Tag Archives: #FreedomOfThePress

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This is how newspapers can once again grow and thrive Newspapers have a value that television news does not, but editors and publishers are not trying to sell it

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain, formerly a professional newspaper reporter, wrote:

Sitting here with my office TV tuned to CNN — I watch CNN, so you don’t have to — I’m struck by the arrogance of their assumption that they get to decide what is and is not newsworthy, as if their audience had no other source of information about what’s going on in the world, and no desire to know anything else except what CNN is “reporting.”

The only difference between CNN and Fox News — other than the leggy reporterettes on Fox — is that CNN runs the same eight stories a day, where Fox only has five. If their audience truly does have no other source of information, they’re going to be fairly uninformed.

My Washington Post subscription, which is the least expensive one I have.

Some have mocked the fact that I subscribe to five newspapers, an expensive hobby, to be sure, because, with my nearly dead ears I prefer to read the news than watch or listen to it, but another aspect of newspapers is that they have more than a few stories a day. The homepage of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website currently shows 72 separate stories, and if more than a few of them are a couple of days old, that’s still a lot. Even a smaller McClatchy newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, currently has 54 stories showing on its website main page at the moment.

How much do people lose by not reading newspapers anymore? Even the stories that CNN and Fox do cover are rarely covered in a lot of detail; only the things which show well on television get covered, because that is the limitation of the visual and entertainment medium.

My far more expensive Philadelphia Inquirer subscription. I could use a senior citizen’s discount right about now.

That is not to say that newspapers do not have their own biases, in their news coverage as well as editorial sections. The Inquirer most certainly does, and what my, sadly late, best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal does as well, though sometimes not as blatantly. But it’s easier to sift through the bias, and see where the bias is, to get around that, when the medium is the written word, when the reader can go back and reread a particular sentence or paragraph. As I have written previously, the credentialed media don’t exactly lie, but they conceal politically incorrect facts.

This is what newspapers need to sell! CNN’s eight stories and Fox’s five, hammered relentlessly toward audiences which come-and-go through the day, shouldn’t be able to compete with the dozens newspapers offer. Yeah, it takes the fact that I already know a lot, to find the parts that are omitted, and a jaundiced eye to see them, but for an at least reasonably-well educated reader — like Jethro Bodine, I is a sixth-grade graduate! — newspapers can and should be the medium of choice. And this is where Gabriel Escobar and Daniel Pearson of the Inky, and Richard Green of the Herald-Leader, need to concentrate their efforts.

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Why do the credentialed media hide the news? Two police officers and a paramedic murdered, and the professional media are ignoring the story as much as they can

My good internet friend Robert Stacy McCain noted that the local police and credentialed media decided to keep secret the identity of the “suspect” who murdered two police officers and a paramedic on Sunday in the Minneapolis suburb of Burnsville.

Mr McCain noted:

(The alleged suspect) petitioned the court in 2020 to have his gun rights restored, which a judge denied.

However, the Associated Press reported:

The suspect, who officials said had multiple guns and large amounts of ammunition, also died.

Clearly, clearly! this report must be false. Since the (alleged) suspect was legally prohibited from owning or possessing firearms, he couldn’t possibly have had the weapons in question.

The only reasonable answer is that one of the children in the house owned and had the firearms, one of the kids shot the police officers and fireman, and the (alleged) suspect, in nobly trying to shield the children, wound up sacrificing his life.

I started this article early, but put it on the shelf, waiting to see if The Philadelphia Inquirer would update it, but nope, the 8:28 AM EST version of the story is the last one posted. More, it no longer shows on the main page of our nation’s third oldest newspaper, and the newspaper of record for the sixth largest city, and seventh largest metropolitan area in our country. And a site search for Shannon Gooden, made at 4:50 PM EST, the (alleged) suspect, returned nothing connected with this story.

