Tag Archives: #FreedomOfThePress

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No media bias there, huh?

I have previously referred to The City of Brotherly Love’s venerable newspaper as The Philadelphia Enquirer, in mocking reference to the National Enquirer, and it seems as though every day brings more justification of that.[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but I thought it very apt.

Had an experience with extremists or conspiracy theories? Tell us about it.

Have you experienced extremism in your community, or seen family or friends divided by conspiracy theories? Tell us about it and a reporter may reach out to you.

by David Gambacorta | April 7, 2021

We are living in a paranoid time.

Communities of conspiracy theorists have sprouted online in recent years in response to school shootings, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2020 presidential election — distorting reality, amplifying divisions, and fueling real-world harm.

» READ MORE: From Philly to the Capitol, conspiracy adherents have fractured families and harmed communities

A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 73% of Americans believe that conspiracy theories are out of control. The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which left five people dead, illustrated the risks of allowing extremism, and conspiracy theories like QAnon, to spread unchecked.

Have you experienced extremism in your community, or seen family or friends divided by conspiracy theories? Tell us about it in the form below and a reporter may reach out to you.

That’s all of the text. Mr Gambacorta’s end of article bio blurb is a short one:

I work on the investigative team, and narrative-driven projects.

I guess that the older style, something along the lines of “Mr Gambacorta is part of the Inquirer — to use the newspaper’s real name — investigative team,” isn’t young or #woke enough, and has to be more personalized.

But I digress. The article then gives four options in a response form:

Which extremist groups or conspiracy movements have you had an experience with?

  • QAnon
  • Proud Boys
  • Covid-19 Truthers
  • Other

Did you notice? All of the “extremist groups or conspiracy movements” given as options are those attributed to conservatives. There is no option to choose Antifa or #BlackLivesMatter as an extremist group with which one has had experience, even though Philadelphia experienced plenty of damage and violence in the protests over the killing of George Floyd and Walter Wallace.[2]Walter Wallace Jr was a mentally disturbed man who charged police with a knife, when officers responded to the fourth call from his family over his erratic behavior; the officers, who did not have … Continue reading

The Proud Boys, huh? A site search of the Inquirer’s website turned up this:

Far-right Proud Boys march through Center City

The alt-right Proud Boys marched through Center City Saturday with nearly 60 participants, many wearing body armor and helmets.

by Staff Reports | September 26, 2020

The alt-right Proud Boys conducted a march through Center City Saturday with nearly 60 participants, many wearing body armor and helmets, some waving American flags, and occasionally engaging in sharp verbal exchanges with onlookers.

They stopped in front of Independence Hall to sing The Star-Spangled Banner and then proceeded to City Hall, where they posed for a group photo, some displaying a white power sign with their fingers.

On the way there, they crossed paths without incident with the March to End Rape Culture, a protest to raise awareness about rape and express solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Later, the Proud Boys chanted “Back the blue” as they made their way to a parking garage at Penn’s Landing, where police closed off access until members of the group drove off.

The action came a week after the Proud Boys were expected to rally in Clark Park, when instead about 500 counterprotesters showed up to the popular West Philadelphia site in a progressive, racially diverse neighborhood.

Social media posts claimed Proud Boys were present, but were disguised as journalists to gather information about leftist activists.

If you open that article, you will see several photographs of the Proud Boys march in Philly, none of them showing any violence, none of them showing the buildings they burned or the stores they looted, because none of that happened! Not one story concerning the Proud Boys indicates any violence, any violence at all, by them in Philadelphia.

There was plenty, though, concerning the arrest of Zach Rehl, a Philadelphia man whom federal prosecutors say was a Proud Boys leader and participant in the January 6th Capitol Kerfuffle. The Feds want to keep Mr Rehl locked up before his trial begins, even though they have conceded that Mr Rehl did not participate in any violence himself:

Assistant U.S. Attorney Luke Jones conceded in court Friday that the government had no evidence that Rehl had directly participated in any property destruction or violence against police once he was inside Capitol grounds. But he balked at the suggestion from Rehl’s lawyer that the man was being jailed pretrial solely for expressing controversial political views.

“He is not before the court because of his opinions,” he said. “He’s before the court because of his actions and the people he led.”

Yet it was the Proud Boys, not Antifa and not Black Lives Matter, who organized and committed actual violence and vandalism, whom Mr Gambacorta listed as an extremist group!

Even though I am no longer a Pennsylvania resident, I do pay attention to foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, enough so that I broke down and subscribed to the Inquirer — after my wife told me to do so, seeing the conniptions through which I was going to get their stories without paying for them — but it doesn’t take much to see the leftward bias of that newspaper.

The editors, writers and reporters of The Philadelphia Enquirer Inquirer have, of course, their absolute First Amendment rights to think and say and print whatever they want, but I have the same rights to point out their utter stupidity.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but I thought it very apt.
↑2 Walter Wallace Jr was a mentally disturbed man who charged police with a knife, when officers responded to the fourth call from his family over his erratic behavior; the officers, who did not have tasers available to them, defended themselves.
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The credentialed media want to muzzle Glenn Greenwald They're finding out just how well that works

I have never been a particular fan of Glenn Greenwald. Born in the United States, he now resides in Rio de Janeiro with his “husband,” and has been a mostly left-wing journalist throughout his career. His participation in helping the odious Edward Snowden reveal classified documents was repugnant.

