Category Archives: Journolism

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The Philadelphia Inquirer tells us all about Barbie and gluten-free meals at the shore. Criminals on the streets? Not so much.

Rasheed Banks, Jr, via WVPI-TV.

The Philadelphia Inquirer was more than willing to tell readers about how heroic Michael Salerno intervened to try to stop a carjacking, and was killed for his efforts:

Police identify man killed in South Philly trying to stop a carjacking

Michael Salerno was trying to prevent three young men from stealing his car while a woman was still inside, police said.

by Rob Tornoe | Thursday, July 13, 2023 | 2:22 PM EDT

A Philadelphia man is dead after police say he tried to stop three young men from stealing his car Wednesday night.

Police said the victim, identified as Michael Salerno, 50, was attempting to prevent his car from being carjacked around 10:45 p.m. in South Philadelphia. A woman was in the car, but officials declined to identify her, citing the ongoing investigation.

“Preliminary information appears that the motive for this homicide began with a carjacking of a female, and when the owner intervened, he was shot and killed,” Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small told reporters Wednesday night.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Death in Killadelphia

The episode occurred on Porter Street near South 12th Street. Salerno had just arrived at the location but wasn’t in the car when the attempted carjacking occurred, according to police, who declined to say whether it was near his home.

There’s more at the original, but at the time, all that we were told was that the suspects were to be three “young men, appearing to be between the ages of 15 and early 20s, dressed in dark clothing.”

WPVI-TV, known locally as Channel 6, the ABC owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia, had more on Friday, as the Philadelphia Police Department identified one of the suspects, 15-year-old Rasheed Banks, Jr., and published his photograph. Young Mr Banks is still on the loose as I write this, but if WPVI is trying to help, showing Philadelphians for whom to be on the lookout, as of 9:12 PM, The Philadelphia Inquirer has nothing about this.

Then there was this from Fox 29 News. The Philadelphia Police Department released surveillance photos of the suspects in the shootings on which we have previously reported. The editors of the Inquirer were naturally horrified at the fact an 11-year-old girl, almost certainly simply an innocent struck by a stray bullet — out of around 30 fired in what may have been a gunfight between gangs — but, when the Police released photos of the suspects, in the hopes that someone would recognize them and give information to the police, the Inquirer has chosen not to publish either the story or the photos of the suspects.

Given that two of the suspects are shown wearing hooded sweatshirts, with the hoods pulled up, on a Philadelphia evening where it was above 70º F, it would seem obvious that this wasn’t a snap decision, but gang members, oops, sorry, ‘street group’ members out with intentions that were less than kindly.

That the Inquirer chose not to inform its readers, readers who are paying for the privilege[1]My unlimited digital subscription: $5.49/week, billed every 4 weeks; that’s $285.48 a year. of reading our nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper, because publisher Elizabeth Hughes forthrightly told us that the newspaper would censor the news if it was too politically incorrect.

Not that the Inquirer didn’t give us important news!

But warning readers about killers and gang bangers still on the city’s streets, and perhaps, just perhaps, getting them picked up a bit earlier? Nope, not the Inky!

References

References
↑1 My unlimited digital subscription: $5.49/week, billed every 4 weeks; that’s $285.48 a year.
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CNN correspondent in trouble for telling the truth Sometimes CNN makes about as much sense as a tampon dispenser in the men's room.

My good blogging friend Robert Stacy McCain likes to note how the once-renowned Cable News Network, CNN, has fallen in the ratings, not just third behind Fox News Channel and MSNBC, but gets fewer viewers than Nickelodeon’s kiddie cartoon Paw Patrol.

Fox News is unapologetically conservative, and MSNBC makes no bones about being leftist. CNN is leftist as well, though the network tries to deny it, and recently fired CEO Chris Licht, who was at least trying to get the network to report less bias and more news.

Well, in today’s more amusing news, a CNN correspondent, Ryan Young, is being criticized for doing something really radical, telling the truth!

CNN under fire for misgendering Dylan Mulvaney: ‘Unbelievably bad’

By Lee Brown | Wednesday, July 12, 2023 | 9:21 AM EDT | Updated: 4:14 PM EDT

CNN is under fire for misgendering Dylan Mulvaney as “he” and “him” in a segment about the “culture war” being waged over the transgender influencer’s partnership with Bud Light.

Correspondent Ryan Young failed to use the 26-year-old influencer’s preferred pronouns in a short segment about the backlash against the beer giant that has led to plummeting sales.

Young also mispronounced Mulvaney’s first name as “Dylvan” while describing the social media star to “CNN News Central” viewers Tuesday.

“He, of course, is the transgender person they were going to sponsor and go along with, with Bud Light,” Young said, using “he” instead of Mulvaney’s preferred “she.”

