Tag Archives: #FreedomOfThePress

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The laughable contortions taken by the professional media when a school shooter is #transgender Isn't simply reporting the truth much, much simpler?

It did not take long for the crazy person who shot up The Covenant School, a private Christian elementary school, Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a woman who killed three children and three adults, to be identified as transgender, a woman who decided that she was a man. Yet that news was primarily confined to Twitter and conservative sites; the professional media seemed reticent to acknowledge that part.

Finally, there was this, at 1:39 AM EDT this morning, in The New York Times:

There was confusion about the gender identity of the assailant in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Chief Drake said the shooter identified as transgender. Officials used “she” and “her” to refer to the shooter, but, according to a social media post and a LinkedIn profile, the shooter appeared to identify as male in recent months.

This was the sixth paragraph down. In what is even more amusing is that the article used some stilted prose, to refer to Miss Hale as “the shooter” or “the assailant,” and managed to not once refer to her with a gendered pronoun.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Nashville Shooter Left ‘Manifesto,’ Was ‘High-Functioning’ Autistic

A second Times story also managed to avoid using gendered pronouns or honorifics — like The First Street Journal, the Times uses honorifics, unlike the vast majority of publications — and had this paragraph:

In the aftermath of the shooting, there was confusion about the shooter’s gender identity. Chief Drake said the shooter identified as transgender, and officials used “she” and “her” to refer to the attacker. But according to a social media post and a LinkedIn profile, the shooter appeared to identify as male in recent months.

Not quite identical, but very close. The author of the second article, Adeel Hassan, was not one of the four listed authors, Emily Cochrane, Ben Shpigel, Michael Levenson and Jesus Jiménez, of the first one. The second article was time stamped at 6:57 AM EDT this morning.

The Washington Post, which does not use honorifics, gave slightly more information:

(John)Drake (chief of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department) said Hale was transgender. Asked if that had played a role in what he described as a “targeted attack,” Drake said it was part of the police investigation.

“There is some theory to that,” Drake said. But, he added, “We’re investigating all the leads, and once we know exactly, we will let you know.”

Don Aaron, a police spokesman, later clarified the chief’s remarks. “Audrey Hale is a biological woman who, on a social media profile, used male pronouns,” Aaron said in an email.

Not restrained by editorial policy specifying honorifics, the Post story frequently referred to the killer as “Hale”, so there were fewer references to “the shooter” or “the assailant.” Neither the Times nor the Post referred to “the killer.” But there was this highly amusing sentence as a stand-alone paragraph:

Police initially described Hale as appearing to be a teenager before revising the age upward to 28.

In any normal composition in English, that would be “revising her age” or “revising his age”. “(R)evising the age” is incredibly stilted.

The Philadelphia Inquirer simply had an Associated Press story by John Matisse, time stamped 2:34 PM EDT on Monday, which, starting on the fifth paragraph down, included:

Police gave unclear information on the gender of the shooter. For hours, police identified the shooter as a 28-year-old woman and eventually identified the person as Audrey Hale. Then at a late afternoon press conference, the police chief said that Hale was transgender. After the news conference, police spokesperson Don Aaron declined to elaborate on how Hale currently identified.

Drake did not give a specific motive when asked by reporters but gave chilling examples of the shooter’s prior planning for the targeted attack.

“We have a manifesto, we have some writings that we’re going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident,” he said. “We have a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.”

He said in an interview with NBC News that investigators believe Hale had “some resentment for having to go to that school.”

Like the other stories listed, the AP avoided any gendered pronouns in reference to Miss Hale. An updated version, this one in the Lexington Herald-Leader, time stamped at 7:19 AM on Tuesday, had the same paragraphs, and did the same as the Times, referring to “the shooter.”

The Wall Street Journal, which does use honorifics, had a somewhat briefer story, noted that the killer was transgender, but avoided any language which required honorifics or gendered pronouns, referring to “the shooter” and “the suspect.” The suspect? She’s stone-cold graveyard dead now, so unless there’s some chance that the police shot the wrong person, I believe we can avoid calling her “the suspect.”

These are the hoops through which the credentialed media are jumping to avoid “misgendering” someone. Our Stylebook, which specifies that, “Those who claim to be transgender will be referred to with the honorific and pronouns appropriate to the sex of their birth,” avoids that kind of confusion or stupid prose. Isn’t simply telling the truth much, much simpler?

Finally, my compliments to the police! Unlike the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre, where the School Resource Officer, Scot Peterson, earned the epithet the “Coward of Broward“, by hiding outside while Nikolas Cruz was inside killing people, or the Uvalde school shooting, where armed responders waited for an hour while the carnage continued, because they were scared [insert vulgarity for feces here]less, Nashville Metropolitan Police received the call of an active shooter at 10:13 AM CST, and by 10:27 AM Miss Hale was dead.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

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Killadelphia: Everyone wants to talk around the problem, without ever telling the truth

There are dozens and dozens of suggestions on how to reduce crime, but there is one way which actually does work: locking up the criminals that are caught for as long as the law allows, because the criminal who is behind bars is not out on the streets able to commit more crimes. But somehow, some way, that very simple logic has escaped the good citizens of the City of Brotherly Love. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Gun violence can affect every part of Philly life. Here’s how residents suggest solving it.