Mr McCain, and many others, have wondered why the credentialed media kept the name, and thus the photo, of the (alleged) suspect under wraps, and many have suggested that it is because Mr Gooden is black, and that had he been a MAGA hat wearing white male, his name and image would have been all over the news. Perhaps that’s true, though there’s at least the possibility that the police were waiting until Mr Gooden’s family had been notified.

But it wasn’t just the Inky which never updated a story to identify Mr Gooden. A Google search for Shannon Gooden, conducted at 5:10 PM EST, returned only one national news source, CBS News, with the story on the first page. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Duluth News-Tribune, both had stories, but they’re local news sources, not national.

Two police officers and a fireman working as a paramedic, murdered, and this story is being quickly memory-holed.

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More proof that The Philadelphia Inquirer and District Attorney Larry Krasner side with the thugs, not the police.

I have frequently referred to the District Attorney of Philadelphia as the “George Soros-sponsored, police-hating and criminal-loving Larry Krasner,” and he goes out of his way to prove me right. He loves to cut real criminals a break, and charge Philadelphia Police officers with crimes whenever he can. The incident was during the riots over the unfortunate death while being arrested of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled, previously convicted felon George Floyd in Minneapolis, when the Usual Suspects went wild in the City of Brotherly Love.

Ex-Philadelphia police inspector found not guilty of assaulting protester during 2020 racial justice demonstrations

Joseph Bologna was acquitted by a Philadelphia jury on charges of simple assault and possessing an instrument of a crime.

by Jesse Bunch | St Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2024 | 12:37 PM EST | Updated: 6:24 PM EST

Joseph Bologna, the former Philadelphia police inspector accused of assaulting a Temple University student with a baton during the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd, was not guilty of assault, a jury determined Wednesday.

The Philadelphia jury found Bologna, 57, not guilty of simple assault and possessing an instrument of crime, reaching the decision in about 30 minutes.

In roughly half an hour, huh? That tells us that the jury, which had to be unanimous, had no hesitation at all, that whatever case he believed he had, Mr Krasner and his minions came nowhere close to convincing the jurors.

Bologna’s defense lawyer Fortunato N. Perri Jr. told the jury during closing arguments that his client’s life had been a “nightmare” during the 3½ years since he was arrested for his actions, which took place during the June 1 melee on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Center City.

The Philadelphia Police Department faced heavy scrutiny over its use of force during that summer’s protests over racial injustice and police brutality. That includes Bologna, who was accused by multiple people of using excessive force during demonstrations.

Really? Accused by whom? The police-hating demonstrators themselves?

Of course, The Philadelphia Inquirer went all-in on screaming, “Police brutality,” like a typical villain, caricatured lawyer, or street preacher in a police show like Blue Bloods!

City settles three civil rights suits against former police Inspector Joseph Bologna for $267,500

“It makes you wonder what they were thinking out there,” one attorney said. “It was a police brutality protest, and you respond to it with the sort of thing that’s being protested?”

by William Bender | Friday, December 23, 2022 | 5:00 AM EST

In the spring of 2020, as civil unrest erupted across the country following the murder of George Floyd, video clips that circulated on social media showed how a volatile situation could explode into chaos when Philadelphia Police Inspector Joseph Bologna got involved.

I do not like using photos from the Inquirer, but this article demands it, under Fair Use guidelines. I included it to show the caption that the newspaper used:

Joseph Bologna, then an inspector with the Philadelphia Police Department, repeatedly appeared in videos during the spring of 2020, escalating already volatile confrontations with protesters. Three lawsuits against him were settled this year.

Inflammatory much? Back to the body of the article:

At 10th and Market Streets, for example, a young woman appeared to tap Bologna’s bicycle tire with her foot as they passed each other while crossing the street. Bologna, then the operations commander for the department’s patrol bureau, reacted violently. He threw his bike, lunged at her, and tackled her to the ground.

Also see: Don Surber, “Let newspapers die; They dropped objectivity and with it credibility long ago“

That, in turn, set off a wave of pushing, shoving, and cursing between protesters and police officers.

In other videos, Bologna was seen wielding his collapsible metal baton like a hammer in search of a nail.