But if there is one thing I definitely do appreciate about Mr Greenwald is his devotion to Freedom of Speech and of the Press.

Journalists Start Demanding Substack Censor its Writers: to Bar Critiques of Journalists

This new political battle does not break down along left v. right lines. This is an information war waged by corporate media to silence any competition or dissent.

by Glenn Greenwald | March 11, 2021

Glenn Greenwald

On Wednesday, I wrote about how corporate journalists, realizing that the public’s increasing contempt for what they do is causing people to turn away in droves, are desperately inventing new tactics to maintain their stranglehold over the dissemination of information and generate captive audiences. That is why it journalists have bizarrely transformed from their traditional role as leading free expression defenders into the the most vocal censorship advocates, using their platforms to demand that tech monopolies ban and silence others.

That same motive of self-preservation is driving them to equate any criticisms of their work with “harassment,” “abuse” and “violence” — so that it is not just culturally stigmatized but a banning offense, perhaps even literally criminal, to critique their journalism on the ground that any criticism of them places them “in danger.” Under this rubric they want to construct, they can malign anyone they want, ruin people’s reputations, and unite to generate hatred against their chosen targets, but nobody can even criticize them.

Any independent platform or venue that empowers other journalists or just ordinary citizens to do reporting or provide commentary outside of their repressive constraints is viewed by them as threats to be censored and destroyed. Every platform that enables any questioning of their pieties or any irreverent critiques of mainstream journalism — social media sites, YouTube, Patreon, Joe Rogan’s Spotify program — has already been systematically targeted by corporate journalists with censorship demands, often successfully.

Back in November, the media critic Stephen Miller warned: “It’s only a matter of time before the media tech hall monitors turn their attention to Substack.” And ever since, in every interview I have given about the success of Substack and every time I have written about journalist-led censorship campaigns, I have echoed that warning that they would soon turn their united guns on this platform. Miller’s prediction was prompted by a Columbia Journalism Review article entitled “The Substackerati” which claimed that Substack was structurally unfair because “most” of “the most successful people on Substack” are “white and male; several are conservative” and “have already been well-served by existing media power structures.”

I will admit to having little contact with Substack. I knew that Patrick Frey, who has blogged for free as Patterico since 2003, and Bari Weiss, who was forced out at left The New York Times by the hatred of the young #woke in the newsroom. Mr Frey is an educated, (mostly) conservative, his hatred for Donald Trump notwithstanding, heterosexual married white male, but Miss Weiss is a mostly liberal lesbian.[1]A couple of commenters I consider to be anti-Semitic on The Other McCain have sought to educate me that she can’t be white, because she’s a Jew.

Thus, I never realized that Substack is a bastion of conservative white males. Mr Greenwald continued to note that most successful Substack writer is a somewhat obscure female History professor at Boston College.

In fact, looking at the list of ‘Substackerati’ Mr Greenwald used, Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, Heather Cox Richardson, along with Messrs Greenwald, Frey and Miss Weiss, I find three who are homosexual, and the majority liberal.

Mr Greenwald continues to note what has really bothered the currently credentialed media:

That is precisely why they are so furious. They cannot stand the fact that journalists can break major stories and find an audience while maintaining an independent voice, critically questioning rather than obediently reciting the orthodoxies that bind them and, most of all, without playing their infantile in-group games and submitting to their hive-mind decrees. In fact, the more big stories you break while maintaining your independence from them, the more intense is the contempt they harbor for you: that explains, among other things, their willingness to watch Julian Assange (who has broken more major stories than all of them combined) be imprisoned for publishing documents.

That they are angry and upset is irrelevant. It only matters because these resentments and fears that they are losing their monopolistic power over public thought are translating into increasingly concerted and effective censorship campaigns.

The credentialed media heaped scorn on the recently deceased Rush Limbaugh, virtually celebrating in his death due to cancer, because he was the one who began the breaking of the ‘gatekeeping’ function of the media. When the only way for a contrary voice to be heard was if an editor approved, the editors had the power (mostly) to restrict the terms of debate. Mr Limbaugh, by virtue of his tremendous talent — “talent on loan from God,” he used to say — expressed to an audience of as much as thirty million the things that many people already believed, but rarely heard outside of their circle of friends. Then Al Gore invented this internet thingy, and debates started in America Online chatrooms, and then moved to independent blogs. Powerline and Little Green Footballs, working solely from images on low-definition television screens, were able to expose how CBS News used forged documents to try to turn the election of 2004 against the younger President Bush, and were able to get their findings out to millions of people. They went around the gatekeeping function of the credentialed media.