Philadelphians are “tired of looking over their shoulder.” Some want to leave the city altogether.

by Ellie Rushing and Nate File | Monday, March 20, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

Joshua Sanchez was leaving his bank one day in North Philly when a group of men with guns swarmed him. They robbed him, he said, then shot him once in the back before fleeing.

“It’s still there,” Sanchez, 38, said of the bullet, which is lodged too deep and close to his spine for doctors to remove.

Three years later, he’s tried to move his life forward, but gun violence remains a looming threat. Sanchez hears shots at home and at job sites, where he works in property maintenance. The danger often feels overwhelming, the lifelong Philadelphian said. He worries that if he stays much longer, he or his son may not survive.

“I just put my house up for sale,” he said. “I’m getting out of Philadelphia.”

He wouldn’t be the first. The 2020 Census put the population of Philadelphia at 1,603,797, but just a year later, the Census Bureau was guesstimating the city’s population as down to 1,576,251, a 1.72% population loss. More than a year later, the Census Bureau has still not updated its website to reflect its guesstimate for 2022 population.

Nearly 50% of Philadelphians in recent poll said that gun violence has had a major negative impact on their quality of life, per the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and research firm SSRS, and 64% of respondents said they have heard gunshots in their neighborhood in the last year.

This is the second time in a week in which I have seen the Leftist Lenfest Institute referenced in an Inquirer story, yet in neither the previous one, nor this, does the newspaper article point out that the Lenfest Institute owns the Inquirer. To cite something as though it is an outside source without that disclosure violates every standard of journalism of which I can think. The Lenfest Institute’s website doesn’t even mention that it owns the Inky on its main page, and you have to go down to a second section on its “About” page to see that acknowledged.

In interviews with nearly a dozen residents, people conveyed an ever-present fear of life in the city. Many said they’ve changed their habits in recent years as shootings have spiked, and now limit their time spent outdoors, especially at night. Mothers said they worry about their children anytime they leave home. Others, such as Sanchez, said they’d move out of Philadelphia if they had the resources.

“People are tired of looking over their shoulder,” said Jacob Green, 69, a poll respondent who’s saving up money to move from Mount Airy to North Carolina.

Then there was this tweet from WCAU-TV, Channel 10, the NBC owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia. District Attorney Larry Krasner apparently wants to give them their severe slaps on the wrist, and released a series of mugshots of homicide suspects. Given that many of the credentialed media journolists[1]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 … Continue reading have complained about Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News and his unsoftened coverage of crime in the city, they will doubtlessly be aghast that NBC10 put together this montage of the mugshots of the ten murder suspects, because nine of them are black, and one appears to be Hispanic, or “brown” as The Philadelphia Inquirer would call him. That the District Attorney had the police mugshots of nine of the ten suspects tells us that all but one had been previously arrested, which raises the obvious question: how many, if any, of these suspects could and should have been behind bars when they committed the murders of which they are accused?

More than that, in the linked story from NBC10, the mugshots of the ten suspects are all separate, but, for the tweet, the station put them all together, a montage of minority suspects.

As I guessed without looking first, the Inky didn’t have any of that on their website main page or specific crime page.[2]As of 10;10 AM EDT. The newspaper would much rather not show mugshots like that than help the police apprehend murder suspects.

Back to the original Inquirer article:

The poll also quantified a long-known fact of the crisis: Communities of color largely bear the brunt of it.

Black respondents were more than twice as likely to say that gun violence has seriously affected their quality of life, compared with white respondents. And across income levels, Black and Latino residents were more likely than white residents to report that they had heard gunshots in the last year.

So, while the Inky is willing to tell us that “(c)ommunities of color” are the primary victims of shootings and killings in Philly, the newspaper is unwilling to do anything to get identified and sought-after killers off the city’s streets. Got it!

The survey indicates that while 86% want improved relationships between the police and local communities, only 55% support increased funding for the Philadelphia Police Department. And the people of Philadelphia voted, by landslide margins in both the primary and general elections, in Philly’s most murderous year, 2021, to keep Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner as District Attorney.

Meanwhile, Margie Harkins, 63, a former X-ray technician who frequently worked with gun violence victims, said she wants to see stricter gun laws but knows that action must come from state leaders, not the city. But first, she said, the city must address the mindset of the people using guns.

“Why is everything settled by pulling a gun?” asked Harkins, a poll respondent from Southwest Philly.