“But [trans activists] didn’t like how Bud Light didn’t stand by him after all this,” Young said, again failing to use the influencer’s preferred “they.”

Well, that’s a mistake: is Mr Mulvaney’s preferred pronoun “she,” the feminine singular, of “they,” the genderless plural?

Media Matters critic Ari Drennen shared footage of the less-than-2-minute clip, ripping it as an “unbelievably bad CNN segment.”

That Media Matters would see using the correct pronouns to refer to Mr Mulvaney as “unbelievably bad” is unsurprising. Naturally, CNN apologized for having a correspondent tell the truth:

CNN eventually apologized at the end of Wednesday’s episode of “News Central.”

Referring to Mulvaney, Bolduan said: “She was mistakenly referred to by the wrong pronoun, and CNN aims to honor individuals’ ways of identifying themselves and we apologize for that error.”

When Mr McCain noted that CNN was coming in behind Nickelodeon’s Paw Patrol, he neglected to mention that Paw Patrol, and really all of the children’s network’s programming, is more accurate and truthful than CNN. Mr McCain has said that he watches CNN so that his readers don’t have to, which is a fair amount of self-sacrifice. Sometimes CNN makes about as much sense as a tampon dispenser in the men’s room.

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Killadelphia: What the Philly media won’t tell us

With the Kingsessing mass shooting being a Philadelphia story, it’s unsurprising that The Philadelphia Inquirer would have several follow-up stories on it.

As soon as the name of Kimbrady Carriker was released, his social media were investigated, and photos of Mr Carriker in female dress led to immediate speculation that he was, like Audrey Hale in Nashville, yet another transgender killer. Well, that led to Philly officials quickly denying it:

While he acknowledged the social media images that appear to show Carriker wearing women’s clothing and jewelry, Asa Khalif, a member of the LGBTQ advisory committee for the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, condemned the “violent” language coming from the “conservative press” about Carriker’s gender identity and shared what the district attorney’s office knows firsthand about Carriker’s gender identity.

“Appear to show”? No, there’s no “appear to show” here, but actually show. Why would Mr Khalif, who supports the homosexual and transgender community, and must surely not be offended by, or see anything wrong, with cross-dressing, want to mealy-mouth things?

“The suspect has not identified themselves as trans. They have only identified themselves as male,” Khalif said at Wednesday’s news conference. “But the language spewed out by the conservative press is violent and is dangerous, and it’s targeting trans women of color. It’s rallying the community to be violent, and we’re better than that.”

I saw a video of Mr Khalif’s statement, and while he stated that Mr Carriker had not identified as transgender or anything other than male, I also noticed that he went out of his way to use “they/them” pronouns to refer to the suspect. Did Mr Carriker express a preference for such to be used? If so, it hasn’t made the credentialed press, but speaking with the District Attorney at his side, he might have been clued in to something the DA’s office knew but hasn’t been made public.

Khalif condemned those who label trans people as “killers.”

“They are the most vulnerable to violence,” he said. “They want to live their lives, and they have every right to do so, and we will not allow conservative bigots to use that type of language to attack trans people.”

District Attorney Larry Krasner expressed similar sentiments.

“There are some people for whom hate is a full-time job,” Krasner said. “And if they can stay away from the facts and talk about nonsense, that’s what they’re going to do.”

Mr Khalif, who tweeted on the Fourth of July, “So when i say Fuck The Police..don’t tell me that’s disrespectful..the violence against black people is beyond disrespectful!”, keeps telling us, through multiple tweets, and retweets that the alleged shooter isn’t transgender. The Philadelphia Inquirer also jumped on that bandwagon:

Conservative media outlets claimed Carriker was transgender based on Facebook photos of him dressed in feminine clothing. However, Carriker is identified as male on public records and district attorney officials said Wednesday that he identifies as male.

I actually avoided making such a claim, writing on Independence Day:

Everybody who pays any attention to Philadelphia news had heard, hours before the Post’s article was time-stamped, that the (alleged) shooter has been identified as Kimbrady Carriker, a 40-year-old black male, and he has a history of posting photos of himself on Facebook in women’s clothing, including earrings, tank tops, and at least one in which the outlines of a bra are showing. It has not been reported that he somehow thinks he’s really a woman, whether he’s just a cross-dresser, or whether he’s just clowning around, but that’s part of what we do know, and have known since well before the Post updated this article, yet the newspaper has kept this information from readers, readers who are paying good money for their subscriptions, because, Heaven forfend!, it isn’t politically correct.

But, you know what I also haven’t seen in the Philly media? You know what Mr Khalif, a member of the LGBTQ advisory committee for District Attorney Larry Krasner, hasn’t yet told us? Mr Carriker’s grandmother said that he was homosexual:

Ms Carriker said her grandson was gay and would sometimes dress in women’s clothing, but had not undergone gender transition surgery or treatment.