The older editors of major media sources realized, albeit grudgingly, that their power was lost. But as the young #wokes forced out older and wiser heads like James Bennet and Stan Wischnowski, even though they were liberal themselves, the young #woke lost that institutional memory which should have informed them that the gatekeeping function is gone.[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading

And now they think they should somehow get it back. Their success in using #CancelCulture to cow others into silence seems to have emboldened them.

But it’s an effort doomed to failure. As we previously noted, the HuffPost was bought out by BuzzKill BuzzFeed, and now Verizon Media has laid off about 30% of what was supposed to have been HuffPost’s independent newsroom. BuzzFeed has had its own financial problems, cutting salaries a year ago due to COVID-19 and having laid off 15% of its workforce in 2019.

The First Amendment to the Constitution protects the Freedom of the Press, but all that means is that the government cannot control the press, cannot censor it, and cannot punish people for printing things the government do not like. Unfortunately, far too many in the media believe that it confers on them some sort of special status, that it means they are somehow beyond criticism. Mr Greenwald, and a few of the other ‘Substackerati,’ have had the temerity, the unmitigated gall to criticize other reporters, so naturally the credentialed media are striking back. There’s nothing they can do about The First Street Journal and me, and my frequent criticisms of what I sometimes call The Philadelphia Enquirer, because, sadly, 🙁 there’s no one paying me to write and publish what I do.

But Substack? The media know that Mr Greenwald and others are making money due to their Substack affiliation, and they can put pressure on Substack to rein in those horrible, horrible free voices.

The fictitious Police Commissioner of New York City, Frank Reagan of Bluebloods, once said on his show that the freedom of the press is limited to those who actually own a press. In a way, that’s true enough, but with the internet, almost anybody can now own a printing press. Writers on the internet are successful or failures based on their individual merits as writers and self-publicists, and not upon the judgements of newspaper editors.

References

References
↑1 A couple of commenters I consider to be anti-Semitic on The Other McCain have sought to educate me that she can’t be white, because she’s a Jew.
↑2 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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The HuffPo is biting the dust

While I have often noted that print newspapers are 18th century technology, the contraction of media outlets isn’t restricted to print.

BuzzFeed Announces Deep Cuts To HuffPost Staff After Acquisition

BuzzFeed acquired HuffPost from Verizon Media in February.

By Sara Boboltz | March 9, 2021 | 12:31 PM EST

BuzzFeed announced layoffs for the HuffPost newsroom on Tuesday, three weeks after acquiring HuffPost from Verizon Media in February.

Hillary Frey, the site’s executive editor, and Louise Roug, the executive editor for international, will be departing in the restructuring effort.

HuffPost Canada will also shutter operations later this month.

A deal between BuzzFeed, HuffPost and Verizon Media was first made public in November. Verizon Media stated at the time that BuzzFeed and HuffPost would operate as “separate, distinct news organizations” with their own websites and editorial staff while BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti led the combined company.

Translation: Verizon Media lied to them!

The HuffPost Union, organized as part of the Writers Guild of America, East, slammed the restructuring effort in a statement:

Today, we learned that 33 of our colleagues — nearly 30% of our unit — will be laid off. We are devastated and infuriated, particularly after an exhausting year of covering a pandemic and working from home. This is also happening less than a month after HuffPost was acquired by BuzzFeed. We never got a fair shot to prove our worth. These layoffs reiterate the importance of forming a union and advocating for our colleagues. We are glad that we are protected by a collective bargaining agreement and that our colleagues will receive severance. Our union will continue fighting to make HuffPost a more just and equitable workplace, including pushing for clear and accountable commitments to hiring and promoting more people of color and for transparency around pay equity.

It really is just so exhausting working from home! 🙂 It means that you have to make your own coffee in the morning rather than having a $7.25 per hour clerk at 7/Eleven doing it for you.

Now let me be clear here: I don’t like seeing anyone losing his job, but let’s be honest here: the HuffPost was as #woke and biased a ‘publication’ as any around. There was no special reporting there, and nothing you can see on their website front page is not available elsewhere — frequently with better writing — for free. And given the contempt the media have for working class men and women in ‘flyover country,’ it’s difficult not to feel some schadenfreude.

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It’s not just the big boys like The New York Times and The Washington Post who don’t like #FreedomOfSpeech for other people Much smaller media like the Lexington Herald-Leader aren't too fond of it either

At The First Street Journal, and William Teach’s The Pirate’s Cove — and Mr Teach has done this site an invaluable service, crossposting because I’ve been under power-cutting ice storm threats for several days now — we have been tireless defenders of the First Amendment and Freedom of Speech. Thus, I was interested enough to read Joel Pett’s OpEd piece in the Lexington Herald-Leader celebrating that free speech pioneer, Larry Flynt.

RIP Larry Flynt: Kentucky native, porn publisher, and First Amendment champion

By Joel Pett | February 15, 2021 | 10:50 AM | Updated 12:50 PM EST

In the gathering gray of an April evening in 2004, I waited alone in the alley behind the Kentucky Theater, uncertain that my guest would show up. Inside, 150 or so attendees of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists annual convention watched a screening of the 1996 drama “The People vs. Larry Flynt.”