Why? Because parents aren’t rearing their children properly, that’s why. With fathers absent or never known, and mothers trying to rear children on their own when there simply are not enough hours in the day to work and try to be both mother and father to their kids, with drugs rampant and a city that’s trying not to stamp out drugs but create ‘safe injection centers’, how can anyone expect anything other than savagery?

References

References
↑1 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.
↑2 As of 10;10 AM EDT.
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Once again, the #woke credentialed media don’t want to cover the story * Updated! *

As we reported on Saturday, some of the credentialed journalists, journolists as we see them, really don’t like it when other journalists do something really radical like report the facts. 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.

Yesterday, a 15-year-old Hispanic boy was shot and killed, shot ten times, making it an obvious hit, not far from Samuel Fels High School. Here’s the story from Fox 29 News:

Police: 15-year-old chased down Philadelphia street, shot to death in broad daylight

Published March 13, 2023 1:27PM | Updated 10:17PM

PHILADELPHIA – A 15-year-old is dead after police say he was chased down a Philadelphia street by a group of gunmen and shot at least 10 times. Continue reading →

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Journolists don’t like real journalism Reporting the unvarnished truth doesn't sit well with those who want to apply their own 'finish' to stories

No, that’s not a typo in the headline: 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.

We have reported on, too many times to count, the fact that The Philadelphia Inquirer minimizes its reporting on homicides in the city, deliberately removing references to race in such stories. That I have frequently referred to as The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. does have its Freedom of the Press, and can report, or not report, on whatever it chooses. But it seems that the newspaper, or at least its long-time columnist, Jenice Armstrong, doesn’t like it when other members of the credentialed media exercise their Freedom of the Press! From Philadelphia magazine:

Fox 29’s Steve Keeley Under Fire From Reporters and Councilperson for Crime Coverage

“It’s embarrassing,” says one Fox 29 insider of Keeley’s reporting. Plus: What’s with my ridiculous PGW bill?

by Victor Fiorillo | Friday, March 10, 2023 | 9:13 AM EST

On Thursday, I reported on a new study about the Philadelphia media world. I pointed out that of the Philadelphia media outlets studied (and there were many), Fox 29 leads the charge by far in terms of the quantity of crime reporting on the network. I thought that would be the end of it, but then a curious thing happened.

Veteran journalists at well-established Philadelphia media outlets don’t generally stick their necks out to criticize one of their peers. (Though you may not consider me a veteran journalist or Philly Mag a well-established outlet, two points we can argue about over a PBR sometime, I’m an exception to this rule, because Philadelphia doesn’t have enough media criticism, and it needs it.) So I was surprised when two did just that.

First up was Cherri Gregg. She worked at KYW Newsradio for many years before switching over to Philadelphia’s NPR affiliate, WHYY, where you can hear her for several hours each day. Since 2021, Gregg has essentially become “the voice” of WHYY.

Gregg took to Facebook shortly after I published my story and wrote the following:

I rarely speak badly of news outlets — BUT Steve Keeley FOX 29’s coverage of crime — definitely makes me cringe. Crime coverage can be very harmful and scares people.

I have been working with my fellow Board Members at Law & Justice Journalism Project to train journalists to do better. Our crime coverage must be community centered — otherwise it can be harmful, sensationalized and disproportionate to what is really happening. AND who gets harmed?? Black and brown people… Black communities and Black men.

OK, I’m going to criticize Victor Fiorillo’s reporting here! He referenced Cherri Gregg’s Facebook statement, but a responsible reporter in an online article would have done something really radical like included the link to Miss Gregg’s posting. I was able to find it in less than a minute, screen capture it in less than another minute, and Mr Fiorillo obviously had it, so why didn’t he include the documentation?

Shouldn’t a media report on other media’s coverage not include documentation? Documentation increases credibility! And non-documentation is, to me, indicative of just plain laziness.

Meanwhile, veteran Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong, who previously worked for the likes of the Washington Post and the Associated Press, also had something to say. She wrote on Facebook: “His Twitter feed is also disturbing.”

Regrettably, I was unable to find that statement from Miss Armstrong, but I shouldn’t have had to have tried; Mr Fiorillo could and should have included the link.

Ah yes, his Twitter feed. Keeley’s Twitter account takes his doom-and-gloom, the city is going to hell, the junkies are everywhere approach to a completely different level. It is the Citizen app on steroids. Just have a look and you’ll see what I mean. It’s easy to see why Armstrong would find it “disturbing.”

Miss Gregg, further down in her Facebook post, told us why she was displeased with Mr Keeley’s reporting: he took it from police reports, and showed mugshots when available.

One wonders about her statement that “it is not good reporting to simply repeat police accounts/ narratives, center reporting on an alleged suspect,” when that is exactly what most Philadelphia Inquirer crime reporting — when they report on it at all — is, as I have documented here and here and here. The Inky’s own Helen Ubiñas noted the same thing, in December of 2020, though apparently before publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ edict that the newspaper would be an “anti-racist news organization,” and the paper ceased noting the race of suspects and victims.