She said she made it clear to Carriker that she disapproved of him wearing women’s clothes due to her Christian beliefs.

“I saw him one time in female clothes, and from the expression on my face, from that point on, he never came in female clothes around me because he knew how I felt about it,” she told The Independent.

“He was trying to find himself. He didn’t know where he belonged. I used to talk to him about it, but he didn’t like to converse with me about things like that.”

The Philadelphia media, so quick to tell us some of Mr Carriker’s political views, his support for the Second Amendment, admiration of Tucker Carlson, and hating of President Biden, but soft-peddling his support of #BlackLivesMatter and the riots in many cities in the wake of the unfortunate death during the arrest of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled convicted felon George Floyd, and telling us that he wasn’t transgendered, never mentioned, at least as far as I could find, that he is homosexual. It took a report from a newspaper in London, England, for us to get that news.

It is not a surprise to anyone who pays attention to the Philly media that they would keep such under wraps.

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The journolism of The Washington Post Why won't the professional media tell the whole truth?

No, I did not misspell journolism in the title of this article. 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, and boy, did The Washington Post demonstrate that today!

I normally use the headlines from articles in newspapers, with the hyperlink embedded in the headline, but today I am using a screen capture of the Post’s article, because I want to document for the reader the time it was published, at 12:28 PM EDT on Tuesday, July 4th, but updated at 7:03 PM. If you cannot see the image clearly enough, just click on it, and it will show up enlarged.

What we know about the mass shooting in Philadelphia

By Kim Bellware, Tamia Fowlkes, Kelsey Ables and María Luisa Paúl | Updated July 4, 2023 at 7:03 p.m. EDT | Published July 4, 2023 at 12:28 p.m. EDT

Five people were killed and two children were wounded in a Monday night mass killing in Philadelphia, authorities say. A man suspected of the shooting has been arrested after firing on victims “seemingly at random,” Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said during a Tuesday news conference.

“Let me crystal clear: What happened last night in our Kingsessing neighborhood was unimaginably disgusting and horrifying,” Outlaw said.

Here’s what we know about the shooting in the largely residential area in southwest Philadelphia.

The victims

The five who were killed are all male, Outlaw said Monday.

Police identified them as Daujan Brown, 15; Lashyd Merritt, 20; Dymir Stanton, 29; Joseph Wamah Jr., 31; and Ralph Moralis, 59. Brown’s address was unknown; the other victims all lived close to the scene of the shooting. The two wounded children, ages 2 and 13, were in stable condition late Monday, Outlaw said.

Two people were also injured by broken glass during the shooting, including the twin of the 2-year-old gunshot victim, Philadelphia Police staff inspector Ernest Ransom said Tuesday.

“The suspect fired at a vehicle being operated by a mother who was driving her set of twins home,” Ransom said. “One of the twins suffered a gunshot wound to the leg. Their sibling sustained injuries to the eyes from shattered glass.”

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: National Media Instantly Sends Philly Mass Shooter Down the Memory Hole

That’s all pretty unremarkable, standard journalism. But here’s where the Post veers off into the weeds:

Who’s the shooter?

Two people were in custody in connection with the shooting, authorities said: a 40-year-old man who is suspected in the killings, and one person who may have fired at the shooter.

The gunman was shooting as police pursued him on foot and was found wearing a bulletproof vest and magazines, police said. He had an AR-style rifle and a handgun, as well as a police scanner, according to Outlaw. Police found about 50 spent shell cases, Outlaw said.

Charges are pending for the 40-year-old man suspected in the killings, police said Tuesday afternoon.

“The suspect, while wearing body armor, a ski mask and holding a AR-15-style assault rifle was observed at several locations near 56th Street near Chester Avenue and Springfield Avenue,” Ransom said. He noted that the suspect began shooting “aimlessly at occupied vehicles and individuals on the street as they walked.”

There’s more at the original.

Everybody who pays any attention to Philadelphia news had heard, hours before the Post’s article was time-stamped, that the (alleged) shooter has been identified as Kimbrady Carriker, a 40-year-old black male, and he has a history of posting photos of himself on Facebook in women’s clothing, including earrings, tank tops, and at least one in which the outlines of a bra are showing. It has not been reported that he somehow thinks he’s really a woman, whether he’s just a cross-dresser, or whether he’s just clowning around, but that’s part of what we do know, and have known since well before the Post updated this article, yet the newspaper has kept this information from readers, readers who are paying good money for their subscriptions, because, Heaven forfend!, it isn’t politically correct.

