OK, OK, it’s been a slow day at the farm, and I’ve been lazy. Mochi is on the couch on the screened in porch! And letting sleeping dogs lie is pretty much what today’s journolists,^[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use … Continue reading er, journalists do.

Well, being lazy, and having seen an episode of Roku’s Murder House Flip, I wasn’t online when my good friend Robert Stacy McCain threw me a bone and published this!

Leif Halvorsen: The Only Kind of Mugshot the SJW Media Will Let You See

By Robert Stacy McCain | May 22, 2021 |

Say hello to Leif Halvorsen, who was convicted for killing of three people in Kentucky “in a drug-fueled shooting rampage” in 1983. In order to fight “systemic racism,” the Social Justice Warriors who run the McClatchy newspaper cartel have developed a policy against publishing mugshots of criminals, because of the negative impact the publication of such mugshots allegedly has on “marginalized communities.”

Our blog buddy Dana Pico of First Street Journal notes that the McClatchy-owned Lexington Herald-Leader is apparently not adhering to company protocols, because they published Halvorsen’s mugshot in a story about convicted murderers in Kentucky who may be eligible for parole under a new state policy. To illustrate that story, the Herald-Leader published the mugshots of Halvorsen and four other convicted murderers who, perhaps not coincidentally, shared a certain trait with him. Can you guess what that trait was? I think you can.

There’s much more at Mr McCain’s original, but he added something I hadn’t considered:

Obviously, not every local media outlet has surrendered to the kind of SJW (Social Justice Warrior) mentality that now controls the Lexington Herald-Leader, but as someone who spent more than 20 years in the newspaper business, I must ask this: What happened to “the public’s right to know”?

This was the phrase used by journalists for many decades to defend such controversial decisions as publication of the “Pentagon Papers,” and many other practices. Journalists demanded access to public records (so-called “sunshine laws”) because what government did, in the name of the people, and with taxpayer dollars, ought to be publicly known.

Certainly in matters of law enforcement, the identities of people arrested by police are a matter of public record, as are the mug shots of suspects. No ethical journalist would willingly become complicit in a deliberate effort to conceal such information from the public.

But of course, the unethical SJWs of the McClatchy cartel do not consistently apply their policy of suppressing facts about crime.

Mr McCain was an actual professional journalist, starting at a small Southern newspaper and eventually working for the Washington Times. That pretty much leaves my two years with the Kentucky Kernel in the dust! And his point is spot on: journalists have been using that phrase for as long as I can remember. Consider McClatchy’s statement of policy:

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.

There is a powerful meaning that the executives at McClatchy want to hide, but can’t quite: if “inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color,” it must mean at least one of two things:

1. Either ‘people of color’ are arrested for the crimes they commit in a far greater percentage than are white people; or
2. ‘People of color’ actually commit crimes at a far greater rate than do white people.

Logically, either 1 or 2 can be true, or both 1 and 2 can be true. But the only way that neither can be true is if the publication of mugshots does not disproportionately harm ‘people of color.’ Regardless of which, or both, are true, either one being true is something which ought to generate a whole lot of investigative journalism to find out why it is true.

The problem is that, as far as the executives at McClatchy, and journalists in general, are concerned, the belief is that number 2 is true. Oh, they want to believe that number 1 is the correct answer, which is why you see so many stories about police stopping cars driven by black Americans, but somehow that doesn’t explain why those stops have so frequently led to the discovery of illegally-possessed firearms or drugs.

The executives at McClatchy were quite blatant about it: publishing mugshots would harm communities of color because there would be a disproportionate number of mugshots depicting people of color. Today’s journalists do not want to investigate any of that, because they are afraid, deathly afraid, of the answers they would find. I noted, last year, in This is what Social Justice law enforcement gets us:

Simply put, (Larry) Krasner, who hated the police from the beginning, installed a form of ‘social justice’ law enforcement; he was tougher on the police than he was on criminals. He was oh-so-concerned that “disproportionately high numbers of minority males” were charged, convicted and incarcerated, without ever thinking to consider that perhaps, just perhaps, “disproportionately high numbers of minority males” were the ones committing crimes.

There are two kinds of crimes: crimes of evidence and crimes of reporting. If a man rapes a woman on the streets of Philadelphia, as far as the police are concerned, if it wasn’t reported, it didn’t happen. It is commonly assumed that most rapes go unreported, with some guesstimates being as high as 90% not reported. Crimes like robbery might go unreported if the victims do not trust the police or think it will do any good, or are fearful of revenge by the criminals. When your city is stuck with a District Attorney like Mr Krasner, who doesn’t believe in prosecuting criminals, or sentencing them harshly when they are prosecuted and convicted, what reason is there to report that you were robbed?

But murder is different: it is a crime of evidence. It isn’t easy to dispose of a dead body in a way that it won’t be found, especially if you haven’t carefully planned things. You’re looking at 100 to 300 pounds of dead meat, bone and fat, and something which will put off a strong and nasty odor after very little time. The vast majority of dead bodies get found.

I noted, just two days ago, that in St Louis, a city that is 45.3% black and 44.1% white, 68 out of the then-current 73 homicide victims were black, 53 males and 15 females, only three of the victims were white, and of the two known suspects, both were white. Out of the 34 identified suspects, 2 were white, 2 were Hispanic, and 30 were black. All thirty of the identified black suspects were accused of killing black victims.

The Social Justice Warriors simply have no answer for those raw, very raw, numbers. But one thing is certain: the executives at McClatchy don’t want you to know them. The editors of the Sacramento Bee, the newspaper at McClatchy’s headquarters, and the precursor to the McClatchy policy, put it more directly:

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.

Stereotypes exist for a reason; they exist because there is usually an element of truth behind them.

For McClatchy, for Peter Baniak, Editor and General Manager of the Herald-Leader, and for the newsroom at The Philadelphia Inquirer,^[2]If I seem to harp on those two newspapers, it’s because I have paid for subscriptions to them, so I read them most often. any consideration of the “public’s right to know” has been overshadowed by their desire to manipulate public attitudes, by their desire that the public not hold stereotypes which just might be accurate. The last thing they want to do is the investigative journalism to determine why those stereotypes exist, and just how true they might be, because, deep down, they believe those stereotypes themselves. They are the ones who cannot handle the truth, and they are deathly fearful of what might happen if you knew the truth.