It’s not just Miss Gregg, or the Inquirer; a lot of media organizations have engaged in this censorship of the news that they don’t want to publish, as is the case with the McClatchy Mugshot Policy. But Steve Keeley and Fox 29 News are not censoring the news, at least not that part of it, and the liberals in the credentialed media are not at all happy about it. When Mr Keeley and Fox 29 report the unvarnished facts, Miss Gregg and Miss Anderson are appalled because they have told the whole truth, and they just can’t handle the truth.

Freedom of the Press includes the right not to read the Inky, not to listen to listen to Cherri Gregg on WHYY, not to watch Fox 29, and not to read Steve Keeley’s tweets. If someone doesn’t like the way Mr Keeley, or any of those media sources, reports the news, they are perfectly free to not read or listen or watch them. What Misses Gregg and Armstrong don’t like is that someone else is producing the information they’d like to keep hidden.

But I’ll tell another truth: while the Enquirer Inquirer deliberately censored the truth about the recent shooting of seven people in Strawberry Mansion, is there anybody who knows anything about Philly who didn’t “know” that the shooters and the victims were all black? Do Misses Gregg and Armstrong think that the people who read and listen to them don’t know what information they are trying to hide, even without Fox 29 and Mr Keeley’s tweets?

I’ll close with this thought: by withholding the information on race when it comes to crime in the City of Brotherly Love, are the liberal journolists not contributing to a perception that all crime in Philadelphia is committed by, to use the Inquirer’s usual formulation, “black and brown” people? While it’s certainly true that most crime occurs in those neighborhoods, not all crime does, and not every shooter or victim is black or Hispanic. Of the 294 shooting victims listed in the city’s shootings victims database, through Thursday, March 9, nine were non-Hispanic white males, seven were non-Hispanic white females, and two were Asian males. Yes, those are small numbers, just 6.12% of the total, but the number isn’t zero. In Philly right now, the perception is so bad that some people might think that the number for white and Asian victims is zero.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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In which the credentialed media unwittingly destroy the transgender ideology

This was just a feel-good story in the sports section of The Philadelphia Inquirer, how a teenaged girl was competing, and having some success, in wrestling competition against boys.

Julissa Ortiz became the first girl to win a Public League wrestling title. She’s just getting started.

Julissa Ortiz was about 7 years old when her older sister wrestled a Catholic League rule to its knees. Now, at age 14, she just became the first girl to win a Public League wrestling championship.

by Aaron Carter | Friday, March 10, 2023 | 5:00 AM EST

Julissa Ortiz was about 7 years old when her older sister, Tatyana, then a freshman at Marianna Bracetti High School, inadvertently wrestled a Catholic League rule to its knees.

Last month, Julissa, who is now a freshman at Bracetti, became the first girl to win a Public League wrestling championship.

I will admit it: I sometimes wonder if these Inquirer articles for “paid subscribers only” are so restricted to keep people not exactly friendly to the newspaper’s editorial slant from seeing them. 🙂

“I feel like my sister went through a lot of roadblocks,” Julissa said before a recent practice. “When she was in high school, there were barely any girl wrestlers. When a guy saw a girl wrestler, it was like the end of the world.”

Later, she added: “I just learned to never give up and not listen to what other people say, because this is what I want to do. So I’m just going to stick with it.”

So, young Miss Ortiz has set a goal, has been working hard to achieve it, and has succeeded at some level.

Ortiz, 14, had hoped to compete in Sunday’s unsanctioned girls’ state championships at Central Dauphin High School. Last week, however, Ortiz was unable to compete in girls’ regionals after she weighed in one pound over for the 124-pound weight class.

Last month, with Tatyana, who is now 22, in attendance at the PIAA District 12 co-ed championships, Julissa won her first-round match but lost in the quarterfinals at St. Joseph’s Prep.

“For me just watching [Julissa] grow,” Tatyana said via phone, “it just makes me feel happy because I feel like I’ve done my job. I feel like I’ve shown her how to pave her own way. Even if you’re a girl battling against guys. It doesn’t matter, as long as you put the dedication in. I am so proud of her.” . . . .

And on Feb. 11, she won the Pub title in the 121-pound weight class, beating Central’s Henry Hunsicker via decision in the finals.

Hey, she beat a teenaged boy competing in the same weight class; good for her.

Also see: William Teach: GOP House Moves Legislation On Parental Rights And Banning Trans In Women’s Sports

But here’s where the Inky undermined their own agenda: the entire article on Miss Ortiz’s success is based on the fact she is a teenaged girl, occasionally wrestling against, and beating boys. In the ‘man-bites-dog’ reporting notion, her story merited a full-sized article in the sports section of the newspaper precisely because it was so unusual. It’s not as though the newspaper routinely covers high school athletics other than football and basketball, and even those infrequently.