I’m waiting to find out if Mr Carriker left us a ‘manifesto,’ the way the ‘transgender’ Nashville murderer, Audrey Hale, did, a ‘manifesto’ that the authorities have thus far refused to release, and have managed to keep from being leaked.

At least The New York Times managed to include:

In initial reports, police described the suspect as a 40-year-old male, but authorities later clarified that they were unsure of the suspect’s gender identity and in a news conference on Tuesday used the pronouns “they/them.”

It wasn’t just the Post. The Philadelphia Inquirer, in an article time-stamped “an hour ago” when I opened it at 9:29 PM, said absolutely nothing about Mr Carriker being black, or anything about him being ‘transgender,’ a cross-dresser, or whatever.

The New York Post, our nation’s second-oldest newspaper, one which does not shy away from sensationalism, but one which is also unafraid of publishing the truth regardless of political correctness, did tell us about the alleged shooter.

The professional media love to tell us how special they are, because the First Amendment mentions the press specifically. Of course, the First Amendment is protecting the right to publish, and not somehow glorifying individual publishers, but the people at the Post and the Times and the Inquirer sure don’t like to see it that way. To me, the best way for an individual media company to glorify itself would be to simply tell the truth, and tell us the whole truth.

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If it’s a gang, say it’s a gang! The professional media don't usually tell us outright lies, but their editorial and stylistic decisions sure do shade the truth!

The main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website had, at 7:07 PM EDT on Sunday, June 25th, an interesting juxtaposition. The site seems to automatically search for and note related stories, and had two listed below the main story headline.

A South Philly neighborhood was awash in retaliatory gunfire. A recent trial showed the human cost.

“We don’t like each other,” Nyseem Smith said while telling police about shootings he and his friends committed against rival groups.

by Chris Palmer | Sunday, June 25, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

To hear Nyseem Smith tell it, shooting people was something of a pastime for him and his friends in South Philadelphia.

Week after week, sometimes day after day, Smith said, he and his crew from 31st Street would fall into a familiar routine: They’d steal a car, hop in with guns they all shared, then go looking for rivals to shoot.

Sometimes, he said, they’d seek out young men associated with 27th Street, another neighborhood group. Other times, they’d look for people who lived around the nearby Wilson Park apartments.

The cycle of violence — sometimes chronicled on Instagram — became virtually impossible to extinguish. And by the time investigators caught up with Smith in 2019, he confessed to a staggering array of crimes.

I guess that Mr Smith knew they had him! But, as you’d probably have guessed, he was singing because the prosecutors had cut him a deal.

Regular readers of The First Street Journal — both of them! — have probably realized by now that I read with a careful eye, and notice things that some might miss. In the first four paragraphs of reporter Chris Palmer’s story, we see Mr Smith’s, and other people’s, gangs referred to as “his friends,” “neighborhood group,” “crew”, and “people”. We have previously noted that the newspaper really, really, really doesn’t like to refer to gangs as gangs, and in the 42 paragraphs beyond the four that I quoted, unless I just plain missed it — and unless you’re an Inquirer subscriber, you can’t check my work on this! 🙂 — the words “gang” or “gangs” appear exactly zero times.

Mr Palmer is one of the four Inquirer reporters credited with the article in which the newspaper told us that there were no real gangs in the city!

In Philadelphia, there are no gangs in the traditional, nationally known sense. Instead, they are cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families. The groups have names — Young Bag Chasers, Penntown, Northside — and members carry an allegiance to each other, but they aren’t committing traditional organized crimes, like moving drugs, the way gangs did in the past.

Ahhh, but that search function led the Inky to post a link to this story:

Krasner, state officials announce nine arrests in long-running South Philly gang feud

District Attorney Larry Krasner said Thursday that an additional six suspects are being sought.

by Vinny Vella and Mike Newall | Thursday, April 15, 2021

Jackee Nichols had come to believe the city had forgotten about her 15-year-old grandson, Rasul Benson. In October 2018, Rasul was gunned down at a South Philadelphia Gulf station while pumping gas with his friends for tip money to buy a cheesesteak.

On Thursday morning, Nichols finally received the answer she had been waiting for when an investigator working with the Philadelphia Gun Violence Task Force called to tell her a man had been arrested and another was being sought for Benson’s slaying as part of a sweep of nine suspects involved in a gang-fueled turf war between 2016 and 2020.

There’s more at the original, but it seems that the Inky wasn’t shying away from the truth on income tax day two years ago. I assume that this somehow all stems from publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ edict that the newspaper would be an “anti-racist news organization.”

We are, we have been told, supposed to respect journalists. Columnist Jenice Armstrong recently told us that “the press is the only profession mentioned in the U.S. Constitution,” though it actually refers to the right ot people to publish, not the journalists’ profession. The newspaper’s Senior Vice President and Executive Editor, Gabriel Escobar, said, “When people say ‘fake news’ and it is aimed at staining the work that journalists do, there’s great danger in that.”

