: the Philadelphia metropolitan area has roughly 6,108,000 people, meaning that the Inquirer’s circulation is paid for by a whopping 1.67% of what ought to be its service area.

If the Inquirer is valued that little by the people of the Philadelphia metropolitan area, why should all of those people who don’t find it worth the cost of paying for it be taxed to support it?

Journalists have always had an exaggerated opinion of their status. Because freedom of the press is mentioned in the Bill of Rights, the so-called Fourth Estate tends to see itself as somehow specially privileged, and owed support. And for centuries, the public did support newspapers, because they were the source of information from near and far.

The above mentioned quote from one of Mr Friedlich’s linked sources is important:

    For more than two centuries, newspaper editors and reporters, more often than not, served as arbiters of our news, determining what made front-page headlines read by millions of people in this country. They were the prime, if not sole, source of credible and comprehensive news and information, especially for residents in small and mid-sized communities.

What is an ‘arbiter’? Arbiter is defined as:

  1. a person with power to decide a dispute : JUDGE
  2. a person or agency whose judgment or opinion is considered authoritative

This is how the credentialed media see themselves, and they were, for centuries, the gatekeepers, the decision takers of what would, and would not, be published. With the arrival of that internet thingy that Al Gore invented, that gatekeeping function passed away. The First Street Journal may not have the circulation of the Inquirer, but as long as I pay my site hosting bills, the editors of the Inquirer cannot stop me from publishing.

It was 2004, when the sites Powerline and Little Green Footballs destroyed that lofty air of authority the credentialed media enjoyed, when, working only on the low resolution television screens of the day, they managed, independently, to spot the forgery with which Dan Rather and CBS News tried to turn the presidential election against the younger President Bush.

Seventeen years later, the Inquirer has announced, in public, by its publisher, Elizabeth Hughes, that it would not publish the unvarnished truth, but only those things which passed muster through the lens of being “an anti-racist news organization,” censoring information which might reflect poorly on “people of color.”

Why should people pay for a newspaper which has announced that it will deliberately slant the news?

It’s hardly just the Inquirer. We noted, just three days ago, how The New York Times, supposedly the ‘newspaper of record’ for the United States, ignored a rather large New York City story, because the editors didn’t want to admit that resistance to COVID vaccine mandates was leaving the trash piled high on the streets in two boroughs. This site has pointed out, many times, how my ‘local’ newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, censors news that is freely available on the local television stations, because of political considerations rather than any journalistic imperative to actually report all of the news.

If the Inquirer is to survive, it must make itself a newspaper, whether in print or digital only, that the people of the Philadelphia metropolitan area find valuable enough for which to pay. If it can’t do that, it does not deserve to survive.

References

References
↑1 Jim Friedlich is CEO and executive director of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit organization that owns The Inquirer.
↑2 Full disclosure: I do pay for a digital subscription to the Inquirer.
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How does a lie become the truth?

Well, maybe I got it wrong. Maybe when I said that the credentialed media don’t (usually) print out-and-out lies, but show their bias in their editorial decisions about what stories to cover, and what to ignore, I was forgetting The Philadelphia Inquirer.

We had previously noted the shooting death of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes, who was sitting in a parked, and possibly disabled, Chrysler PT Cruiser, with five other people, including other students assigned to E W Rhodes School, just after 9:00 AM on Friday, October 8, 2021, at the intersection of North Judson and West Clearfield Streets in North Philadelphia. The Rhodes Elementary School website notes that “All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.”

I pointed out to the Inquirer, and to reporter Anna Orso specifically, that young Mr Stokes was clearly not on his way to school, not if he was sitting in a parked car many blocks away; Miss Orso didn’t like it, but the fact that she responded means that she saw the notification.

People at the Inquirer know that young Mr Stokes was not on his way to class that day. But the lie was repeated again, on Thursday:

    Philly schools will pay community members to keep kids safe on their way to and from school amid gun violence crisis

    “There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not outraged by the acts of violence going on throughout the city of Philadelphia,” said Superintendent William R. Hite Jr.

    by Kristen A. Graham | Thursday, October 28, 2021

    The Philadelphia School District will spend close to a million dollars over the next three years to station members of the community in targeted communities in an effort to keep children safe on their way to and from schools.

    Based on a Chicago program, Philadelphia’s plan will start at four high schools: Lincoln, Motivation, Sayre and Roxborough, and expand to others. The “Safe Path” program will pay trusted community members and equip them with radios and bright, reflective vests to serve as eyes and ears — not to take physical action against anyone armed with a gun. Kevin Bethel, the district’s chief of school safety, said he wants Safe Path operational before the end of the school year.