Miss Ortiz’s competition and victories against the boys are newsworthy because no one expects it, because everyone knows that males have physical advantages over females, even of the same size, in sports requiring strength, endurance, speed, and quickness.

As of 4:08 PM EST, there was only one reader comment, one offering her congratulations. No complaints, no deleted comments noted.

UPenn Women’s Swim Team, via Instagram. It isn’t difficult to pick out the one man male in a women’s bikini top. Click to enlarge.

That certainly hasn’t been the case with the newspaper’s reports on Will Thomas, the male University of Pennsylvania swimmer who claims to be a woman and goes by the name “Lia.” As we have previously reported, the Inquirer was quick to censor reader comments — and there were several of them — which challenged the notion that Mr Thomas is a woman and should be competing against women in formal swim meets. The 6’3″ tall physically intact Mr Thomas absolutely destroyed the competition before he learned to hold back a little, to win races but not by such devastating margins.

It’s actually pretty simple: most conservatives don’t object to someone trying to step up against tougher competition, and we recognize that girls and women deciding to compete against boys and men in sports where males, overall, have a decided physical advantage over females, isn’t unfair to anyone. What we also realize is that males competing against females in women’s sports is different, is the taking advantage of male size, speed, endurance, and musculature, against women. The Inquirer would never publish an article about how some teenaged boy who wasn’t claiming to be a ‘transgender’ girl won a girls’ sports competition; the newspaper simply goes along with the ‘transgender’ ideology because the editorial and news staff are #woke journolists[1]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 … Continue reading who have swallowed the far-left line hook, line, and sinker.

But, every once in a while, they wind up reporting on something, something very much in the realm of common sense, which completely destroys the “LGBTQ+” meme without ever realizing what they’ve done. I am amused.

References

References
↑1 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.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer: using grammar to avoid telling the whole truth

Writers attempt to communicate with the written word, and decent writers should know at least something about grammar, to ply their trade most efficiently. One important concept in grammar is the difference between the comparative and the superlative.

Comparatives vs. Superlatives

Published October 7, 2019

Not all things are created equal: some are good, others are better, and only the cream of the crop rise to the level of best. These three words—good, better, and best—are examples of the three forms of an adjective or adverb: positive, comparative, and superlative. . . . .

There are a few irregular adjectives and adverbs. For those, you must memorize how these change the spelling of their positive form to show comparative and superlative degrees.

Some common irregular adjectives are good, better, best and bad, worse, worst.

Some have more than one option: little can become littler or less (comparative), and littlest or least (superlative). Many, some, or much become more in the comparative and most in the superlative.

It was this paragraph which caught my attention, in the main editorial in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer. Any decent writer understands that he shouldn’t use the same word twice in a sentence if possible, so when the Editorial Board wrote that “too many residents endure,” the following should be “where most, but not all, the shootings occur.” Continue reading →

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The Philadelphia Inquirer has now come out against Freedom of Speech and of the Press No one who reads the newspaper regularly can really be surprised.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon sought a restraining order to prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from printing more of the so-called “Pentagon Papers,” technically the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, a classified history and assessment of American policy and operations in the Vietnam war. The Times and the Post fought the injunctions in court, the Times winning in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). The Times was all about the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press.

Of course, the American left were aghast that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has meant that conservatives would be able to actually speak freely. As we have previously noted, Twitter added rules banning “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” “Misgendering” means referring to ‘transgendered’ individuals by their biological sex, either directly or through the use of the appropriate pronouns, while “deadnaming” means referring to such people by their birth names rather than the ones they have adopted which are more consistent with their imagined ‘gender.'[1]The First Street Journal’s Stylebook is exactly the opposite: while we do not change the direct quotes of others, in original material we always refer to people by their normal, biological sex … Continue reading The New York Times gave OpEd space to Chad Malloy[2]Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker Malloy.” to claim that such restrictions actually promoted freedom of speech.

And now come the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who are also very much opposed to the freedom of speech and of the press . . . for other people!

Social media companies must curtail the spread of misinformation | Editorial

It may be up to policymakers to strike the balance between upholding the First Amendment and regulating speech on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

by The Editorial Board | Sunday, February 19, 2023 | 5:00 AM EST

About 500 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every minute. The online video-sharing platform houses more than 800 million videos and is the second most visited site in the world, with 2.5 billion active monthly users.

Given the deluge of content flooding the site every day, one would surmise that YouTube must have an army of people guarding against the spread of misinformation — especially in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that was fueled by lies on social media.

Whenever I see something by the Editorial Board which has a plethora of hyperlinks, I always suspect it was written by columnist Will Bunch; that’s just his style. And when I see yet another reference to the Capitol kerfuffle, I’m even more persuaded, because former President Trump has been living, rent-free, in Mr Bunch’s head.