Really? Did Mr Krasner or his minions fail to present these videos to the jury trying him, or did that jury not see what reporter William Bender tell readers that they showed?

No responsible editor of a (purportedly) unbiased media source would ever have allowed an article written in that manner to be published, not as news, under which it was listed.

Mr Bologna had the charges against him dismissed by Municipal Court Judge Henry Lewandowski III, in January of 2021, when he ruled that the prosecution had not presented sufficient evidence to establish that Inspector Bologna’s use of his baton against Evan Gorski — captured on video — amounted to a crime.

Mr Krasner’s reaction? He refiled the charges against Mr Bologna the following month, saying, “Philadelphians demand evenhanded justice and we are trying our very best to give them exactly that.” Of course, the DA had dismissed the arresting charges against Mr Gorski, showing you that the District Attorney was not being evenhanded, but a partisan favoring the protesters.

Back to the first article cited:

District Attorney Larry Krasner, when asked about Bologna’s acquittal during an unrelated news conference, said that he had no criticism of the jury’s decision, but that his office was “obviously hoping for a different verdict.”

“I know that the culture in the system, the culture in society, tends to give every benefit of the doubt to law enforcement who are charged with crimes,” Krasner said. “We accept this outcome. I am proud of the fact that our investigations unit worked so hard to try to get justice in ways that my predecessors never even tried.”

In other words, the DA and his minions went after Mr Bologna as hard as they could, including the refiling of dismissed charges, yet they were unable to come up with anything sufficient, in a case which lasted barely a day in the courtroom, to persuade even a single juror to even push deliberations beyond the bare minimum. How could the super-duper legal eagles in the District Attorney’s office not know that they really had no case?

After the trial, Gorski said that although he understood the jury’s decision based off of admissible evidence, he was “ultimately disappointed” with the outcome.

Gorski said he would still like an apology from Bologna, but his expectations are low after he didn’t receive one during his civil lawsuit against the city that settled for $175,000 in 2022.

Not only does Mr Gorski not deserve an apology, he ought to get a hearty, “F(ornicate) you!” from Mr Bologna, and the rest of the Philadelphia Police Department.

“A jury of Joe Bologna’s peers listened intently to the evidence presented at trial and rendered a fair and just verdict,” Roosevelt Poplar, the police union’s president, said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

Asked whether Bologna would try to get back his job with the Philadelphia Police Department, Perri said his client would “look at all his options.” Later in the day, the FOP confirmed that it would begin the process of getting Bologna reinstated.

“Hopefully, he gets back to work,” Perri said.

The average Chief Inspector salary in Philadelphia, PA is $97,661 as of January 26, 2024, but the salary range typically falls between $81,643 and $116,751. Former Inspector Bologna should receive 3½ years of back pay, and restoration of all pensions and benefits. And he should be restored to his position with the Department.

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Once again, an otherwise detailed article in The Philadelphia Inquirer omits a pertinent fact. The newspaper just doesn't want to mention the crime angle

Perhaps it’s wrong of me to expect more in-depth coverage from The Philadelphia Inquirer, and my $285.48 annual subscription, but this one jumped out at me:

These Philadelphians got rid of their cars in the past year. They haven’t looked back.

“Now that I’m forced to walk, I’m seeing the city more than I did before,” said one newly car-less resident. She used to pay about $400 a month on her car payment and insurance.

by Erin McCarthy | Friday, February 9, 2024 | 5:00 AM EST

Dajé Walker’s Hyundai Elantra was stolen from a Brewerytown parking lot in July, only to be found a week later on the side of a local highway.

The car that Walker had driven for three years was “in shambles,” Walker said, and the insurance company deemed it a total loss.

“I had that existential crisis moment where I was like, ‘Do I need a car or do I want a car?” she said.

Around the same time, Walker, 28, got a new, completely remote job as a project manager. The news sealed her decision: She took the insurance payout of about $15,000, putting some of the money in savings and using the rest to move from Brewerytown to Old City, and never looked back.

