Category Archives: Journolism

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Anna Orso does not like being questioned! The Philadelphia Inquirer sure isn't happy with its journalism being examined

I can be on the critical side when it comes to the professional journalists, but I believe it only proper to let those journalists know when they have been mentioned, and thus I included Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Anna Orso in a tweet when I examined her article in yesterday’s Inquirer. A screen capture of the tweet is to the right. While I can embed tweets in my articles, screen captures work better, because people can delete tweets.

Miss Orso did not particularly like my tweet, and responded, via Twitter, “get a life”. I responded:

    Oh, I have one. I examined your story, and the flaws were obvious. These were things that should have been asked and examined.

    You are a professional journalist; do some actual journalism.

I don’t know Miss Orso, never having met her, and no longer living in the Keystone State, the chances would seem to be vanishingly small that I ever will; there is no reason for me to have anything personal against her. All that I can see is her written words, and what I saw was a story with some real flaws in it.

The First Amendment to the Constitution protects our freedom of Speech and of the Press. Those freedom include, to be blunt about it, the freedom to lie, and the freedom to shade the truth. Most journalists do not actually lie, but when it comes to The Philadelphia Inquirer, “the third oldest surviving daily newspaper in the United States in its own right,” publisher Elizabeth Hughes has already told us that the Inquirer was taking many steps to become that “anti-racist news organization” she wanted it to be, including:

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

Translation: Mrs Hughes wants the Inquirer to shade the truth if the unvarnished truth might ‘stigmatize’ certain ‘Philadelphia communities.’

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.

Normally, an experienced editor would review a reporter’s story before the story was published. With all of the cutbacks through which the Inquirer has gone, perhaps that wasn’t the case in this instance, but with three major stories[1]At least three that I have seen; it is always possible that I have missed one, though I have been diligent about looking. published now on the killing of young Mr Stokes, it seems very unlikely that no supervising editor at all has read those stories. Yet all of them have made it through the process and been published, and no one there has raised serious enough questions to change things.

How does that happen?

One way it could happen is if no one at the Inquirer was paying anything more than glancing attention, and just wrote and passed on a story without any sense of inquisitiveness. That’s kind of difficult to believe, given that this writer, a 68-year-old retired fellow living three states away, whose last journalistic experience was with his collegiate newspaper, was able to spot the discrepancies from the very first story on the killing.

But another way it could happen is if the Inquirer was trying to engage not in reporting but propaganda. Miss Orso’s story has the effect of making young Mr Stokes out to be a wholly innocent victim, and perhaps that’s exactly what he was. But if he was a completely innocent victim, someone at the Inquirer should have been asking the questions and getting the answers as to why he was sitting in a car which was targeted in a deliberate assassination attempt; no one fires at least twelve rounds — “officers found 12 shell casings at the scene” — by accident. While it is possible that the shooter targeted the wrong vehicle completely, the Inquirer has not reported that, nor would such be consistent with the story that at least ten shots were fired at a vigil for the young victim. Mr Stokes might not have been the individual who was targeted, but the obvious conclusion is that at least some bad guy was involved.

The Inquirer has expended enough bandwidth on the story that someone there needs to start digging more deeply, someone needs to ferret out the whole story. That story might not be one that the Inquirer’s reporters and editors would like, but that is the difference between propaganda and news, between journolism[2]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 and journalism.

References

References
↑1 At least three that I have seen; it is always possible that I have missed one, though I have been diligent about looking.
↑2 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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The ‘journalism’ of The Philadelphia Inquirer

North Judson and West Clearfield Streets in North Philadelphia. Image from Google Maps.

We have said, many times, that black lives don’t matter, at least not to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which only reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love in which the victim is an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl is the victim.

However, sometimes the Inquirer tries to paint someone as an innocent victim, but the details of the story, stories in this case, just don’t add up.

    Gunshots took a 13-year-old who was friends with everyone. At his North Philadelphia school, it’s ‘utter devastation.’

    A teacher at E.W. Rhodes School said seventh-grader Marcus Stokes was bright with an infectious smile, and that his peers “really enjoyed being his friend.”

    by Anna Orso | Friday, October 15, 2021

    Four days after 13-year-old Marcus Stokes was fatally shot in North Philadelphia on his way to school, his fellow students came back to the classroom at lunchtime to set up a makeshift memorial.