Yet here is The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, older than The New York Times and The Washington Post, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, mealy-mouthing their words, seemingly having amended their stylebook to soften the truth rather than simply printing it.

Our professional media don’t normally lie outright, though, like any other human beings, reporters and editors can occasionally make mistakes. But the bias in the media comes through, if you take care to notice, by what they choose to print, and not to print, by the words that they choose, normally regulated by a stylebook, to use in their stories.

If it’s a gang, say it’s a gang!

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The pot calling the kettle black: Jenice Armstrong tells us that cable news networks are biased The Philadelphia Inquirer laughably tells us that they "delineate between opinion and straight news."

I have said it many times before: I prefer to read the news rather than listen to it on radio or watch it on television. Part of that is because I have very degraded hearing, and part of it is because newspapers have the capability, especially now that digital newspapers have taken some advantage of being able to ignore the printed space limitations of the dead trees editions. Reading the news enables me to go back and reread a section if I found it confusing or contradictory. There’s also the personal point that I delivered newspapers from the sixth through eleventh grades.

But I had to laugh, and I mean a loud, trying-not-to-spill-my-Rice-Chex guffaw, at Jenice Armstrong’s OpEd column in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

I don’t watch cable news much anymore. Here’s why.

Recently, I hosted a screening of “Trustworthy,” a new documentary that asked Americans what they think about the state of media in the U.S. No surprise: It isn’t good.

by Jenice Armstrong | Thursday, June 22, 2023 | 7:00 AM EDT

When I decided to pursue a career in journalism, it wasn’t that long after the glory days of the uncovering of the Watergate scandal that took down Richard Nixon. Back then, Americans viewed us as heroes, champions of the people.

I worked at newspapers all over because I admired reporters such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. I sacrificed time I could have spent with my family — or even starting one of my own — because I wanted to do this work. I’ve watched my colleagues do the same, only to end up working for a shrinking industry that Americans rank not far above used car salespeople.

Today, Americans trust journalism less than ever. A recent poll by the Knight Foundation and Gallup discovered that only 34% of Americans trust the news media to be accurate and fair; more — 38% — said they have “no trust at all” in the media.

Recently, I hosted a screening of Trustworthy, a new documentary on the subject of media distrust, at the Fitler Club, which was followed by a panel discussion. Executive producer Stephany Zamora, a Silicon Valley tech executive, created it after watching Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. She woke up the following morning determined to explore the media and democracy and whether it’s possible to find common ground.

Despite having zero filmmaking experience, Zamora set off on a 5,300-mile bus journey across the country interviewing academics, journalism experts (including Inquirer editor and senior vice president Gabriel Escobar), and ordinary Americans about what they think about the state of media in the U.S.

The blurb to the right is a screen capture from Miss Armstrong’s column, and it’s certainly true. But the columnist is about to miss the entire point.

All it takes to discredit news media are two words, Escobar notes in the documentary: “Fake news. When people say ‘fake news’ and it is aimed at staining the work that journalists do, there’s great danger in that.”

Mr Escobar said that as though the “work that journalists do” is somehow beyond criticism, beyond question. But I am old enough to remember ‘Rathergate‘, in which CBS News used forged documents to try to sabotage the younger President George Bush’s re-election bid. More, I watched CBS News coverage on election night that year, as Dan Rather kept asking reported Ed Bradley, who was doing the numbers that night, for another scenario in which Senator John F Kerry (D-MA) could somehow pull out a win, despite the numbers going against him as the returns rolled in, and the hang-dog expressions on all of their faces as they realized that President Bush was going to be re-elected.

Miss Armstrong wrote that she blamed the problems that journalism is facing on “cable news,” at which point she commented on the failures of CNN to revitalize itself after the firing of Jeff Zucker and hiring of Chris Licht, an effort which failed, and Mr Licht was let go himself earlier this month, after barely a year on the job. Amusingly, the Associated Press reported:

A lengthy profile of Licht in Atlantic magazine that came out on Friday, (June 2, 2023), titled “Inside the Meltdown at CNN,”[1]Internal link added by me; not in cited article. proved embarrassing and likely sealed his fate. Author Tim Alberta discussed how Licht’s effort to reach viewers turned off by CNN’s hostility to Trump had failed and damaged his standing with CNN journalists.

Another belly laugh here. According to the report, CNN’s journalists were complaining that, in effect, Mr Licht was trying to go for less strident anti-Trump stuff and trying to engage in less unfair more unbiased reporting.