Well, not actually.

Following recent cutbacks, there is just one person in charge of misinformation policy worldwide, according to a recent report in the New York Times. This is alarming, since fact-checking organizations have said YouTube is a major pipeline in the spread of disinformation and misinformation.

The hand-written copy of the proposed articles of amendment passed by Congress in 1789, cropped to show just the text in the third article that would later be ratified as the First Amendment.

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was very simply written: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” But it seems that the Editorial Board very much want Freedom of Speech and of the Press limited.

Not limited for the Inquirer, of course, but to all of those riff-raff not part of the old-line credentialed media.

Mr Bunch, oh, sorry, the Editorial Board continued for several paragraphs, telling us how Google and Meta and Twitter lave laid off thousands of staff, including people who were, supposedly, staff who were supposed to stifle “misinformation,” and “hate speech,” before we get to this:

But Musk says he is a free speech absolutist — except when it impacts him. The billionaire temporarily suspended the accounts of several journalists and blocked others who rebuked him on Twitter. He also fired employees at SpaceX, one of his other companies, who criticized him.

More to the point, Musk fails to understand that freedom of speech is not absolute. As much as this board supports and cherishes the First Amendment, there are rules and regulations surrounding what can be said.

For example, you can’t harass or violate the rights of others. Just ask Alex Jones. The conspiracy theorist and Infowars founder was ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in damages to the families of eight victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting for his repeated lies that the massacre was a hoax.

Oops, sorry, wrong answer. That was not the government regulating speech, but a civil action in which Mr Jones was found liable for damages (supposedly) inflicted on eight families. Just like the old maxim that you can’t yell, “Fire!” in a crowded theater, while doing so can make you liable for both civil damages and criminal law violations if someone is injured by your actions, that does not give the government the right to prevent you from entering the theater because you might yell, “Fire!”

To be sure, the First Amendment makes it difficult to regulate social media companies. But doing nothing is not the answer. The rise of artificial intelligence to create sophisticated chatbots such as ChatGPT and deepfake technology will worsen the spread of fake news, further threatening democracy. Policymakers must soon strike a balance between the First Amendment and regulating social media.

“Strike a balance”? What part of “Congress shall make no law” don’t the Editorial Board understand?

Texas and Florida have already muddied the regulation debate by passing laws that will upend the already limited content moderation efforts by social media companies and make the internet an even bigger free-for-all. The U.S. Supreme Court put off whether to take up the cases, leaving the state laws in limbo for now.

Meanwhile, the European Union is pushing forward with its own landmark regulations called the Digital Services Act. The measure takes effect next year and aims to place substantial content moderation requirements on social media companies to limit false information, hate speech, and extremism.

And there you have it: the admiration of the Board to limit not what they are calling “false information,” but also “hate speech and extremism.” The Board want to limit what people can read, if it doesn’t meet with their approval of what should be said. We reported on the Inky ending reader comments on all stories other than sports, and then, when a sports story on Will Thomas, the male University of Pennsylvania who claimed to be a woman named “Lia,” with open comments, drew many which held that no, Mr Thomas was not a woman, the newspaper removed them. To the Inky, which has all of its articles on Mr Thomas, on all ‘transgendered’ persons, phrased to agree with the claims that they are the gender they claim to be, rather than the sex they really are, questioning that in any way is ‘misinformation’, ‘hate speech,’ and ‘extremism.’

“As much as this board supports and cherishes the First Amendment,” they claimed, but let’s tell the truth here: the Editorial Board do not support and cherish the First Amendment when those First Amendment rights are exercised by people of whom they disapprove, expressing opinions with which they disagree.

References

References
↑1 The First Street Journal’s Stylebook is exactly the opposite: while we do not change the direct quotes of others, in original material we always refer to people by their normal, biological sex and their original names. But we do say that explicitly.
↑2 Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker Malloy.”
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The credentialed media really, really, really hate being held to account Taylor Lorenz is just hopping mad that not everything in the world revolves around her

Taylor Lorenz is a Washington Post journolist[1]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 … Continue reading about whom we’ve reported several times. Miss Lorenz first came to my attention when she doxed Chaya Raichik, a Brooklyn-based real estate salesperson who was the creator of the Twitter site Libs of TikTok. My good friend Amanda Marcotte of Salon loved that LoTT was doxed, doubtlessly hoping that Chaya Raichik, a Brooklyn-based real estate salesperson and LoTT creator would lose her job, and posted a hope that Mr Musk’s buyout of Twitter results in the whole thing being killed.

Then, a month later, we noted that Miss Lorenz, who found it so necessary to expose Miss Raichik, was simply appalled that the political resistance to President Biden’s attempt to create a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security forced the proposal to be ended. The proposed Minister of Truth board administrator, Nina Jankowicz, worked in the press room at Volodymyr Zelensky’s campaign headquarters, which calls into question just how impartial she could have been in fighting ‘disinformation’ concerning the Russo-Ukrainian War.