    They hung up a picture of Marcus that their teacher, Marcella Hankinson, had printed at Staples, and they strung balloons of blue and white, his favorite colors. They placed candles and a single rose next to a teddy bear on his desk, and they scrawled messages to him on red sticky notes next to his picture.

    The death has left students and teachers at E.W. Rhodes School traumatized, fearful, and in a state of “utter devastation,” said Principal Andrea Surratt, who oversees the school that serves kids in kindergarten through eighth grade. It’s the first time a student was fatally shot in her four years at the helm, and it took place five blocks from the school, triggering an hour-long lockdown.

There’s more at the original.

West Clearfield Street, from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

The murder of Young Marcus Stokes happened at on North Judson Street, at the intersection with West Clearfield Street. If you look at the map, North Judson is not five blocks from the school, which is at 2900 West Clearfield Street, but eleven blocks. It’s just a hair over 1/3 mile between the two.

Anna Orso’s story says, further down:

    Investigators believe Marcus and five other young people — including other Rhodes students — were sitting in a parked car on the 3100 block of Judson Street before 9 a.m. on Oct. 8. A gunman approached the vehicle and fired shots into it, hitting Marcus once in the chest, authorities said.

Yet a previous Inquirer story stated that Mr Stokes was shot “just after 9 a.m.” That’s an important difference, because the E Washington Rhodes School website states “Breakfast will be served from 8:15 am to 8:45 am each day. All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.” If you read Miss Orso’s story carefully, she stated that Mr Stokes and five other E W Rhodes’ students were “were sitting in a parked car on the 3100 block of Judson Street before 9 a.m.”, not that the victim was actually shot before 9:00 AM. Miss Orso has to have been aware of the previous article noting that he was shot after 9:00 AM, because she was one of the two Inquirer reporters who wrote it!

But, if you didn’t know that the shooting itself didn’t take place until after 9:00 AM, perhaps, just perhaps, you wouldn’t figure out that no, young Mr Stokes was not on his way to school. He should have been on his way, but it is obvious that he wasn’t.

Also in the earlier story which Miss Orso co-wrote with reporter Chris Palmer was this statement:

    (Chief Inspector Frank) Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it.

Miss Orso had to know that those kids weren’t driving to school, but she still wrote that the victim was “on his way to school”.

The Inquirer published the picture of the vehicle in question, a Plymouth PT Cruiser, not a particularly large vehicle, one in which six people aren’t normally going to cram just to have a chat or pray the rosary. Sunrise was at 7:03 AM on that day, and the weather was unseasonably warm, yet the photo of the vehicle shows all of the windows closed. What, some might ask, were six kids doing, sitting in a parked car with the windows rolled up 15 minutes after they were supposed to be in school? If the police know, if Miss Orso knows, such has not been revealed to readers of the Inquirer.

Back to the first cited article:

    Homicide Capt. Jason Smith said officers found 12 shell casings at the scene, and investigators have recovered some surveillance footage showing a possible suspect fleeing. No one has been arrested. Smith said detectives have not determined a motive but don’t believe Marcus was the shooter’s intended target. He did not elaborate.

So, who in the vehicle was the intended target? When you read about an intentional ‘hit’ like this, the most common answers which leap to mind are ‘rival gang member’ or ‘rival drug dealer’. Other characterizations could come to mind, but few would guess ‘community organizer’ or ‘Baptist youth minister.’ And the fact that we haven’t been told that the possibly intended target was a community organizer or Baptist youth minister, which is the kind of information which would have been disclosed if true, leads one to believe that ‘rival gang member’ or ‘rival drug dealer’ is the more probable guess.

Who is Anna Orso? Her Linkedin biography tells us that she has:

    spent the last seven years as a reporter in Philadelphia covering mostly general assignment and breaking news. I’m currently a member of the Justice and Injustice team at the Philadelphia Inquirer, which is part of its broader News Desk. My coverage is focused on issues related to public safety and policing.

She isn’t someone three months out of a small college journalism program, but earned her Baccalaureate degree in “Print Journalism, sociology/ criminology” in 2014. Yet she wrote a story in which her statements contradicted what has been previously published, contradicted the timeline, and contradicted the map. She made young Mr Stokes into an innocent victim, when what has been published about this crime throws doubt on that notion.