    “I can no longer sit back and wait for volunteers while I see in some of our corridors the issues we’re having,” Bethel said. Details on what the groups will be paid and how they can apply will be shared soon, he said.

    The news comes amid a gun violence crisis that has affected schools across the city. This month, a shooting outside Lincoln just after dismissal killed a 66-year-old and gravely wounded a 16-year-old, and a 13-year-old seventh grader was killed on his way to classes at Rhodes Elementary.

There’s more at the original, but there it is, the claim that the “13-year-old seventh grader” was “on his way to classes,” and the embedded link goes to Miss Orso’s very sympathetic story about young Mr Stokes.

That’s not just a lie, but it is a deliberate lie.

Let’s face it: The First Street Journal doesn’t reach many people, far, far, far fewer than the Inquirer, and the continued pushing by that #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, “anti-racist” newspaper is going to keep on and keep on reporting something that they know isn’t true until it becomes the ‘truth.’

But, let me give credit where credit is due, to Miss Orso. She may not have liked what I wrote, but in her next article on the subject, she got it right:

    Philadelphia police are searching for a man wanted in the shooting of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes

    Police say Shafeeq Lewis, 29, of North Philadelphia, fired a dozen shots into a parked car, killing the boy who was just blocks from his school.

    by Anna Orso | October 27, 2021

    Shafeeq Lewis, photo by Philadelphia Police Department.

    Philadelphia police are searching for a 29-year-old man who they say fatally shot a 13-year-old boy just blocks away from his school earlier this month, officials said Wednesday.

    Authorities say Shafeeq Lewis, of North Philadelphia, fired a dozen shots into a car that was parked on the 3100 block of North Judson Street about 9 a.m. on Oct. 8. Six young people were sitting in the vehicle and police said one of the shots struck 13-year-old Marcus Stokes in the chest. He was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he died of his injuries.

    Detectives obtained surveillance footage capturing the sound of gunshots, then a man dressed in dark clothing running from the scene. Deputy Police Commissioner Ben Naish said investigators believe Lewis was the man fleeing, and they obtained an arrest warrant on murder charges last week.

    Lewis remains at large, and investigators have not determined a motive.

There’s more at the original, but “just blocks from his school” is an accurate statement. I would like to think that my oh-so-mean tweets caused Miss Orso to look at how she was writing things, but I really have no idea.

I placed the mugshot of Shafeeq Lewis in the body of the Miss Orso’s article, but that picture was not on the Inquirer’s website. Rather, it was in this story from Channel 10, the NBC owned-and-operated affiliate in the City of Brotherly Love. Mr Lewis has several distinctive tattoos on his neck and face, and it’s obvious from the fact that the Philadelphia Police already had mugshots of Mr Lewis that he had come to their attention previously.

The Channel 10 story states that all of the people in the vehicle were minors, and were wounded.

So, what were the six kids doing in that car? Smoking pot? Handsy sex? Discussing the prospects for the Eagles or 76ers? None of the stories in the Philadelphia media have told us that, nor have the police released any suspected motive for the shooting, nor does anyone know if Mr Stokes, individually, was the (alleged) gunman’s target.

The Inquirer likes human interest stories, and when someone is murdered in the city, if the victim is an ‘innocent,’ the paper just loves that! But, as brilliant as I am, as careful a reader as I am, I doubt that I’m the only one who noticed that the initial stories on the shooting didn’t quite match up with the facts.

Perhaps I was wrong; perhaps Miss Orso didn’t share with others in the newsroom the issue I raised, and that’s why Kristen Graham, the reporter for the first cited story didn’t think twice about writing that young Mr Stokes was simply on his way to school. But I suspect that if the newspaper is trying to make out Mr Stokes as a completely innocent victim of “gun violence,” it might not work.

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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This is how media bias works! The credentialed media don't have to lie; they can simply not report the truth.

Although anyone can make a mistake, The New York Times doesn’t normally print out-and-out lies; that’s rarely how #FakeNews works. Rather, it’s the editorial decisions taken by the credentialed media which expose media bias.

Trash is piling up in NYC and sanitation workers blame de Blasio’s vaccine mandate

By Larry Celona, Julia Marsh, Kevin Sheehan and Bruce Golding | October 27, 2021 | 7:22 PM EDT

These city employees think Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vaccine mandate is pure garbage — and they should know!

Sanitation workers outraged over the order to get inoculated against COVID-19 are letting trash pile up across Staten Island and in parts of Brooklyn — and the head of their union said Wednesday that he’s on their side.

The protesting workers are engaging in a rule-book slowdown that includes returning to their garages for things like gloves or gas so collections don’t get finished, sources said.

Supervisors have even been warned to guard the garages this weekend to prevent trucks from getting vandalized, sources said.