The film chronicled the infamous pornographer’s landmark 1988 legal battle with the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, which ended with a unanimous Supreme Court firmly reinforcing our collective right to satirize the powerful. (Even if that satire implies that a renowned religious figure had fornicated with his own mother in an outhouse.) The AAEC had filed a friend of the court brief on Flynt’s behalf.

I didn’t wait long. A standard prom-issue limo slid up next to the loading dock. A couple of well-dressed young men emerged, lifted the gold wheelchair out and positioned it. Out swung Larry Claxton Flynt’s legs, rendered useless by a 1978 assassination attempt and wrapped in an expensive suit. Flynt struggled into position, looked up at me and growled “Goddammit, I hate to f—ing travel!”

Flynt, who died last week at 78, not only won the big First Amendment case, he was a native Kentuckian, making him a natural “get” for the Lexington convention. I had found his office tricky to communicate with, since they made no demands, didn’t need airline tickets (he had his own jet) and handled their own hotel reservations. He had simply barked into the phone, some eight months earlier, “All right, dammit, I’ll be there!”

Mr Pett’s paean to Mr Flynt is somewhat tiresome. Larry Flynt was the extreme test case for the first amendment, just as a vicious, cold-blooded killer is the extreme test for opposition to capital punishment: the concepts one wishes to defend are personified by the worst of people. Mr Flynt’s Hustler magazine went where Playboy and Penthouse did not go, far exceeding them in raunchiness and crudity. Since then, the internet has made much more graphic pornography widely available, often for free, and if there’s anything not available on the internet somewhere, I can’t think of what it would be.

Heck, you can find the basics for building nuclear weapons on the internet!

Mr Pett was unstinting in his praise for the Hustler publisher:

His injuries made speaking a struggle, but Flynt delivered. He animatedly railed against former President George W. Bush, for whom he had a particular dislike. He stayed to answer plenty of questions with grace, wit and humor.

I was a little disappointed that, over dinner, Flynt was considerably less effusive. No matter, he had done his job, sparking soul-searching among our self-important, ponderous, mainstream newspaper cartoonists about First Amendment protections extending to the gratuitous, crude, misogynistic and utterly distasteful smut between the slick covers of porn mags.

I don’t have to like Mr Flynt to agree as far as freedom of speech and of the press are concerned. But, as we’ve sadly noted previously, today’s credentialed media are a lot more supportive of their own First Amendment rights than they are for others.

And so we have Mr Pett’s conclusion:

Larry Flynt once said, “If the First Amendment protects a scumbag like me, then it will protect all of you. Because I’m the worst.”

Maybe. But watching Donald Trump’s outrageous claims to free-speech protection play out last week, some might disagree.

Mr Flynt had done his job, Mr Pett said, “sparking soul-searching among our self-important, ponderous, mainstream newspaper cartoonists about First Amendment protections extending to the gratuitous, crude, misogynistic and utterly distasteful smut between the slick covers of porn mags.” Yet when it comes to the political speech of President Trump, speech with which both Mr Pett individually and the editors of the Herald-Leader in general disagreed, that First Amendment, well, maybe it shouldn’t cover that!

Mr Teach’s blog tagline is, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” It seems to me that today’s credentialed media do not believe in freedom of speech and of the press for those theyn despise.

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LOL! A group calling itself Refuse Fascism actually advocates fascism, in seeking to deny the right of the accused to counsel But the left have always had an authoritarian streak to themselves; leftism and liberty are mutually exclusive

The left, so many of whom want to defund the police and emasculate law enforcement, will tell you that everyone deserves an attorney who will vigorously defend them in court.

Unless, of course, the defendant is Donald Trump. Then there’s Hell to pay! From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

From laughs over ‘Philly-delphia’ to vandalism at home, Trump lawyer Michael van der Veen draws backlash

by Jeremy Roebuck | February 13, 2021- 6:53 PM

Philadelphia attorney Michael T. van der Veen has taken a starring role in Donald Trump’s impeachment defense over the last two days — but he’s also incurred backlash.

Vandals smashed windows and spray-painted “TRAITOR” on the driveway of his suburban Philadelphia home Friday night, after he spent hours on the Senate floor hurling partisan invective and testily condemning the former president’s second impeachment trial as “constitutional cancel culture.”

A group of demonstrators with the group Refuse Fascism gathered outside his Center City law office chanting, “When van der Veen lies, what do you do? Convict. Convict.”

There’s more at the original. Another article from the Inquirer noted:

Michael van der Veen hired 24-hour private security for his family after vandals smashed windows and spray-painted “TRAITOR” on the driveway of his suburban Philadelphia home Friday night. He told reporters Saturday he received more than 100 death threats.

And they acknowledged being caught off guard by the level of rancor from Trump’s critics and supporters alike — even given the country’s fiercely divided politics and how other lawyers in his orbit have fared.

