It began on Tuesday, February 15th, with the huge headline on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, “Black City. White paper. The summer of 2020 forced a reckoning for the country, Philadelphia, and its newspaper. But after perpetuating inequality for generations, can The Inquirer really become an anti-racist institution?”
The article, by Wesley Lowery, began with an editor’s note:
The following account of The Inquirer’s history, failed attempts at newsroom integration, and current efforts at internal reckoning is based on more than 75 interviews with current and former staff members, historians, and Philadelphians. Inquirer editors were uninvolved with the production of this piece, which was written by Wesley Lowery, an independent reporter. Lowery’s reporting was edited by Errin Haines, a Philadelphia-based journalist, and member of the board of The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which currently owns the paper.
The “Buildings Matter, Too” headline was published June 2, 2020 on page A12 of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Click to enlarge.
It’s pretty long, and gives us the history of the Inquirer as time passed, concentrating on the inclusion, or, more accurately, mostly the exclusion of black journalists and employees through time. The takeoff point was the article headlines “Buildings Matter, Too,” which thoroughly offended many black journalists in the Inquirer’s newsroom.
Cassie Haynes started the morning of June 2, 2020, as she does most mornings, with a copy of her hometown newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer. What she read that day horrified and enraged her.
For weeks, Black people in Philadelphia and across the country had protested amid dual pandemics. They had been traumatized and enraged by cell phone video showing a Black man, George Floyd, begging for his life as his windpipe was crushed beneath the knee of Derek Chauvin, a white police officer in Minneapolis. And the millions who poured into the streets did so despite a global public health crisis that was disproportionately ravaging Black communities.
That Tuesday morning, The Inquirer published on Page A12 a column by the newspaper’s Pulitzer-Prize winning architecture critic beneath the three-word headline: “Buildings Matter, Too.”
Two years earlier, Haynes, who is Black, cofounded Resolve Philly, a group that works with media outlets across the city to create community and solutions-oriented journalism. The Inquirer is one of their partners. Yet, here was the newspaper likening the value of her life to that of a few storefront windows. Her cofounder happened to have a meeting that morning with The Inquirer’s executive editor, Stan Wischnowski. Haynes said to tell him she was canceling her subscription.
“A few storefront windows”? The article has since been retitled:
“People over property” is a great as a rhetorical slogan. But as a practical matter, the destruction of downtown buildings in Philadelphia – and in Minneapolis, in Los Angeles and in a dozen other American cities – could be devastating for the future of cities.
by Inga Saffron | June 1, 2020
Does the destruction of buildings matter when black Americans are being brazenly murdered in cold blood by police and vigilantes?
That’s the question that has been raging on the streets of Philadelphia, and across my architecture-centric social media feeds, over the last two days as a dark cloud of smoke spiraled up from Center City. What started as a poignant and peaceful protest in Dilworth Park on Saturday morning ended up in a frenzy of destruction by evening. Hardly any building on Walnut and Chestnut Streets was left unscathed, and two mid-19th century structures just east of Rittenhouse Square were gutted by fire.
Their chances of survival are slim, which means there could soon be a gaping hole in the heart of Philadelphia, in one of its most iconic and historic neighborhoods. And protesters moved on to West Philadelphia’s fragile 52nd Street shopping corridor, an important center of black life, where yet more property has been battered. . . . .
“People over property” is great as a rhetorical slogan. But as a practical matter, the destruction of downtown buildings in Philadelphia — and in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and a dozen other American cities — is devastating for the future of cities. We know from the civil rights uprisings of the 1960s that the damage will ultimately end up hurting the very people the protests are meant to uplift. Just look at the black neighborhoods surrounding Ridge Avenue in Sharswood or along the western end of Cecil B. Moore Avenue. An incredible 56 years have passed since the Columbia Avenue riots swept through North Philadelphia, and yet those former shopping streets are graveyards of abandoned buildings. Residents still can’t get a supermarket to take a chance on their neighborhood.
A photo that accompanied the article was captioned:
The intersection of Ridge Avenue and Sharswood Street shows the blight that has plagued the area since the 1964 Columbia Avenue riots. The building has since been demolished.
And what’s there more recently? The building on the corner has been demolished, and it was, at least in August of 2021, when Google Maps made their most recent pass, a street with business locations with rolled down steel doors or bars across their windows, litter in the streets, and cars parked on the sidewalks.
Was it really racist to note, as Inga Saffron did, that buildings in heavily black areas had more than just front windows smashed but that some were burned out? Is it racist to point out that many of the buildings burned out and businesses destroyed housed black-owned businesses, or the places of employment of black Philadelphians?
When you need to go to work, to earn a paycheck, to pay your rent and put food on the table, if the business at which you worked has been damaged beyond near immediate reopening, then that building mattered to you!
The initial article cited followed the history of integration at the Inquirer, which was not rapid. However, the history as given is from the perspective of the 21st century, an attempt at holding the newspaper in the middle of the 20th accountable to today’s standards.
Much further down, the article notes how the staff meetings at the Inquirer went. Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski did not write the “Buildings Matter, Too” headline; that was the work of an unnamed copy editor, and approved by the editor who oversaw the print desk. Both editors submitted their resignations, but Mr Wischnowski refused to accept them.
The “newsroom’s journalists of color” were not happy, and organized a sick out. Then, by Thursday, June 4, 2020, Mr Wischnowski, who had been with the paper for twenty years, was telling his colleagues at the newspaper that he expected to lose his job. The subsequent Saturday evening, published Elizabeth Hughes announced that Mr Wischnowski had resigned. In other words, I have been right all along when I characterized his departure as being fired. Fortunately, Mr Wischnowski landed on his feet, and is now the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a position to which he was named on September 5, 2020, so he wasn’t out of a job for too long.
