I have previously noted Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas, several times, based primarily on column from December of 2020, “What do you know about the Philadelphians killed by guns this year? At least know their names.” She wrote:
- The last time we published the names of those lost to gun violence, in early July, nearly 200 people had been fatally shot in the city.
By the end of 2020, that number more than doubled: 447 people gunned down.
Even in a “normal” year, most of their stories would never be told.
At best they’d be reduced to a handful of lines in a media alert:
- “A 21-year-old Black male was shot one time in the head. He was transported to Temple University Hospital and was pronounced at 8:12 p.m. The scene is being held, no weapon recovered and no arrest.”
That’s it. An entire life ending in a paragraph that may never make the daily newspaper.
That was thirteen months ago. What brings it to my attention again? Her column on Friday, and its subtitle:
For two mothers touched by gun violence: ‘Pray, pray, and pray some more.’
Numbers tend to attract attention around here; the people behind them, not always so much.
by Helen Ubiñas | Friday, January 7, 2022
At 12:55 p.m., on the eve of the new year, a 17-year-old died from a gunshot wound he suffered a day earlier.
He was the 562nd person to be killed in Philadelphia in 2021.
And, as it would turn out, the last homicide victim of the year.
His name was Nasheem Choice, and three days later, on Jan. 3, he would have celebrated his 18th birthday.
There’s much more at the original, a good column which you should read.
But it’s that subtitle, noting that “around here” it’s the numbers which get attention, not the individuals who were killed. What do I see in the Inquirer, a newspaper which publisher Elizabeth Hughes vowed to make “an antiracist news organization”? I see that the paper paid more attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s five separate stories, a whole lot more than the two or three paragraphs most victims get.
Then there was the murder of Samuel Sean Collington, a Temple University student approaching graduation. Mr Collington was a white victim, allegedly murdered by a black juvenile in a botched robbery. The Inquirer then published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him. Five separate stories about the case of a murdered white guy.
The Inquirer even broke precedent when it came to Mr Collington’s murder by including the name of the juvenile suspect in the case, and delving into his previous record.
Compared to the coverage the Inquirer gives concerning black victims, that’s some real white privilege there!
Oh, it’s not as though the Inquirer doesn’t publish stories about black victims, at least when it comes to black victims who are ‘innocents’. The murder of Samir Jefferson merited two stories, and four stories about the killing of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes.[1]I did note my suspicion that young Mr Stokes might not have been quite the innocent the Inquirer, and writer Anna Orso, made him out to be. A story is merited if the victim was a local high school basketball star, and cute little white girls killed get tremendous coverage: a search of the newspaper’s website for Rian Thal returned 4855 results! But for the vast majority of black victims, Inquirer coverage is a couple paragraphs, mostly in the late evening, and which have disappeared from the main page of the newspaper’s website by morning.
Did the newspaper’s editors think that no one would notice this? Or is it that the editors have so internalized their own biases that they didn’t realize it themselves?
I’ve said it dozens of times: black lives don’t matter to the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer, regardless of what they say, because their actions, their editorial decisions, speak far more loudly, and clearly, than their words.
Can Miss Ubiñas change that? Can she bring it to the editors’ attention? I have tried, but I’m just a nobody, and the editors seem to need a Somebody to point out what the readership can clearly see.
References
| ↑1 | I did note my suspicion that young Mr Stokes might not have been quite the innocent the Inquirer, and writer Anna Orso, made him out to be. |
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In their defense, as my mother always told me “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
I seriously doubt that there’s much nice to say about most of the “victims” in these cases.
Of course that does make the job a little easier:
“xxxxxxxx was an aspiring rap artist who, according to his family, was ‘a good kid at heart’ and was in the process of turning his life around when tragedy struck”.
All you’ve got to do is insert the name.
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