“I’ve been representing controversial clients for 30 years, and I’ve never experienced this type of vitriol,” said William J. Brennan, another local member of the team whose past clients include priests accused of sexual abuse and judges facing corruption charges. “We had no political agenda here. We are not partisan warriors. We are criminal defense lawyers who represented a client.”

So far, the Editorial Board has been silent, not condemning the attacks on President Trump’s defense lawyers, but, given the state of the #woke dominating the newsroom and the lack of actual journalism from the Inquirer, I wouldn’t be surprised if the editors remained silent.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees that anyone acused of a crime has the “to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”

The hand-written copy of the proposed Bill of Rights, 1789, cropped to show the text that would later be ratified as the Sixth Amendment. Click to enlarge.

But, apparently the oh-so-tolerant left don’t believe in the Sixth Amendment and the right of the accused to defend himself and have the assistance of counsel. members of the laughably named Refuse Fascism group demonstrated outside of Mr van der Veen’s office:

Refuse Fascism has a logo as part of their Twitter biography, telling us that, “In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse To Accept a Fascist America!” But what would be more fascist than not allowing an accused defendant to have an attorney to defend himself?

This was their tweet:

Of course, were one of the members of Refuse Fascism arrested, he’d be screaming, “Lawyer! Lawyer! Lawyer!” at the top of his lungs.

In American history, we are taught that patriot John Adams served as counsel for the defense in the trial of eight British soldiers accused of murder during a riot in Boston on March 5, 1770, what was called the Boston Massacre, and he won acquittals.

Before we had our independence, before we had our Constitution and the Sixth Amendment, Mr Adams, passionate advocate of freedom, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and second President of the United States, took on the unpopular cause of defending those British soldiers, because he believed that every man deserves a defense, every man has a right to a defense.

That lesson seems to have been lost on the members of Refuse Fascism. Rather, in protesting the attorneys representing President Trump, they are protesting the right to counsel. They are not refusing fascism, but advocating it.

Of course, Refuse Fascism has an absolute right to assemble and advocate anything they wish. But I, too, have the freedom of speech, and the right to point out that Refuse Fascism is itself advocating fascist behavior.

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The sad, sad decline of The Philadelphia Inquirer

I ran across a photo if the masthead of The Philadelphia Inquirer from February 25, 1953, and noticed the ‘taglines’ that it used: “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. By Public ledger, the Inquirer was setting itself up as Philadelphia’s newspaper of record, which Wikipedia defines as “a major newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative.” That Wikipedia article named four newspapers of record for the United States: The New York Times (Founded 1851), The Washington Post (1877), The Los Angeles Times (1881) and The Wall Street Journal (1889). First printed on Monday, Jun1 1, 1829, the then Pennsylvania Inquirer is older than any of them. “An editorial in the first issue of The Pennsylvania Inquirer promised that the paper would be devoted to the right of a minority to voice their opinion and ‘the maintenance of the rights and liberties of the people, equally against the abuses as the usurpation of power.’”

Boy has that changed! As has happened to other great newspapers, the newsroom of the Inquirer was captured by the young #woke, who forced the firing resignation of Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski over the headline Buildings Matter, Too.

“Devoted to the right of a minority to voice their opinion”? Yeah, that failed, too, as the Inquirer closed comments on the majority of its articles, stating that:

Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.

Really? How do they know? How can they be sure that these views do not represent more than a “tiny fraction” of their audience? Have they really done the research, or was it just that the #woke didn’t like the idea that the riff-raff could express their opinions? “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”? No, the Inquirer has now become a non-profit newspaper for the left.

There’s a reason I’ve called it The Philadelphia Enquirer, mocking its name by using the same spelling as the National Enquirer.[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but I thought it very apt.

Before I retired, I used to pick up a copy of the Inquirer at the Turkey Hill in downtown Jim Thorpe, on my way to the plant. I read it, as did my drivers, though they sometimes said I should have picked up the Allentown Morning Call instead, being somewhat closer to local news. I read a lot of stories in the Inquirer, about the killings of Philadelphia police officers, I noted how the newspaper didn’t really care much about the murders of young black men in the city, but has the killing of cute little white girl Rian Thal splashed through the paper for days.[2]That site search for Rian Thal returned 3,128 results! Think the Inquirer was obsessed much, or were they just printing what the editors thought their readers wanted to see?

So, I’m sad to see what the Inquirer has become. They write about “gun crime” as though an inanimate object somehow jumps up and shoot people all by itself, because it’s just too politically incorrect to note that that “gun violence” is disproportionately committed by black Philadelphians. The editors have dozens and dozens of articles claiming that #BlackLivesMatter, when it has become obvious, to anyone who reads the newspaper, that black lives don’t matter, unless they are taken by a white police officer.

Despite the fact that I said I wouldn’t, I finally subscribed to the digital edition of the Inquirer, after Mrs Pico kept telling me to do so rather than try to get copies of stories for free and then have to manually type them into my blog articles. But the paper has gone downhill, even from just ten years ago.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but I thought it very apt.
↑2 That site search for Rian Thal returned 3,128 results! Think the Inquirer was obsessed much, or were they just printing what the editors thought their readers wanted to see?
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The New York Times and the Ministry of Truth

Anybody who has ever written for a collegiate newspaper, a category which would include me, has had at least a few dreams about being a reporter and writer for The New York Times.[1]Though not a journalism major, I wrote for the Kentucky Kernel for two years while in the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce in the early 1980s.