When asked what was going on, Teamsters Local 831 President Harry Nespoli, whose union represents the sanitation workers, shot back, “The mandate’s going on.”

“Look, you’re going to have some spots in the city that they feel very strongly about this,” he said.

Nespoli added: “I’ll tell you straight out: I disagree with the mandate because of one reason. We have a program in place right now in the department, which is, you get the vaccination or you get tested once a week.”

There’s more at the original, including several photos of trash piled up on city streets. When the story mentioned that the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn was one of the areas afflicted, I think they should have shot a pic in front of 8070 Harbor View Terrace in Bay Ridge, the house exterior used in Blue Bloods as fictional Police Commissioner Frank Reagan’s house, but I digress.

The cited story above is not from the Times, but the New York Post. The Times founded in 1851, has long been considered our nation’s number one newspaper, and, along with The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal, one of the four newspapers of record in the United States. The New York Post is actually older, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton.

So, what’s so special about the Post article cited above? A fairly major New York City story, yet there isn’t a single story about the garbagemen’s slowdown on either in the Times’ New York section or website main page. Hugely important stories, like New York Has a New Band of Buzzy Post-Punk Teens: Geese and 5 Things to Do This Weekend, are there, but a major slowdown by sanitation workers, leaving the garbage piled high in Staten Island and Brooklyn? Nope, not in the Grey Lady!

Site queries for sanitation, garbage and trash all failed to find a single Times story on the slowdown.[1]Research for this was done between 2:20 and 2:24 PM EDT on Thursday, October 28, 2021, and the statements were accurate as of that time. There was one story about the potential disruptions due to the vaccine mandate:

    New York plans for shortages of police officers and firefighters as its vaccination deadline nears.

    By Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Troy Closson and Dana Rubinstein | October 28, 2021 | Updated 1:59 PM EDT

    Officials in New York City are bracing for staffing shortages, overhauling schedules and making contingency plans amid fears that thousands of police officers and firefighters could stay home when the vaccine mandate for city workers takes effect on Monday.

    The mandate, set by Mayor Bill de Blasio, requires city workers to get at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccine or go on unpaid leave. But workers at some city agencies have resisted getting vaccinated.

    About 65 percent of Fire Department workers and 75 percent of Police Department employees had reported receiving at least one dose of a vaccine by Wednesday, city officials said.

    Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat in his second term, predicted on Thursday that many city workers would get a shot at the last minute. He said New Yorkers would be safe and city agencies would weather the storm if some employees do not show up for work because of the mandate. . . . .

    Hundreds of protesters appeared outside Gracie Mansion on Thursday morning to oppose the vaccine mandate. Many wore sweatshirts and shirts bearing Fire Department engine and ladder company numbers from across the city. Union leaders at the demonstration led chants of “Hold the line!” and warned that New Yorkers would be endangered if unvaccinated firefighters and paramedics were sent home.

    The city’s largest police union warned on Wednesday — after a state judge denied their request for an injunction against the mandate — that the city was facing a “real crisis” and that New Yorkers should blame Mr. de Blasio for “any shortfall in city services.”

    The mandate, the union said, “not only violates police officers’ rights — it will inevitably result in fewer cops available to protect our city.”

There’s more at the original, including the Fire Department planning for a 20% shortage in ambulances and closure of about a fifth of the city’s fire stations.

The ‘slowdown’ by sanitation workers was not mentioned in the story.

The possible loss of police and firemen by the city still lays in the future; the sanitation slowdown over the Mayor’s vaccine mandate is already happening. And while police and firemen are certainly important, piles of garbage already laying on the sidewalks impacts far more New Yorkers than most other city services. 389 murders in the city, through October 24th — 15.68% fewer than Philadelphia’s 450 on the same date, even though NYC has 5¼ times Philly’s population — are certainly serious, but still relatively few people in the city have serious dealings with the police or firemen, while not getting the garbage picked up affects everyone.

And it wasn’t just one day; the Post noted that, at least in the Dongan Hills neighborhood of Staten Island, garbage collection was missed on both Saturday the 23rd and Wednesday the 27th.

But, for The New York Times, it just wasn’t news that was fit to print.

That is how media bias works! The Times wasn’t lying to anybody, but simply not saying anything about a major problem in the Big Apple. Sanitation workers in parts of the city, almost certainly including the vaccinated as well as the unvaccinated, are putting pressure on the city in a way that, if it spreads, every New Yorker will feel, and that’s the kind of pressure which can really force Bill de Blasio to back down.

References

References
↑1 Research for this was done between 2:20 and 2:24 PM EDT on Thursday, October 28, 2021, and the statements were accurate as of that time.