She no longer has to set aside $300 a month for her car payment and another $100 for insurance. When she recently moved to Old City, she didn’t have to worry about securing a convenient and safe parking spot, which can cost at least $250 a month at private lots.

There’s a nice photo of Miss Walker, with her dog, on the narrow, brick streets, streets wide enough for a horse-and-buggy back in 1776, in the historic Old City, a really nice area in Philly, if you can afford it.

But while Miss Walker was able to get a new, 100% work from home job, published at the very same time was the article “IBX’s (Independence Blue Cross) new in-person office policy has some workers feeling betrayed. Others are job-hunting. Senior employees say they are worried that their teams will quit to find more flexible or better-paying positions at other companies,” which was a follow on to the Groundhog Day article, “Independence Blue Cross changes its work-from-home policy, the latest big Philly employer to require more in-office days: The insurance company had been allowing most employees to work remote as much as they liked. Now, they’ll be required onsite a majority of the work week.”

So, more and more employees are being expected to do something really radical and actually come to work in Philly; won’t those workers need a way to get to work?

More people are back in the office, but commuters say SEPTA service isn’t back to pre-pandemic norms

SEPTA service isn’t back to 100%, but it’s still outpacing ridership, even as employers push more in-office time. Would workers be more willing to commute if transportation schedules bulked up?

by Lizzy McLellan Ravitch | Friday, October 6, 2023 | 9:18 AM EDT

On Wednesday morning, SEPTA sent 39 notifications of Regional Rail trains running at least 10 minutes late and warned of potential delays or cancellations on 18 bus and trolley lines “due to operator unavailability.”

“It’s a gamble” trying to catch the bus, said a Pennsylvania state employee from West Philadelphia, who asked to remain nameless out of concern for their job. “There were times I would wake up earlier to get an earlier bus, and that wouldn’t show up.”

SEPTA’s mismanagement by CEO Leslie Richards is famed far and wide in Philly.

They have taken a rideshare to work on multiple occasions because their bus route options were canceled or late. Walking to a further bus stop isn’t an option because they have a disability. A lifelong bus rider, they said the system was more dependable before COVID-19.

[Sigh!] In English grammar, properly understood, the masculine subsumes the feminine, meaning that the singular masculine pronouns are used to refer to one person, even when that person’s sex is not known or specified. Anything else is sloppy writing.

“You have to laugh to keep from crying,” the West Philly bus rider said. “People could lose their jobs” if they’re late for work.

Septa’s ridership is down 39% from 2019, the year prior to the panicdemic, though the bus service alone was back up to 75% last October.

Back to the first cited article:

After a surge in car-buying statewide at the height of the pandemic, there are signs that some Philadelphians like Walker have made the decision to do away with their cars in recent years, bucking larger trends.

In 2022, more than 638,000 passenger vehicles were registered in the city, about 24,000 fewer cars than were registered here a year prior, according to the most recent state data. That represents a 3.6% decline in registered vehicles over a period when the city’s population decreased 1.4%, the largest one year drop in 45 years.

Do all of these things make sense together? Car ownership is down significantly from the population decrease, public transportation ridership has significantly decreased, and more people are being required to return to their employers’ offices? We reported, just two days ago, that the newspaper did not report politically inconvenient facts about vehicle ownership, that while the Inquirer reported on the surge in automobile insurance rates, completely ignored was the possibility the city’s huge auto theft and carjacking rates had anything to do with that surge.

Well, here they go again. The newspaper has previously reported:

Philadelphia has seen a surge in plateless vehicles. Some are abandoned, but others are the result of drivers attempting to evade law enforcement, parking tickets, or toll-by-plate systems.