Of course, to become a writer for the greatest newspaper in the world, you had to be well-educated, and it helped if you went to one of the top schools, such as the Columbia University’s School of Journalism. To have been well-educated, at least as far as a liberal arts degree is concerned, there is virtually no way you could not have read George Orwell’s 1984, the dystopian novel about life in a totalitarian society.

So, one would think that no one could ever suggest, in the pages of the Times, such a thing as Mr Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, where the main character, Winston Smith worked, would ever be a good idea. But if one did think that, one would be wrong.

How the Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis

These steps, experts say, could prod more people to abandon the scourge of hoaxes and lies.

By Kevin Roose[2]Mr Roose is a technology columnist for The Times, and the host of the “Rabbit Hole” podcast. His column, “The Shift,” examines the intersection of technology, business, and … Continue reading | February 2, 2021 | 11:54 AM EST

Last month, millions of Americans watched as President Biden took the oath of office and, in a high-minded Inaugural Address, called for a new era of American unity.

But plenty of other Americans weren’t paying attention to Mr. Biden’s speech. They were too busy watching YouTube videos alleging that the inauguration was a prerecorded hoax that had been filmed on a Hollywood soundstage.

Quite the statement! Mr Roose seems to believe that if I didn’t watch the inaugural, I must be some evil or deluded conspiracy theorist. As it happens, I did not watch the inaugural, but I did not because I did not wish to see the transition to someone with Joe Biden’s and the Democratic Party’s repugnant policies.

Or they were melting down in QAnon group chats, trying to figure out why former President Donald J. Trump wasn’t interrupting Mr. Biden’s speech to declare martial law and announce the mass arrest of satanic pedophiles.

Or maybe their TVs were tuned to OAN, where an anchor was floating the baseless theory that Mr. Biden “wasn’t actually elected by the people.”

It’s a long article, in which Mr Roose suggests:

  • “Unless the Biden administration treats conspiracy theories and disinformation as the urgent threats they are, our parallel universes will only drift further apart, and the potential for violent unrest and civic dysfunction will only grow.”
  • We must have a “holistic understanding of what the spectrum of violent extremism looks like in the United States, and then allocate resources accordingly.”
  • “The Biden administration could set up a “truth commission,” similar to the 9/11 Commission, to investigate the planning and execution of the Capitol siege on January 6. This effort, (Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy) said, would ideally be led by people with deep knowledge of the many “networked factions” that coordinated and carried out the riot, including white supremacist groups and far-right militias.”
  • Several experts with whom Mr Roose spoke “recommended that the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a ‘reality czar.'”

Mr Roose graciously granted that this “sounds a little dystopian,” but continued to say that we needed to listen to the arguments for such suggestions, including tapping into the algorithms used by Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to ferret out bad, bad, bad messages.

Really? As we noted previously, Twitter already takes sides on the issue of ‘transgenderism,’ and bans ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering,’[3]‘Deadnaming’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth, rather than the name he has taken to match the sex he claims to be; ‘misgendering’ means referring to a … Continue reading as though the issue is settled, and no dissent can be tolerated.

Was Mr Roose simply reporting? The Times has already published articles claiming that Free Speech is killing us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence, and that Twitter’s bans on ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ actually promotes freedom of speech. The Times told us how wonderful it was that Jeff Bezos was able to deplatform Parler, but lamented that some of those who lost their speech on Parler migrated to Gab and Rumble.[4]Full disclosure: I maintained a Parler account, and have a Gab account.

Until the nation reckons with the self-inflicted wounds stemming from an under-regulated, unreformed social media information architecture, President Biden’s calls for healing and national unity won’t produce substantial, lasting results. The new administration needs a long-term plan to confront the escalating threat, as far-right insurgents migrate from one platform to the next.

The Parler hack is the place to start. It indicates that moderation of violent, racist, anti-democratic content will increasingly lead to migration of that same hateful content. For instance, the deplatforming of Parler triggered a virtual stampede to similar forums like Gab and Rumble. Analysts have already documented Parler groups re-forming and spreading evermore hateful content on Telegram and a host of smaller platforms.

When the Times prints OpEd pieces claiming that social media are “under-regulated (and) unreformed,” what are we ro conclude other than the Times, which so jealously and zealously protested that its own Freedom of the Press should not be restricted in New York Times Co v United States, believe that other people’s speech and publications must be more strictly regulated, that those who decline to conform to the Accepted Wisdom — meaning: the wisdom of the left — should simply not be allowed to make their cases or present their views?

