Screenshot from Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, July 7, 2021, 4:42 PM EDT. Click to enlarge.

Sometimes you just know what you have to do: take a screenshot as documentary evidence, before someone tries to make history vanish.^[1]I pointed out the tremendous bias in a tweet to Gabriel Escobar, the editor of the Inquirer, so it’s at least possible that the headline will be changed, not that I expect it. The screen capture to the right was taken by me, at 4:42 PM EDT on Wednesday, July 7, 2021.

Philly cop’s brother charged with assaulting Black Lives Matter protester in Fishtown

Richie Goodwin, 45, turned himself in to East Detectives division where he was charged with assault and recklessly endangering another person.

by Barbara Laker | July 7, 2021 | 4:10 PM EDT

Richie Goodwin, the brother of a 26th District police officer, was arrested today and charged with repeatedly punching a man who showed solidarity with Black Lives Matter supporters near the police station last year.

Goodwin, 45, turned himself in to East Detectives division where he was charged with assault and recklessly endangering another person.

The night of June 1, 2020, between 4 and 10 p.m., dozens of Fishtown residents called 911 or the 26th District to report they felt unsafe because they saw an agitated group of white men armed with baseball bats, wooden walking clubs, axes and metal tools threatening, harassing and, in some cases, assaulting peaceful protesters.

There were some 36 reports of a “person with a weapon” during that time, yet officers arrested no one on any charge within a half-mile of the district headquarters, according to department records provided by police, an Inquirer investigation found. Instead, Capt. William Fisher and other officers watched.

There’s more at the original. There were several paragraphs describing the incident for which Mr Goodwin was arrested, and the fact that he had spent some time in prison:

Police are well familiar with Goodwin. He had served prison time for punching a man to death during a 2008 alcohol-fueled brawl. He was on probation when he was arrested in March 2012 for a DUI and a judge sentenced him to a maximum of four years, according to court records.

What gets me is that the Inquirer decided, in its headline — and headlines are normally written by an editor, not the reporter — to specify that Mr Goodwin was the brother of a Philadelphia Police Officer. But the only mention of the officer was in a paragraph near the end:

Goodwin said his brother, Joseph Jr., an officer since 1996, came to help and drove him to the Philadelphia VA Medical Center. Richie Goodwin had served in the Navy from 1995 to 1998 where he said he suffered a brain injury after being attacked in the Persian Gulf.

So, no criminality was mentioned or even alluded to by the officer, but one thing is clear: whoever wrote that headline was trying to stir up resentment against the Philadelphia Police Department. Yeah, I call that journolism, not journalism. The spelling ‘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.

At the end of the article was Barbara Laker’s, the reporter’s, first person bio line, “I try to dig deep into a host of topics, hoping to break new ground and uncover injustices.” Yeah, that sure sounds like the self-description of a #woke ‘social justice warrior.’