Naturally, there was the Inquirer’s standard denigration of Fox News as slanted — which it is — but I was amused when Miss Armstrong told us that she used to keep cable news on as a “backdrop,” and “fall asleep listening to MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show.” If you listen to Miss Maddow’s show, you’ll never run out of biased news, as she is as hard left, on an admittedly leftist network, as you can find.

Miss Armstrong concluded:

In the meantime, I have another solution: Stick to newspapers, which delineate between opinion and straight news. Also, turn off 24-hour cable news, which too often blurs the line between fact and opinion and hypes events to boost ratings.

That’s what I do. I’m way less triggered that way. I sleep better, too.

“Stick to newspapers, which delineate between opinion and straight news”? How many times have I noted the 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 — of the Inquirer? There are 68 stories on this website alone in which a site search for Inquirer journalism returned. We have noted how the Inky deliberately censors the police reports they use, refused to publish a story on a pro-life clinic, in Philadelphia, being vandalized, and we have previously noted the killing of 12-year-old Thomas J Siderio, Jr, after he took a shot at the police, and The Philadelphia Inquirer’s attempts to drum up sympathy for a wannabe gang-banger with parents who are criminals. We have pointed out that while the Philadelphia Police Department wanted to keep the name of the officer who shot young Mr Siderio confidential, for the officer’s safety, the Inquirer dug in, found out the officer’s name, and published it, in what I can only believe is an attempt to get the officer killed. The Inquirer’s Editorial Board had 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.” I guess that outrage means that the Inquirer ought to put a target on the officer, to try to get him killed, because that’s exactly what they have done. What apparently didn’t outrage the Editorial Board was the fact that a wannabe gang banger was carrying a weapon and took a shot at the police.

Many of those stories were supposedly straight news stories, not specified opinion pieces.

But it’s hardly unexpected, because the Inquirer itself told us that, to meet publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ requirement that it become an “anti-racist news organization,” the newspaper would censor the news, saying that the newspaper would be:

  • 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.

In a city which has averaged over 500 murders a year for the past three years, and could be headed that way again in 2023, I’m not sure how the newspaper could possibly ‘overemphasize crime.’

  • Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.

So, the newspaper has publicly committed to an “antiracism” mission, and that, rather than simply presenting the facts, will guide how it publishes the news.

  • 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.

Put plainly, Miss Hughes told us that the Inky would bend its coverage on “crime and criminal justice” with an organization which specifically labels itself activist, which wants reparations from media organizations, and which, despite Miss Hughes’ efforts, wants the newspaper to go even further to the left. The newspaper’s publisher wasn’t telling us about the Inky’s editorial and OpEd pages, she wasn’t “delineat(ing) between opinion and straight news,” but about everything that they publish!

Yes, Miss Armstrong is right: the cable news networks have biases, biases strong and obvious enough that News Nation has seen an opening for straight news programming, though I cannot comment on how successful they’ve been in avoiding bias.

But The Philadelphia Inquirer has a bias, too, and not just on the editorial and OpEd pages; they have already admitted it. It’s understandable that, as a newspaper employee and writer, she’d want people to get their news from newspapers, but to claim that newspapers, especially her own, “delineate between opinion and straight news,” is just laughably false.

References

References
↑1 Internal link added by me; not in cited article.
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The problem with journolism in one coffee mug

I have frequently used the word journolist to refer to some reporters, referencing JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity.

Then I saw a tweet from a relatively sane reporter of a supposedly humorous coffee mug, and it seemed particularly apt:

I’m a
Jernalist
Journolist
Jurnalist
I write the news

And that’s the problem: we don’t need people who write the news; we need people who report the news.

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All the News That’s Politically Correct: The Journolism of The Philadelphia Inquirer

No, that’s not a typo in the headline; I spelled journolism exactly as I had intended, reflecting the liberal bias of the newspaper.

The Philadelphia Inquirer is, as I have noted many times, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and the winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, so one would think that that august journal would cover news that involves the City of Brotherly Love. Well, maybe not, if such news might violate publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ edict that the Inky would be an ‘anti-racist news organization.’ From The New York Times:

White Starbucks Manager Fired Amid Furor Over Racism Wins $25 Million

The company fired a former regional manager because of her race amid the fallout from the arrests of two Black men at a Philadelphia store, a federal jury found.

by Ed Shanahan | Tuesday, June 13, 2023

The episode plunged one of America’s most ubiquitous brands into crisis.

In April 2018, two Black men entered a Starbucks shop in the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood of Philadelphia for a business meeting with a white man who had not yet arrived. While they waited, and before ordering, one of the two asked to use the bathroom. He was refused. Eventually, they were asked to leave. When they did not, an employee called the police.

Note the date of the Times story: Tuesday, June 13th. A site search of the Inquirer’s website for “Shannon Phillips”, conducted at 9:38 AM EDT on Wednesday, June 14th, turned up a story, dated October 31, 2019, on Miss Phillips’ lawsuit being filed, but absolutely nothing on her winning that lawsuit, and $25.6 million in damages.