There was also this:

How rampant phony license plates are being used to get away with crimes in Philadelphia

Fraudulent temporary tags have flooded into Philadelphia from states with looser rules — like Delaware.

by Ryan W. Briggs and Dylan Purcell | November 18, 2022 | 5:00 AM EST | Updated: 12:11 PM EST

(F)ake license plates are an old tool of criminal trades, what’s new is the flood of fraudulent temporary tags into Philadelphia from states with looser issuance rules — like Texas and Delaware. These phony plates have shown up increasingly in police investigations into shootings, carjackings, hit-and-runs, and car thefts. (In addition to counterfeit plates, thefts of auto tags this year to date were 2,378, a more than 60% increase over the same period in 2018.)

How, I have to ask, is it good and reliable reporting to tell the newspaper’s readers that fewer people own cars without mentioning that the city has seen a surge in vehicles on the street which some people possess, though “own” might not be the proper word? There was not the first word in Erin McCarthy’s article to even hint that, Heaven forfend!, there might be more cars on the road possessed by scofflaws and criminals.

Miss McCarthy’s article was entirely upbeat, telling readers that there are good and reasonable ways to live in the City of Brotherly Love, that Philly “is known for being one of the best cities to live in without a car (though historically not all neighborhoods have the same access to public transit),” which, I would guess, will be something referenced in yet another article telling us that we must give up cars to save Mother Gaia.

William Teach reported, just this morning, that we are being told by Our Betters that the behavior of the public as a whole must be changed to fight global warming climate change, but at least Miss McCarthy’s article is trying to be persuasive rather than authoritarian.

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Journolism: The credentialed media don’t exactly lie, but they conceal politically incorrect facts

We have said it before: 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 of the credentialed media don’t outright lie to us, but they are very good at not mentioning politically incorrect facts. For instance, we recently reported that The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, made no mention at all of the murder of 19-year-old Nafiese McClain in a bodega on the corner of 55th and Master Streets on January 29th, nor of the arrest of a 16-year-old juvenile, Jahsir Walke, for that killing.[2]As of 9:28 AM EST today, site searches of the Inquirer’s website showed no returns at all for the names of the arrested, alleged killer or the victim, even though Fox 29 News had the story of … Continue reading We previously reported how the Lexington Herald-Leader concealed the sex of the victims of a female teacher, administrator, and coach in Floyd County, even though two of the known victims came forth publicly, and yup, they were girls.

Well, here the media go again. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Philly has the largest jump in average cost of car insurance in the country in 2024

The average full-coverage premium costs in the Philadelphia metro area jumped 154% this year from $1,872 to $4,753.

by Ariana Perez-Castells | Wednesday, February 7, 2024 | 5:00 AM EST

Drivers in the Philadelphia metro area are spending a larger share of their income on car insurance than many in the nation, according to an annual report released this month from Bankrate, a consumer financial services company.

On average, Philly drivers are spending $4,753 on their annual car premium, 5.65% of their household income.

According to Bankrate, the average full-coverage premium costs in the Philadelphia metro area — which includes Camden and Wilmington — jumped 154% this year. It is the largest increase of any of the 26 metros examined by Bankrate.

Only drivers in the Tampa, Miami, and Detroit metros are spending a larger percentage of their household incomes on their car premium than those in the Philly metro area, according to Bankrate’s analysis.

Four paragraphs follow, telling Inquirer readers that premiums have increased nationwide, and then we get to this paragraph, below its own subtitle:

Why the large increase?

Insurance premiums are, for the most part, reactionary, Martin said, and a lot has happened in the last few years that has affected rates including inflation, an increase in the price of car parts, more fatalities when people got back on the road in 2021, and refunds insurance companies issued customers during the pandemic.

Sounds reasonable, right? But you know what is not mentioned in the article? Carjackings!

It’s not as though the Inquirer somehow missed all of that, given this story in that august newspaper:

  • DA Larry Krasner announces new carjacking unit: Carjackings hit an all-time high in 2022, with more than 1,300 reported, the Philadelphia Police Department told The Inquirer. That figure represents a 53% increase over last year. By Nick Vadala, Friday, December 29, 2022, 3:31 PM EST

More, Miss Perez-Castells is listed as one of the three authors of the article “Car thefts at the Philadelphia Airport have risen sharply since before the pandemic: So far this year, 112 cars have been stolen from the Philadelphia airport, a spike of 5500% from the same point in 2019,” published on Friday, October 13, 2023. She cannot have not known about the terrible car theft and carjacking problem in the City of Brotherly Love.