She later complained about someone else being doxed, a journalism student who had written a critical article about her subject: Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 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.
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In which Leonard Downie says the quiet part out loud The credentialed media have sacrificed objectivity and internalized bias 

Conservatives have been saying, for a long time now, that the credentialed media were quite biased in their reporting, mostly, though not quite entirely, biased in a leftward direction. Yes, this site has focused much of its attention to The Philadelphia Inquirer, but it’s hardly alone; we reported previously how The New York Times found the details about an (alleged) killer not to be news which is fit to print. For the journolists[1]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 … Continue reading in the Times’ newsroom, the ones who forced out liberal columnist Bari Weiss because she just wasn’t #woke enough, the fact that a young, black gang member (allegedly) stabbed to death a white PhD candidate in computer science at an Ivy League college just does not fit Teh Narrative. The leftists who decry ‘mass incarceration’ just can’t deal with the fact that Vincent Pinkney should not have been able to stab Davide Giri, because he should have still been behind bars on that Thursday night, and that it took the London Daily Mail to tell people the truth.

Well, now a professional journalist has said the quiet part out loud. From The Washington Post:

Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust

By Leonard Downie Jr. | Monday, January 30, 2023 | 7:15 AM EST

Amid all the profound challenges and changes roiling the American news media today, newsrooms are debating whether traditional objectivity should still be the standard for news reporting. “Objectivity” is defined by most dictionaries as expressing or using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice. Journalistic objectivity has been generally understood to mean much the same thing.

But increasingly, reporters, editors and media critics argue that the concept of journalistic objectivity is a distortion of reality. They point out that the standard was dictated over decades by male editors in predominantly White newsrooms and reinforced their own view of the world. They believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading “bothsidesism” in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change and many other subjects. And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.

There’s just so much in that which is wholly wrong that it’s difficult to wrap my head around it. But the most obvious point is that, if a reporters are applying their “identities, life experiences and cultural contexts” to the stories they are covering, it means that readers who have different “identities, life experiences and cultural contexts” are not getting the news in a context they can fully understand or appreciate.

The notion that there is one truth for white men and another for women or blacks or homosexuals is pretty stupid when it comes to reporting just the facts. That’s what the Times did, by covering up the known facts about a suspected killer, deciding that their readership did not need to know that Mr Pinkney could have still been in jail when he (allegedly) slew Mr Giri. Their reasons for that? Well, I can speculate, but I don’t know.

Leonard Downie Jr., the author, a former executive editor of The Washington Post, is a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, so that means he is teaching this stuff to journalism students, trying to make the upcoming generation of reporters as consumed with their biases as what we are already seeing.

Something like this occurred during my early years in the field in the 1960s and ’70s. Under the leadership of a few editors, including especially The Post’s Ben Bradlee, our generation of young journalists moved away from mostly unquestioning news coverage of institutional power. I was one of the editors on The Post’s Watergate story, which spawned widespread national investigative reporting that continues today. Colleagues at The Post, other newspapers and broadcast networks reported skeptically on the unwinnable Vietnam War.

“Report(ing) skeptically” is a good thing, if reporters are trying to ferret out the truth.

Throughout the time, beginning in 1984, when I worked as Bradlee’s managing editor and then, from 1991 to 2008, succeeded him as executive editor, I never understood what “objectivity” meant. I didn’t consider it a standard for our newsroom. My goals for our journalism were instead accuracy, fairness, nonpartisanship, accountability and the pursuit of truth.

Well, the dictionary definition of objectivity Mr Downie gave above would be a good one, and would certainly fit in the five goals he stated.

To better understand the changes happening now, I and former CBS News president Andrew Heyward, a colleague at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, investigated the values and practices in mainstream newsrooms today, with a grant from the Stanton Foundation. What we found has convinced us that truth-seeking news media must move beyond whatever “objectivity” once meant to produce more trustworthy news. We interviewed more than 75 news leaders, journalists and other experts in mainstream print, broadcast and digital news media, many of whom also advocate such a change. This appears to be the beginning of another generational shift in American journalism.

Among the news leaders who told Heyward and me that they had rejected objectivity as a coverage standard was Kathleen Carroll, former executive editor of the Associated Press. “It’s objective by whose standard?” she asked. “That standard seems to be White, educated, fairly wealthy. … And when people don’t feel like they find themselves in news coverage, it’s because they don’t fit that definition.

