This site has been hard on The Philadelphia Inquirer and how that august newspaper^[1]The Inquirer is the third oldest surviving daily newspaper in the United States in its own right. pretty much ignores the homicides in its hometown unless the victim is an innocent, someone already of note, or a cute little white girl. In a city in which the vast majority of murder victims are black, you wouldn’t expect that “anti-racist news organization” to have that kind of skewed coverage, would you?

So, it was with some surprise that I saw this article from Feminista Jones on the Inquirer’s website:

When Gabby Petito disappeared, the world watched. Destini Smothers was ignored.

If a greater percentage of African American and Indigenous women go missing and they experience higher rates of fatal domestic violence, why does the media continue to ignore their plight?

by Feminista Jones,^[2]Feminista Jones is an author and doctoral student at Temple University. She is the cohost of Black Girl Missing podcast and a fierce advocate for Black women and girls. Her website is here. For The Inquirer | September 29, 2021

After taking a trip with her boyfriend, a beautiful young woman went missing, never to be heard from again. The last person to see her alive is believed to be her boyfriend, though he has denied any involvement in her death and has since gone missing himself. Her family desperately searched for her, traveling far and wide, pleading with local police and the media for help, hoping someone, anyone would have a clue into her disappearance. When her body was discovered, all hopes of finding her safe and alive were dashed — she was gone forever, and her loved ones would never hold her in their arms or see her brilliant smile again. They want answers and there are several questions about her boyfriend’s connection to her death since he was the last person to see her alive, according to all accounts.



Destini Smothers had been missing since Nov. 3. (Obtained by New York Daily News)

You may be thinking about Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old woman whose body was recently discovered near the campsite she and her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie, visited in Utah in August 2021.

But I was writing about Destini Smothers, a 26-year-old woman from New York who, in November 2020, traveled with Kareem Flake, her boyfriend and father of her two children, from their home in Troy, N.Y., to Queens to both attend a funeral and to celebrate her birthday. When her mother didn’t hear from her, she contacted her boyfriend, who only said that she left their car after an argument, upset because she wanted to go spend time with her friends after they attended a bowling party. He said she left without taking her keys, wallet, or phone. Her mother didn’t believe him and became frantic. She contacted local authorities in November, but she didn’t receive much information about the investigation until March when she was notified that her daughter’s body was found.

In the days after she went missing, Smothers’ disappearance did not appear on national news outlets, every hour or with breaking news segments on 24-hour cable news shows. Smothers was African American and like so many African American girls and women, her disappearance barely made a blip in local media, much less national coverage.

When Black girls and women go missing, the country doesn’t come to a standstill the way it does when a white girl or woman goes missing.

There’s more at the original, but I would have expected, even if Miss Jones wrote this article for wider publication than just in the Inquirer, she would have tailored this one far more specifically to the Inquirer. After all, Miss Jones lives in the City of Brotherly Love, and someone who writes frequently for newspapers^[3]Her biography page states, “Feminista’s passion and talent for writing have led to her being featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Essence, XOJane, Complex, Vox, Salon, and … Continue reading should have paid a bit more attention to her hometown newspaper, and noticed how the Inquirer was just as much of an offender as any other.

Miss Jones goes on, further down, to blame racism:

There is also a lack of empathy for marginalized people living in a society where whiteness is universal and to be anything other than white is to be generally regarded as inferior. Part of the issue is in the media’s commitment to upholding white supremacy by shaping narratives that place white people at the top of a racial hierarchy, thereby prioritizing their wants, needs, and experiences above others. There is no push to regard nonwhite people as equally deserving of empathy, care, and consideration, so when they are victims of violent crimes, their stories are minimized or completely erased to keep white innocence and fragility centered. And due to journalism’s gatekeeping, people of color remain severely underrepresented in the newsrooms to even raise awareness about what’s happening in marginalized communities and amplify their stories.

Upon reading that paragraph, a couple of things struck me. First, Miss Jones was simply whining about “whiteness” and lamenting that non-whites are seen more negatively. Yes, there will be people who will claim that I’m just an [insert slang term for the rectum here], a claim I do not dispute, but let’s tell the very blatant truth here: by American cultural standards, Gabby Petito was a lot better looking than Destini Smothers, and pretty girls sell newspapers.

But when Miss Jones stated that the credentialed media have a “commitment to upholding white supremacy”, perhaps she doesn’t realize that Gabriel Escobar, the Editor and Senior Vice President of the Inquirer, is “one of the highest-ranking Latinos at a U.S. news organization.” Publisher Elizabeth Hughes wrote, four months ago, 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.

The last thing the Inquirer is consciously trying to do is “(uphold) white supremacy by shaping narratives that place white people at the top of a racial hierarchy.” Either Miss Jones was criticizing her hometown newspaper specifically, or she doesn’t really know much about it. But if Miss Jones was trying to say that the Inquirer is unconsciously “upholding white supremacy by shaping narratives that place white people at the top of a racial hierarchy,” then she has a better case.

“When Black girls and women go missing, the country doesn’t come to a standstill the way it does when a white girl or woman goes missing,” Miss Jones wrote, but let’s be honest here: the credentialed media exist to make money^[4]The Inquirer is owned by a non-profit company, but it still has to make enough money to stay in business., and money is made by people paying attention to them, leading to more advertising revenue. Which is the chicken, and which is the egg:

1. A public which respond more intensely to pretty white women; or
2. A media which recognizes that to which the public respond?

If Miss Hughes’ goals are to be met, the Inquirer has to lead the coverage. Yet the newspaper deliberately shies away from crime reporting, something Miss Hughes specifically said she wanted, for ‘racial justice’ reasons. These two things are mutually exclusive. I was never a professional reporter, just a Kentucky Kernel staffer while in grad school, but it seems to me that maybe, just maybe, the Inquirer would be better served to simply cover the news, and leave the mission and biases outside 801 8^th Street.

Will Editor Escobar, will Publisher Hughes, pay attention to Miss Jones’ OpEd piece? It might have been more effective, at least in the Inquirer, had she called them out more specifically, but both are intelligent and educated people; they ought to be able to see that they really have been called out. Somehow, though, I doubt that they will.