Could it be because Miss Hughes wasn’t publisher of the newspaper in 2019? The newspaper quoted her as having said:

Nothing matters more in our democracy than local journalism, to speak truth to power, to hold elected officials accountable, to celebrate our sports teams’ wins and losses, and to report on justice reform and the education system and gun violence, all of which has been part of The Inquirer’s beat for 190 years.

Apparently, “local journalism” and “speak(ing) truth to power” go into the trash bin when that “local journalism” and “truth” do not fit the newspaper’s “anti-racist” direction!

Back to the Times:

The subsequent arrests, captured in videos viewed millions of times online, prompted accusations of racism, protests and boycott threats. The company’s chief executive apologized publicly, describing the way the men had been treated as “reprehensible.” Starbucks took the extraordinary step of temporarily closing 8,000 stores to teach workers about racial bias.

On Monday, in a surprising twist, a federal jury in New Jersey ordered Starbucks to pay $25.6 million to a former regional manager after determining that the company had fired her amid the fallout from the Rittenhouse Square episode because she was white.

The jury found that Starbucks had violated the federal civil rights of the former manager, Shannon Phillips, as well as a New Jersey law that prohibits discrimination based on race, awarding her $600,000 in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages.

Note that while the Times’ story was dated Tuesday, the verdict was reached on Monday; the Inky had plenty of time to get this story onto its website.

There’s more at the Times’ original, which is interesting, but this article is not about the verdict, but the Inquirer’s biased journolism. An important story about an incident in Philadelphia does not get covered because it doesn’t fit the newspaper’s meme.

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No matter how low you bow, you cannot bow low enough for the left!

We have often mocked what I have sometimes referred to as The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. for its 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 wholly #woke[3]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 kowtowing to the left, but it doesn’t matter: no matter how low you bow and scrape, you just can’t bow low enough or rend your garments and gnash your teeth in anguish enough to satisfy the left.

Philadelphia Watchdog Coalition Gives Philadelphia Inquirer Vote of ‘No Confidence’

by Tauhid Chappell | Tuesday, May 30, 2023

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

Free Press joins its allies within the Journalism Accountability Watchdog Network (J.A.W.N.) in giving a vote of “no confidence” to The Philadelphia Inquirer after the city’s paper of record failed to address numerous issues around diversity, equity, inclusion and coverage of Philly’s diverse communities.The letter, signed by Free Press Program Manager Tauhid Chappell and the presidents of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists (PABJ), the Asian American Journalism Association’s Philadelphia chapter (AAJA-P) and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ Philadelphia chapter (NAHJ-P), comes at a time when J.A.W.N. has been working to hold Philadelphia news outlets accountable for their treatment of both journalists of color and communities of color.

Much of this work has centered on pushing The Philadelphia Inquirer to dismantle the structural racism that has long defined the organization. In 2020 — following the mass uprisings responding to the murder of George Floyd — the paper published an article with the callous headline “Buildings Matter Too.” In the wake of the public backlash, the Inquirer claimed that it wanted to become an antiracist institution. But the paper has failed to make the necessary shifts.

Earlier this month, organizers of J.A.W.N met with Inquirer Publisher and CEO Lisa Hughes and Inquirer board member Keith Leaphart to discuss several DEI concerns and commitments that the paper has neglected to address with our organizations following the “Buildings Matter Too” fiasco.

Then Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski, a twenty year veteran if the Inquirer, wrote a catchy headline, “Buildings Matter, Too,” playing off the #BlackLivesMatter meme, and he was fired resigned over it.

Philadelphia was torn by riots following the unfortunate death while resisting arrest of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled previously convicted violent felon George Floyd in Minneapolis. Just a month ago, the Inky bowed low to the rioters, describing a riot-burned-out area as:

The site’s previous buildings — housing a McDonald’s restaurant, a Vans shoe store, and a Dr. Martens shoe store — were ransacked and set ablaze on the night of May 30, 2020, following a day of somber demonstrations condemning the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

“(F)ollowing a day of somber demonstrations”? Is that like “Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests”?

Over the course of two years, Hughes and Inquirer leadership refused to meet with J.A.W.N. as a collective to address the ongoing failure of the Inquirer’s DEI initiatives. Hughes even went so far as to send an email to Inquirer staff warning of “voices outside of our organization looking to downplay and disregard the hard work that goes on each and every day at The Inquirer” — describing the complaints from J.A.W.N. as “demands, threats, and belittlement.”