If objectivity is defined as “as expressing or using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice,” I have to ask: if the media are moving toward reporting filtered through concerns about:

upheaval over discrimination against and abuse of women; persistent racism and white nationalism; police brutality and killings; the treatment of LGBTQ+ people; income inequality and social problems; immigration and the treatment of immigrants; the causes and effects of climate change; voting rights and election inequality; and even the very survival of our democracy

isn’t that the very definition of “distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice”? Two plus two will always equal four, regardless of the race, color, ethnicity or sexual orientation of the observer.

We have noted many times before how the credentialed media have simply accepted the notion that a ‘transgender’ person can change his sex, referring to such people as Richard Levine and Will Thomas as Rachel Levine and Lia Thomas, completely uncritically, and without any reference to their claims that they have ‘transitioned’ to the other gender unless that is a part of the story itself. I get that many people, though I suspect fewer people than the left believe, accept Dr Levine’s and Mr Thomas’ claims that they are really women, but in referring to these people solely by their assumed names and the pronouns appropriate for the opposite sex, have the media not taken one position in the debate over whether the transgendered really have been able to change their sex?

The American left are aghast that Elon Musk’s somewhat delayed purchase of Twitter has meant that conservatives would be able to actually speak freely. As we have previously noted, Twitter added rules banning “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” “Misgendering” means referring to ‘transgendered’ individuals by their biological sex, either directly or through the use of the appropriate pronouns, while “deadnaming” means referring to such people by their birth names rather than the ones they have adopted which are more consistent with their imagined ‘gender.'[2]The First Street Journal’s Stylebook is exactly the opposite: while we do not change the direct quotes of others, in original material we always refer to people by their normal, biological sex … Continue reading The New York Times gave OpEd space to Chad Malloy[3]Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker Malloy.” to claim that such restrictions actually promoted freedom of speech.

To trans people, it represented a recognition that our identity is an accepted fact and that to suggest otherwise is a slur.

That their ‘identity’ might not be “an accepted fact” is not something Mr Malloy wanted to concede, but Twitter’s policy also meant that those who did not accept such claims still had to be careful with their language, or be suspended or permanently banned. The Times, as well as The Philadelphia Inquirer, continued to use language to try to lock in the notion that ‘transgendered’ people have actually changed their gender, and go along with Mr Malloy’s claim that to not accept their “identity . . . is a slur.” Such would certainly not fit with Mr Downie’s standard of “accuracy, fairness, nonpartisanship, accountability and the pursuit of truth.”

“There is some confusion about the value of good reporting versus point of view,” said current Post executive editor Sally Buzbee, who noted that many journalists want to make a difference on such issues as climate change, immigration and education. “We stress the value of reporting,” she said, “what you are able to dig up — so you (the reader) can make up your own mind.”

That is a wildly inconsistent statement. If “many journalists want to make a difference” on some important issues, is that not biased reporting, and trying to influence how readers think rather than giving readers all of the information available so they can make up their own minds?

There’s a lot more in the article, but one paragraph, the last I shall quote, really caught my eye:

Both Heyward and I continue to believe that allowing journalists to express opinions on controversial social and political issues erodes the perception of their news organizations’ fairness and open-mindedness.

A quite reasonable statement, but Mr Downie’s previous quote that “many journalists want to make a difference” allow for the reporters’ opinions when it comes to what are supposed to be straight news stories to slant them, perhaps subtly, toward a particular point of view certainly does erode the perception of a particular news organization’s fairness and open-mindedness.

I will admit to being surprised by Mr Downie’s article, because he said, and The Washington Post admitted through the publication of it, that yes, that credentialed media source, and many others like it, are slanting the news.

Mr Downie said that media organizations can “build trust” as they “move beyond objectivity,” but I have to ask: how does allowing a particular reporter’s presentation of the facts through his ‘lived experience’ or racial, ethnic, or sexual identity and orientation status build trust among those who are not of the same experiences or identity?

Think about the results, because we actually do have them. Newspapers all over the country have been failing; even The Washington Post, one of our country’s newspapers of record, and The Philadelphia Inquirer have been laying off staff, while smaller newspapers have been shut down completely, or bought out by hedge funds with a history of stripping them to the bone. The Post itself might have failed had Jeff Bezos not bought it and saved it, at least for a while.

But it’s more than newspapers: CNN, the first 24-hour news network has been in a steady ratings decline, and has been surpassed in viewership by MSNBC, while both of them have been beaten out by Fox News. All three have obvious biases, and all three are mostly watched by people who agree with their biases. That hasn’t been particularly good for expanding their audiences. CNN can’t blame its general decline on the same forces that have so damaged print newspapers, and whatever it has been doing has not exactly built trust for that network.

Mr Downie said the quiet part out loud, that the credentialed media have sacrificed objectivity and internalized bias. We are not surprised.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

References

References
↑1 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.
↑2 The First Street Journal’s Stylebook is exactly the opposite: while we do not change the direct quotes of others, in original material we always refer to people by their normal, biological sex and their original names. But we do say that explicitly.
↑3 Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker Malloy.”