An actual journalist would have looked at the points I have made, and done something really radical like investigated more deeply and more thoroughly. Who knows? Perhaps young Mr Stokes really was an ‘innocent,’ but if he was, Miss Orso didn’t do much in answering the obvious questions around the time and place of the shooting. Was the Inquirer really so desperate to paint him as a boy doing nothing wrong, just going to school on a Friday morning, that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, dig for the truth?

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Are journalists today trying less to inform public minds than steer public opinions?

As we have previously noted, McClatchy’s mugshot policy is:

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.

Jacob Heil, uncredited photo in the Lexington Herald-Leader, February 22, 2019. Photo cropped by DRP. Click to enlarge.

On Wednesday, October 13th, we pointed out that the Lexington Herald-Leader kept publishing the courtroom photo of Jacob Heil, the 21-year-old former University of Kentucky student charged with reckless homicide and driving under the influence of alcohol for killing 4-year-old Marco Lee Shemwell while his family and he were standing beside Cooper Drive near Scoville Drive. Mr Heil allegedly veered off the road, striking the boy and killing him.

The photo of Mr Heil that the Herald-Leader has been using was a press pool photo, and in it, he is wearing a face mask. However, the very first line of the text in this story, published on February 22, 2019 — before the McClatchy Mugshot Policy went into effect — in which Mr Heil’s full face photo is shown, in a full width of the story format.

Remember: the McClatchy policy states, “The permanence of the internet can mean those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever,” and Mr Heil has not yet been convicted of any crime! He is not an urgent threat to the community, he is not a public official or suspect in a hate crime, is not a serial killer or the suspect in a high-profile crime. Why, then, is the newspaper festooning its website with his courtroom photo?

Jymie S. Salahuddin, 53, from Lexington station WTVQ.

In an article by Herald-Leader reporter Karla Ward, also published on October 13th, Lexington man sentenced to 21 years in prison for cocaine trafficking, the newspaper declined to print the publicly available photo of a convicted felon. Since federal law requires that Jymie S. Salahuddin, 53, serve at least 85% of his 262 month sentence, he will not be eligible for release for 18½ years, when he would be 71 years old. I’m not certain how an 18-year-old mugshot would harm an elderly convict on his release. Mr Salahuddin is not a charged but not convicted person, but one who pleaded guilty. It’s not like the paper needed to save bandwidth; they included a stock photo of jail cell bars.

So, now we come to this:

Kentucky man sentenced to jail for involvement in Capitol riot

By Christopher Leach | Wednesday, October 13, 2021 | 3:44 PM EDT

A man from Cave City has been sentenced for his involvement in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Robert Bauer, a Kentucky resident, was identified through photos of himself during the Capitol riot, according to the FBI. This photo was included in a criminal complaint filed against him. PHOTO VIA FBI. Click to enlarge.

Robert Bauer, 44, was sentenced to 45 days in jail, 65 hours of community service and $500 restitution, the Louisville Courier Journal reported.

As part of a deal with prosecutors, Bauer pleaded guilty to a charge of parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building, according to court records. Bauer originally faced four charges for his involvement in the riot that injured hundreds of police officers.

The judge could have sentenced him to a maximum of six months in prison, a fine of no more than $5,000 and supervised release of no more than one year, according to court records.

The plea agreement document shows that Bauer agreed to the plea in late June.

In other words, as an old UK professor of mine, Gerard Silberstein, used to say, not much of a much. Yet, unlike Mr Salahuddin, whose crimes were so serious that he will spend at least 18½ years behind bars, the Herald-Leader decided to publish Mr Bauer’s photograph.

And while Mr Bauer now stands convicted, the Newspaper published his photo on January 15, 2021, January 30, 2021, and March 3, 2021, all when he was charged but not yet convicted of anything.

The McClatchy Mugshot Policy was put into effect the previous summer, so all photos were in violation of the policy.

So, what might be the distinguishing difference in these photos published and not published? There’s one very obvious one: Messrs Heil and Bauer are white, while Mr Salahuddin is black.

Thud!

Could that be it? Could it really be that simple? Remember, the McClatchy Mugshot Policy is based on two ideas:

  • Those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever; and
  • Inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color.