We reported on a worse-than-usual carjacking in South Philly, one which the newspaper covered, in which the carjacking victim was killed, but in a story in which the newspaper told us that the suspects three “young men, appearing to be between the ages of 15 and early 20s, dressed in dark clothing,” concealing that the suspects were three black young men.

There isn’t even the slightest hint in reporter Ariana Perez-Castells’ article that carjackings, or even auto theft in general, played even the barest part in automobile insurance premiums. If the report she cited stated specifically that carjackings and theft did not contribute to the increase in premiums, Miss Perez-Castells did not mention such.

So, the question becomes: did Miss Perez-Castells omit any mention of the possibility that Philly’s high automobile theft and carjacking rates could have contributed to the dramatic increase in full coverage insurance rates, or did she include it, only to have it blue-penciled[3]Blue penciled is an old copy-editing term, which shows how old I am! by an editor following publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ dictate that the newspaper would become an “anti-racist news organization,” and her promises that the Inky would be closely examining its crime reporting which “portrays Philadelphia (minority) communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime,” and “includes countless stories focused on minor crimes and disproportionately affect people of color”? I don’t know the answer to that, but one thing is certain to me: such should have been included in the story. If the reporter didn’t include it, her editor should have noticed it and asked why it was omitted.

The non-inclusion of this very serious Philadelphia problem took a decent bit of reporting, and mostly trashed it. It’s difficult for me to believe that I’m the only subscriber who would have noticed that glaring omission, because it practically leapt off the page my monitor screen at me. The Inquirer has every right to omit that consideration from its story, for whatever reasons the writer and/or editors had; that’s part of the newspaper’s freedom of the press. But it’s also the right of the readers to notice, and take judgements on the newspaper’s journalism due to it.

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 9:28 AM EST today, site searches of the Inquirer’s website showed no returns at all for the names of the arrested, alleged killer or the victim, even though Fox 29 News had the story of the arrest two days ago.
↑3 Blue penciled is an old copy-editing term, which shows how old I am!
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The Freedom of Speech comes with an obligation of responsibility; people are responsible for what they say.

I have always believed in the freedom of speech, that people should be absolutely free to say whatever they wished. But I also believe that the speaker is not somehow immune from the consequences of his speech. The Supreme Court noted that freedom of speech doesn’t extend to yelling, “Fire!” in a crowded theater, or “fighting words,” but both of those incidences are concerns about the consequences of what someone says, causing a stampede in which people are injured, or getting your jaw jacked because you angered someone enough to hit you in the mouth. From USA Today:

Posting ‘Zionists must die’ is awful. But it shouldn’t get student kicked out of college.

Cornell should balance protecting students and campus staff with protecting free speech.

Continue reading →

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Look to your own house!

Let’s tell the truth here: most people at least occasionally complain about their employers and “those idiots up there,” their bosses. It’s just that when professional journalists do it, they get to combitch — not a typo, but a Picoism — about it to a wider audience.

Jenice Armstrong is a fairly privileged person, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and she has just complained about a lack of media coverage over the killing of a black mother of four in the City of Brotherly Love.

A mother of four got killed. It should have been big news.

If Kasheeda Jones had been white, and driving a minivan, her death could be national — or even international — news. But in Philly, it was just another Friday night.

by Jenice Armstrong | Thursday, January 25, 2024 | 7:00 AM EST

Kasheeda Jones’ life revolved around her close-knit family.

A 2004 honors graduate of University City High School, she briefly attended Cheyney University, hoping to become a TV weather personality, but left for financial reasons. Eventually, she became a corrections officer like her mother and worked in the prison system for 15 years. Along the way, she had four daughters — now ages 15, 12, 6, and 3 — and purchased a three-bedroom rowhouse on Gilbert Street in East Mount Airy.