The article noted that, in November 2020, Miss Hughes named Gabriel Escobar, a longtime Inquirer journalist who was previously Mr Wischnowski’s deputy, the new executive editor. The article then lamented that while Mr Escobar “is the first Latino journalist at the top of the masthead,” “To date, a Black journalist has never run the paper.”
Now comes Lisa Hughes, the publisher, again making her promise to turn the Inquirer into an “anti-racist” newspaper:
A More Perfect Union’s first chapter showed how The Inquirer has historically failed the Black community and journalists who fought for change.
by Elizabeth H Hughes | Wednesday, February 16, 2022
Two years ago we made a pledge to become an anti-racist organization. An important part of that work requires an unflinching examination of ourselves and our approach to journalism, past and present. This work had a marked beginning but has no fixed end. It is in many ways a daily duty, for all of us.
This endeavor requires honesty. In that light, we must recognize that The Philadelphia Inquirer has historically failed in its coverage of the Black community — in a city where Black people have been integral since before the founding of the republic. We must also recognize that as an institution, we have failed Black journalists who for decades have fought, often in vain, for us to be more representative and inclusive.
The journalistic examination of The Inquirer by Wesley Lowery published this week puts our failings in brutal relief. The reporting shows not only that we have not done right — it reveals, starkly, that we have done wrong. Black voices in the story — inside and outside the newsroom — articulate forcefully the harm we have inflicted over decades.
It is worth noting that the story focuses primarily on the modern Inquirer — taking specific note of the racist headline published in 2020 and an offensive editorial published in 1990 — but it does not delve deeply into its long past. First printed just three months after Andrew Jackson was inaugurated president, The Inquirer has been a chronicler of life in the city for almost two centuries, and any historic assessment would doubtless find many more faults.
An acknowledgment of our failings is not sufficient. We also apologize — to the Black residents and communities of Philadelphia, to the Black journalists of The Inquirer past and present, and to other communities and people whom we have also neglected or harmed.
We recommit ourselves to the anti-racist mission we set in the summer of 2020, which has already yielded important changes. If there is skepticism of what we have done, or what we can or will do, we have earned that as well. We recognize that the judgment of our efforts will not be based on the promises we make, but on the actions we take, and the policies and practices we put in place to improve our journalism.
“Improve (their) journalism”? According to the Philadelphia Police Department, two more people were murdered in the City of Brotherly Love on Wednesday, but there isn’t a single story about either killing on the newspaper’s website main page, or its Crime & Justice page. As we noted last month, the concept of “anti-racism” means, as far as the Inquirer’s journolism is concerned, to censor the news when the news could be seen as reflecting poorly on minority communities.
No, “journolism” was not a typo: 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. And to Miss Hughes, formerly the publisher of New York Magazine, telling the truth about the heavily black-on-black homicides in the Inquirer’s home city would be harmful to the black community.
I have to ask why that is, because, let’s tell the truth here: everyone already knows that the vast majority of homicides in Philadelphia are the killings of black people by other black people. Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas, wrote, in December of 2020, “What do you know about the Philadelphians killed by guns this year? At least know their names,” saying:
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 then, and this is now: such stories, when they are printed at all, don’t say ‘A 21-tear-old black male’ but just a ’21-year-old male’ was killed. To identify the victim by race would be to, as the Sacramento Bee once said about publishing mugshots, “perpetuat(es) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.”
Translation: to the publisher and editors of the Inquirer, telling the truth is racist! To Lisa Hughes and Gabriel Escobar and, apparently, to much of the newsroom, to be ‘anti-racist’ is to censor the news, to not tell Philadelphians and the other subscribers to the newspaper a truth that they already know, but a truth that the #woke just can’t handle. How is that journalism rather than journolism?
The originally cited article said:
Several longtime staffers made a point to defend Wischnowski — noting his longtime service to the paper and that he had been uninvolved in writing the headline itself — and that his resignation did not have the unanimous support of the room, even among those pressing for more racial equity.
“It was a knee-jerk reaction,” said reporter Mensah Dean, who is Black. “Everyone got real, real woke, real fast.”
The truth simply did not matter! Mr Wischnowski didn’t write the catchy headline — and aren’t headlines supposed to grab the readers’ attention, to get them to read the articles themselves? — and he apparently didn’t give his approval for it, but he also didn’t fire the two people who were actually responsible for it.
Mentions of Black Philadelphia appeared in the white papers primarily through the lens of crime. To read The Inquirer then would leave one wondering if Black people ever were born, ever died, if they lived lives in between — or if they simply sprouted, fully grown, in the city streets to call for civil rights, seek elected office, and commit various criminal infractions.
That, of course, was what Miss Hughes told us in her previous column, that the Inquirer was:
- 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.
Miss Hughes did something really radical in that: she told us the truth, that the Inquirer would no longer tell the truth, not if that truth might offend some people.
I admit it: I prefer the print medium, because it takes the space to publish more information than the broadcast media normally do, and, with my poor hearing, it’s simply easier for me. But television news, due to the visual nature of the medium, publishes mugshots, publishes photos, and doesn’t have the luxury of hiding the truth the way newspapers can. But when I see what our major newspapers are doing, I cringe.
If I had a billion dollars, I would do what Jeff Bezos did when he bought The Washington Post: I would buy The Philadelphia Inquirer — and no, it wouldn’t cost a billion dollars, probably not even $50 million — and re-establish it as a news organization that told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That’s what the city sorely needs.