At the very least, these statements could mean that editors, even just subconsciously, think that publishing photos of white suspects is simply not as harmful as publishing those of black suspects. But, at a more pernicious level, it could mean, as the Sacramento Bee, the lead McClatchy newspaper, put it, publishing mugshots:

  • Perpetuat(es) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

If that’s the case — and that last part was left put of the McClatchy policy in general — then might some McClatchy editors, at some papers, think that publishing photos of white suspects or convicted criminals while not doing so for black suspects or convicted criminals could actively steer the public away from such stereotypes, and thus be considered, at least to the left-inclined mind, an affirmative good?

If you suspect that I used the adjective “affirmative” deliberately, to bring Affirmative Action to your mind, you’d be right!

Journalists tend to have an elevated opinion of their place in society; the constitutional protection of freedom of the press has led many of them to think that they are some sort of super-duper constitutional guardians. Is it that much of a further leap for some of them to think that their role in society is to guide society into what hey would see as rightthink?

But journalists can only be respected when they tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That is sadly lacking among today’s journolists.

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The whole truth doesn’t interest newspapers these days

While checking on Lexington Police Department data to update the information in Bullets flying in the Bluegrass State, I found that the police had finally updated the city’s shootings investigations page. In 2020, a year which saw the city set its annual murder record with 34 homicides, there were also 140 non-fatal shootings. As of October 10, 2020, there had been 107 non-fatal shootings.

And the thugs are keeping pace, as there have been 109 non-fatal shootings as of October 10, 2021!

Out of 140 non-fatal shootings in Lexington last year, the victim was white 32 times, and listed as Hispanic on four occasions. Out of 140 non-fatal shootings, 104 of the victims, 74.29%, were black, in a city the 2020 census determined was 68.3% white; 14.9% black; 4.2% Asian or Pacific Islander; 7.1% two or more races; and 9.2% Hispanic or Latino.

So far in 2021, there have been 17 non-fatal shooting victims listed as white, and another 10 listed as Hispanic, leaving 82, or 75.23%, listed as being black.

Naturally, the journolists[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 at a politically correct newspaper like the Lexington Herald-Leader won’t tell its readers this!

The Sacramento Bee, the lead newspaper of the McClatchy Company MNI: (%), led the way for the group, of which the Herald-Leader is part, in deciding not to publish mugshots:

    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.

Further down:

    And the 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.

Perhaps that correlation is not so illusory!

The data are there, but the Herald-Leader reporters and editors do not follow the data, do not investigate something that an elderly man, namely me, was able to find sitting in his home three counties away, and so far out in the boondocks that I can’t get a dead-trees copy of the paper delivered.

Jymie S. Salahuddin, 53, from Lexington station WTVQ.

The McClatchy Mugshot Policy, which the Herald-Leader follows, claims that publishing mugshots of people charged with crimes is harmful, if they are not actually convicted of the crimes for which they have been arrested. Yet, in an article by Karla Ward, Lexington man sentenced to 21 years in prison for cocaine trafficking, the newspaper declined to print the publicly available photo of a convicted felon. Since federal law requires that Jymie S. Salahuddin, 53, serve at least 85% of his 262 month sentence, he will not be eligible for release for 18½ years, when he would be 71 years old. I’m not certain how an 18-year-old mugshot would harm an elderly convict on his release.

Not that it would matter: he’s not a charged but not convicted person, but one who pleaded guilty. It’s not like the paper needed to save bandwidth; they included a stock photo of jail cell bars.

Jacob Heil; photo by WLEX-TV press pool footage.

And the newspaper has assigned reporter Jeremy Chisenhall to sit in and cover the trial of Jacob Heil, 21, who is on trial for reckless homicide and DUI after he was involved in a crash which killed a 4-year-old pedestrian. The Herald-Leader has published at least two stories about the ongoing trial, including Mr Heil’s photograph. Though that phot shows him wearing a face mask, the paper published a full-face photo of him on February 22, 2019.

The paper is willing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, when it comes Mr Heil’s trial, on charges of which he could be acquitted, yet when the statistics point to a significant racial disparity in crime and victimhood in the city, all of these well-educated and experienced reporters and editors keep their keyboards closely in check.

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.