If Chad Malloy writes an article claiming that ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ is bad, horrible, and should not be allowed, the Times will publish it, and Twitter will be perfectly happy to allow positive tweets referencing it. If William Teach tweets “Since the gender confused have a much higher chance of having mental issues and suicidal tendencies, let’s put them around military grade weapons for Social Justice, am I right?” he gets suspended by Twitter, and not allowed to express that viewpoint, despite the fact that every point he made is true.[5]Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be female, using the name Parker Marie Malloy.

Twitter suspended the account of Catholic World Report for noting that Dr Richard Levine, appointed by President Biden to become Assistant Secretary for Health in the Department of Health and Human Services is “a biological man identifying as a transgender woman”, despite the fact that the statement is completely accurate.[6]Dr Richard Levine claims that he is female and goes by the name “Rachel.” As noted in our Stylebook, we always refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their biological sex and given … Continue reading

The Times apparently wants some form of a Ministry of Truth, but, like the one for which Winston Smith worked, its business is making certain that whatever Big Brother says is not contradicted by history or the facts. “Ignorance is Strength” the Party says in the book, and it seems that The New York Times wants everybody to remain ignorant of any information, any views of which the Times disapproves.

The late William F Buckley, Jr, famously said, “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” It wasn’t so long ago that the editors of the Times would have shaken their heads at conservative views, but nevertheless simply argued against them, rather than trying to stifle and stamp them out.

Today? All of that has changed! The editors now want a government agency to tell everyone what is true, and stamp out anything they feel is contrary.

References

References
↑1 Though not a journalism major, I wrote for the Kentucky Kernel for two years while in the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce in the early 1980s.
↑2 Mr Roose is a technology columnist for The Times, and the host of the “Rabbit Hole” podcast. His column, “The Shift,” examines the intersection of technology, business, and culture. You can find him on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram. @kevinroose • Facebook
↑3 ‘Deadnaming’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth, rather than the name he has taken to match the sex he claims to be; ‘misgendering’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by sex-specific terms referring to his biological sex rather than the sex he claims to be.
↑4 Full disclosure: I maintained a Parler account, and have a Gab account.
↑5 Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be female, using the name Parker Marie Malloy.
↑6 Dr Richard Levine claims that he is female and goes by the name “Rachel.” As noted in our Stylebook, we always refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their biological sex and given names at birth.
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Is there no actual journalism practiced at The Philadelphia Inquirer?

It’s a pretty sad thing that I have come to check the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page every weekday morning.[1]The statistics are updated Monday through Friday only. Well, this is Monday morning, and the first of February, so we get the homicide statistics for the month of January. And an even fifty people didn’t experience much Brotherly Love in the City during what is normally the coldest month of the year.

In last year’s just-barely-missed-the-record, Philadelphia saw 38 homicides in January. Fifty is a 31.58% increase. Fifty in 31 days is a rate of 1.6129 per day, which, if maintained throughout 2021, would mean 589 people killed in the city’s mean streets.

Yet, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the newspaper of record for the city, the metropolitan area, and really the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, didn’t have the first hint of a story about this, at least not as of 11:38 AM EST, when last I opened the newspaper’s website.

Oh, there was plenty on the website’s main page. There was a big story about why the Inquirer was closing comments on its news stories, because “Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.”

How can they be sure that these views do not represent more than a “tiny fraction” of their audience? Have they really done the research, or is it because the #woke in the newsroom, who got Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski fired to resign because he wrote an attention grabbing headline, but one of which the left wholly disapproved, didn’t like the idea that the riff-raff could express their opinions?

The Inquirer could post an OpEd piece by Patrick J Egan strongly in opposition to capital punishment,[2]Yes, I, too, am opposed to capital punishment, though not for the same reasons. The author claims that executions could resume once Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) is out of office, and a capital punishment … Continue reading but make no mention of the one crime, murder, that can result in capital punishment, even as it has surged to record levels?

How could fifty homicides, occurring at a higher rate than during the previous year be so blithely ignored, be not considered newsworthy?

Oh, wait, I know! You have to have actual journalists on the staff to practice journalism. No wonder I’ve seen it called The Philadelphia Enquirer!

References

References
↑1 The statistics are updated Monday through Friday only.
↑2 Yes, I, too, am opposed to capital punishment, though not for the same reasons. The author claims that executions could resume once Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA) is out of office, and a capital punishment proponent is in office, while ignoring the fact that the previous Governor, Tom Corbett, a Republican, signed 47 separate death warrants during his four years in office, yet not one execution actually occurred.
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The New York Times and The Washington Post want to censor other people’s #FreedomOfSpeech WaPo OpEd piece argues that the Sedition Act of 1798 was a good idea

From 1984, Chapter 2:

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had used an oldfashioned pen, what he had been writing — and then drop a hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.

Winston Smith knew that all evidence of incorrect thought needed to be erased, yet he couldn’t help from keeping his diary. Mr Smith had found the beautifully-paged blank book in the window of “a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town,” the type of shop that Party members were not supposed to frequent, and just buying the thing had been a violation of discipline. George Orwell didn’t really imagine computers or word-processors or the horrors, horrors! of widespread self-publication on the internet, where anybody, anybody! could read things.