A few paragraphs omitted here.

Kasheeda Jones was shot that night (November 17, 2023) on the 800 block of West Venango and transported by a private vehicle to Temple University Hospital, where she died. No arrests have been made, and police have no suspects.

I bet most people reading this right now didn’t hear about Jones’ death.

What happened to her went largely unnoticed outside of her wide circle of family and friends. News coverage of her killing was cursory — a couple of brief mentions in local outlets, nothing more.

It was that last paragraph which got me to fisk Miss Armstrong’s column, because neither of the two media stories the columnist referenced were in her own newspaper. A site search of the Inquirer’s website for “Kasheeda Jones” returned only Miss Armstrong’s column; there wasn’t a single news story on her killing which identified the victim by name. The columnist was right, at least as far as I am concerned: I didn’t hear about Mrs Jones death because the newspaper to which I pay $285.40 per year for a digital subscription didn’t cover it!

In something that absolutely pegs the irony meter, Miss Armstrong, who just hyperlinked Fox 29 News’ coverage of Mrs Jones murder, complained herself that Fox 29’s and reporter Steve Keeley’s coverage of crime “is disturbing.”

Don’t tell me that it’s a terrible wrong that Mrs Jones’ murder didn’t receive more attention from the media when you have combitched that someone else’s crime coverage is too strong or blatant or “disturbing.”

One wonders about WHYY’s Cherri Gregg’s 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. Miss Hughes declared that the Inky was a “white newspaper” in a “black city”, and our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, serving the nation’s sixth largest city — my good friend, the Inky’s editorial writer Danial Pearson claims Philly is fifth largest because Phoenix cheats on its population numbers — and seventh largest metropolitan area, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, which frequently reports on “gun violence” in general, couldn’t be bothered to cover Mrs Jones’ murder . . . or at least didn’t want to publish it.

It matters, also, that if Jones had been white, and driving a minivan, her death could be national — or even international — news. But in Philly, it was just another Friday night.

In this, Miss Armstrong was absolutely correct. The newspaper had plenty of coverage in the senseless murder of Everett Beauregard, a white Temple grad, the paper paid more attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s five separate stories, a whole lot more than the two or three paragraphs most victims get. There was the murder of Samuel Collington, a white victim, allegedly murdered by a black juvenile in a botched robbery. The Inquirer then published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him. Five separate stories about the case of a murdered white guy. The Inquirer even broke precedent when it came to Mr Collington’s murder by including the name of the juvenile suspect in the case, and delving into his previous record.

We previously reported on the tremendous coverage of the murder of white homosexual activist Josh Kruger, while the killings of four “nobodies” were ignored.

We have noted, really too many times to note all of them, that The Philadelphia Inquirer is not really concerned about individual homicides in the City of Brotherly Love unless an ‘innocent,’ someone already of some note, or a cute little white girl is the victim. On Monday morning, it was reported that Josh Kruger, a freelance journalist of at least some note in Philly was murdered, which we noted here, and the left in Philly — Rue Landau, Inquirer reporter Ellie Rushing, Jordan Winkler, Mayor Jim Kenney, the Liberty City Dems, state Senator Nikil Saval, The New York Times, WPVI-TV, Inquirer editorial writer Daniel Pearson, CNN, Taj Magruder, Maggie Hart, and an untold number of other people are all mourning his death.

Yet what about the three people murdered early this morning, along with a fourth person critically wounded, in the Crascentville section of the city, and the ‘person of interest’ suspected in the killings? They are, as far as the media have told us thus far, not ‘somebodies,’ and there are few tweets about them, few messages I have seen, and, as far as I can tell, other than friends and family, nobody f(ornicating) cares. Mayor Kenney has said nothing about those four people, whom I assume to be black from this photo in the Inky. Mr Kruger was white.

Of course, the coverage of Mr Kruger’s murder dried up quickly after it was reported that Mr Kruger’s alleged killer, Robert Davis, said that he had been in a sexual relationship with Mr Kruger when he was only 15 years old, while Mr Kruger was 35. Once the story got into that politically incorrect accusation, everybody clammed up.