These failures have prompted multiple journalists of color to leave the newsroom, which until recently employed zero Black male reporters outside of its sports desk. There continues to be public distrust of the Inquirer‘s coverage of police, gun violence and public safety. There is also a lack of accessible opportunities for the public to hold the Inquirer accountable over its failures to take the steps needed to become an “antiracist” newsroom. We came to this meeting hoping to have an honest conversation where the Inquirer would acknowledge the harm it has inflicted.

There most certainly is an accessible opportunity for the public to hold the newspaper accountable, and it is being held accountable in just that way: people can stop buying the newspaper. The circulation figures I could find for the Inky show that the newspaper is just a fifth of the size it was thirty years ago.

Of course, for the people at Free Press, who actually want “reparations” from media organizations, that really won’t work, because the Inquirer just doesn’t have that many ‘readers of color’ in the city.  With a newsstand price of $2.95 for a weekday issue, assuming you can find a newsstand selling it, a lot of people who might otherwise have picked up a copy no longer will. For black readers in the city, the Philadelphia Tribune, which concentrates on the black community, is a lot less expensive, at $1.25 a copy at the newsstand.

However, there’s a significant problem for readers of the Inquirer: a lot of them really can’t read! But, if they can read, the Inky is running a subscription special! Just click on the image.

These low literacy and retention rates have wide-ranging consequences. Philadelphia ranks 92nd out of the 100 largest U.S. cities in educational attainment. 17.4% of adult Philadelphians—an estimated 225,000—do not have a high school diploma, compared to 10.5 percent in Pennsylvania at large, and only 28% of Philadelphians 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or higher, ahead of only Cleveland and Detroit, and 6% behind the national average.

The literacy crisis in Philadelphia’s public schools produces adults who struggle to read. Philadelphia ranks at the bottom among large American cities in reading proficiency; according to recent federal data, roughly 22 percent of Philadelphians aged 16 and older lack the most basic literacy skills. 52% of Philadelphia’s adults are functionally illiterate, and 67% are low-literate, reading at a sixth- to eighth-grade level. Almost 40% of adult Philadelphians struggle to fill out a job application, to read doctors’ instructions on their medicines, and to help with their children’s homework.

That’s the #woke left for you! We have already noted how ‘progressive’ Helen Gym Flaherty ran, unsuccessfully, for the Democratic mayoral nomination, touting the strong support of the teachers’ union, and bragged about how she saved Edward T Steel Elementary School from ‘going charter.’ The school, still public, is ranked 1,205th out of 1,607 Pennsylvania elementary schools, with 1% of students which scored at or above the proficient level for their grade in math, and 8% scored at or above that level in reading.

Unfortunately, the meeting left J.A.W.N. members feeling that the Inquirer has no intention in working in partnership with the coalition in meaningful and transformative ways. Hughes and Leaphart refused to acknowledge concerns raised by our respective memberships (which include past and current journalists of color at the paper). And the two showed no interest in honoring the formal agreements it had made with PABJ and Free Press. “Let the past stay in the past,” Hughes and Leaphart repeatedly said.

As a result, the Journalism Accountability Watchdog Network has decided to give a vote of “no confidence” in the Inquirer leadership, asserting that the paper does not have a genuine interest in reaching shared grounds to address ongoing DEI concerns that J.A.W.N., and members of the public, have consistently raised over the years. Given this collective vote of “no confidence,” in good conscience J.A.W.N. cannot recommend that anyone seek out opportunities at the Inquirer. This includes fellowship, internship, apprenticeship or hiring initiatives, especially since the company has failed to partner with J.A.W.N. on such initiatives in the past.

So, the Free Press and JAWN complain that the Inky has not hired enough ‘journalists of color,’ yet they also recommend against potential ‘journalists of color’ seeking employment at the newspaper. `

With the conclusion of all of this, Free Press looks forward to working with more community groups and other like-minded organizations in Philly that truly value community engagement, centering community-information needs and producing sound journalism that accurately reflects the city’s diversity.

What, exactly, does the ‘Free Press’ want in journalism from the Inquirer, when it comes to “producing sound journalism that accurately reflects the city’s diversity”? The problem is that the vast majority of the violent crime, shootings, and homicides occurs in the city’s heavily black neighborhoods, and the newspaper does what it can to soft-peddle that fact. As much as Published Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes and Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Gabriel Escobar would like it to be different, if the paper accurately reported the news from Strawberry Mansion and North Philadelphia, it would be reporting much more heavily on the crime and violence in those areas.

By now, Miss Hughes and Mr Escobar ought to have learned the truth: there’s nothing that they could do short of firing every white employee, giving all of their jobs to ‘people of color,’ resigning themselves, and leaving to the people the wokesters would designate millions of dollars in ‘reparations’ that would satisfy the left, and even there, I’m not certain it would be enough.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑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.
↑3 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.