From the Editorial Page of The Wall Street Journal:

Speech and Sedition in 2021

The progressive press decides that dissenters should be suppressed.

By The Editorial Board | January 29, 2021 | 7:21 PM EST

Most Americans learn in school about flagship political excesses in U.S. history like Joe McCarthy’s 1950s inquisitions, the post-World War I Red Scare and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Yet a recent Washington Post opinion piece purports to explain “what the 1798 Sedition Act got right.”

The law banned a wide range of political speech and publication. It was passed by the ruling Federalists to suppress the rival Democratic-Republicans, whom they saw as seditious. The Post piece argues that though their solution was “flawed,” the Federalists had reason to worry about “unregulated freedom of the press.”

The author of the referenced Washington Post OpEd piece is Katlyn Marie Carter, an assistant professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and currently a fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. She is writing a book entitled “Houses of Glass: Secrecy, Transparency, and the Birth of Representative Democracy.” She argued:

Citing the problem of misinformation in 1801, Rep. John Rutledge Jr. (S.C.) did not mince words in identifying falsehood as a particular threat to democracy. “In a Republican Government, where public opinion rules everything, it is all-important that truth should be the basis of public information,” he asserted. If public opinion was ill formed — poisoned by lies, deception, misrepresentations or mistakes — the consequences could be dire. “Government, which is the preservative of the general happiness and safety, cannot be secure if falsehood and malice are suffered to rob it of the confidence and affection of the people.”

Rutledge’s words sound like a premonition. Democracies are uniquely dependent on public opinion and trust, which makes the truth crucial to their function — and early Americans knew it.

While the communications world in 1801 was a far cry from the world of smartphones and social media, the two shared a key similarity. When the Internet debuted, it prompted significant optimism that the ease of access to information would promote knowledge. Similarly, early Americans had faith that a newly expanded print media would spread enlightenment. But like today, this initial hope soon gave way to concern. By the late 1790s many concluded that the truth was actually endangered by unregulated freedom of the press; they believed the only way to secure the republic was to punish people for spreading lies. Otherwise, falsehood would poison public opinion and people’s trust in their elected officials would be unduly eroded.

Rutledge’s warning came as he argued for renewal of the Sedition Act of 1798, which among other things, criminalized “false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute.”

Who, I wonder, did Dr Carter believe would determine what was true and what was not? We noted earlier that the (purportedly) private publisher Twitter has, in effect, determined that transgenderism, the idea that people can change their sex through a combination of drug therapy and surgical procedures, is the truth, and speech arguing differently must be prohibited. The New York Times gave OpEd space to Andrew Marantz to claim that Free Speech is Killing Us, and Chad Malloy[1]Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be female, using the name Parker Marie Malloy. The First Street Journal’s Stylebook notes that we always refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their birth names … Continue reading to state that Twitter’s restrictions on ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ actually promote the freedom of speech. One side of the argument is simply to be suppressed, or, as Mr Orwell put it, “Ignorance is Strength.”

Twitter and Facebook and Joe Biden have all determined that the matter is settled, and therefore statements to the contrary are simply falsehoods, and ought to be suppressed. So far, so far! the government under President Biden hasn’t acted to declare such speech seditious, but private social media sites, which have near monopolistic publication control, apparently have.

Of course, President Biden has only been in office for eleven days now, so give it time; he just might try to use the power of government to shut people up.

The Journal continued to note articles by Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times calling for advertiser boycotts of Fox News, as did Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post. So much for “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” So much for “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”  Apparently these august credentialed media sources believe that Freedom of the Press means only their Freedom of the Press, 

I’ve reached the point where I’ve quoted too much from the Journal, and there is much more at the original. But just one more paragraph:

Much of American journalism, which was supposed to revert to its historic role as a check on those in power after Donald Trump left town, is now devoted to shutting down the commercial lifeline of other media. Think of the precedent for the next populist Republican President who might declare pro-choice publications “deadly.”

Of course, the last populist Republican President did not do that; the worry is that the current pro-abortion Democratic President might declare pro-life publications “deadly.”

That would include this publication!

The next step? Look for the left to start pressuring site hosting services to stop hosting sites like The Pirate’s Cove and The Other McCain and Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion and RedState because those sites don’t agree with what is apparently the Accepted Wisdom concerning transgenderism, and that’s simply unacceptable to the left. Because Parler used Amazon as its site hosting service, Jeff Bezos, owner of the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Washington Post was able to lights out the service.[2]Note that I had a Parler account. Parler was a free speech site, but, sadly, its software and presentation were poor.

The Pirate’s Cove uses the blog tagline, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all,” while The Other McCain has, “‘One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.’ — Arthur Koestler”. The left and the credentialed media want us to do the latter, just shut up.

I’ve never been very good at shutting up.

References

References
↑1 Chad Malloy is a male who claims to be female, using the name Parker Marie Malloy. The First Street Journal’s Stylebook notes that we always refer to the ‘transgendered’ by their birth names and biological sex.
↑2 Note that I had a Parler account. Parler was a free speech site, but, sadly, its software and presentation were poor.