As a Black journalist, I’ve heard the complaint many times: that the media don’t cover the deaths of people of color with the same ferocity as they cover the deaths of white people. Many African Americans have a negative view of the media, according to a study released by the Pew Research Center. Unequal coverage is one of the reasons.

Well, guess what? This site, The First Street Journal, has been “cover(ing) the deaths of people of color with the same ferocity as we cover the deaths of white people,” and I’m a libertarian, conservative white guy. Then again, our ‘angle’ is that credentialed journolists — 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 — are hiding news that doesn’t fit Teh Narrative.

Thankfully, some Black journalists are trying to change that. Recently, members of the newly formed Philadelphia chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists met at The Inquirer to discuss the Pew findings and what can be done about them. It was hard to hear because many of us have devoted our entire careers to helping our newsrooms do a better job covering African Americans. Things have gotten better, but so much still needs to be done — not that Black people expect much to change anytime soon. Nothing was resolved that night, besides renewing our commitment to helping the industry right itself.

And therein we find the problem: much of the news about black Americans in general, and black Philadelphians more particularly, falls into categories that the politically correct coverage of the Inquirer doesn’t want to touch. Reporting on Mrs Jones’ murder would have exposed the fact that the victim was black, and the most frequent assumption that a black woman murdered in Franklinville, an area near the Philadelphia Badlands, will have been killed by another black person. Publisher Elizabeth Hughes said that the newspaper was going to be very careful in its coverage of crime, in its efforts to be an “anti-racist news organization,” would be “Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media,” which is the very thing which has kept stories on things such as Mrs Jones’ murder out of the Inquirer.

To Miss Armstrong I say: look to your own house! Don’t complain about the lack of coverage on a black mother of four in Philadelphia when your own newspaper, the place at which you work, actively discourages reporting on such killings. And consider whether the newspaper’s own editorial philosophy really helps the people of Philadelphia, and the profession of journalism.

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Once again, The Philadelphia Inquirer pegs the irony meter

I have previously written about the fact that the credentialed media rarely actually lie to us, but tend to conceal facts that might not fit in well with Teh Narrative. Did Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jonathan Zimmerman not know about Stan Wischnowski, or simply forget, or was he told not to mention him?

What universities can learn from former New York Times opinion editor James Bennet

There is a core lesson for higher education in the journalist’s recent essay: The best route to progress is a full and free dialogue — even when it hurts.

by Jonathan Zimmerman | Wednesday, December 27, 2023 | 8:08 AM EST

Earlier this month, I read the single sharpest criticism of the American university I’ve encountered in many years. And it wasn’t even about the American university.

It’s an essay that appeared in the Economist by former New York Times opinion editor James Bennet, who was forced out in 2020 after he published an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) calling for the use of the military against violent protesters. Bennet ran the op-ed not because he agreed with it (he didn’t) but because he believed the newspaper had a duty to provoke debate, and — most of all — because he thought his readers could come to reasoned conclusions about it.

That’s the foundation of the small-l liberal creed: Since none of us has a monopoly on truth, we need to let everyone determine it on their own. But in the era of Donald Trump, who thinks he’s right about everything, journalists started to imitate him. They knew the truth, especially about Trump, and their job was to make sure other people knew it, as well.

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What The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t tell us, tells us a lot How can you have a long report on the Philadelphia public schools without telling us how they are doing as far as actually educating students?

We have frequently mentioned the Edward T Steel Elementary School in Philadelphia, since then-mayoral candidate Helen Gym Flaherty used the school as a backdrop for telling voters how she ‘saved’ the school from ‘going charter,’ and kept it a public school.  In the still public Steel Elementary, which is ranked 1,205th out of 1,607 Pennsylvania elementary schools, 1% of students scored at or above the proficient level for math, and 8% scored at or above that level for reading. Maybe keeping it public didn’t work all that well? Continue reading →