Tag Archives: #FreedomOfThePress

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Are the teachers’ unions writing purportedly straight news pieces for The Washington Post?

The Washington Post got the headline wrong. The editors make it sound as though the students were the ones in the wrong for reporting a teacher who broke the law!

Her students reported her for a lesson on race. Can she trust them again?

Mary Wood’s school reprimanded her for teaching a book by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Now she hopes her bond with students can survive South Carolina’s politics.

by Hannah Natanson | Monday, September 18, 2023 | 6:00 AM EDT

CHAPIN, S.C. — As gold sunlight filtered into her kitchen, English teacher Mary Wood shouldered a worn leather bag packed with first-day-of-school items: Three lesson-planning notebooks. Two peanut butter granola bars. An extra pair of socks, just in case.

Everything was ready, but Wood didn’t leave. For the first time since she started teaching 14 years ago, she was scared to go back to school.

Six months earlier, two of Wood’s Advanced Placement English Language and Composition students had reported her to the school board for teaching about race. Wood had assigned her all-White class readings from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a book that dissects what it means to be Black in America.

The students wrote in emails that the book — and accompanying videos that Wood, 47, played about systemic racism — made them ashamed to be White, violating a South Carolina proviso that forbids teachers from making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” on account of their race.

The story was originally entitled “South Carolina students reported their teacher’s lesson on Ta-Nehisa Coates,” or so I judge from the blurb that appears on the article tab using Microsoft Edge. Someone changed it to the headline you see above, which includes “Can she trust them again?” But what Mrs Satterwhite[1]While the teacher did not respect her husband, Ryan Satterwhite, enough to have taken his last name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect to him, and always refers to married … Continue reading did was in blatant defiance of the law in the Palmetto State. Do the editors of the Post support teachers breaking the law?

Reading Coates’s book felt like “reading hate propaganda towards white people,” one student wrote.

Let’s be clear here: Mr Coates, who has had material published previously in the Post, something the Post article does not mention, which is a violation of standard journalistic ethics, strongly concentrates on race relations in the United States. Wikipedia’s section on Mr Coates’ views on race in the US states:

In an interview with Ezra Klein, Coates outlined his analysis that the extent of white identity expression in the United States serves as a critical factor in threat perceptions of certain European Americans and their response to political paradigm shifts related to African Americans, such as the presidency of Barack Obama.

I note here that Ezra Klein was the creator of JournoList, so the above statement concerned a left-wing “journalist” reporting about a left-wing subject. While I was obviously not present during Mrs Satterwhite’s lessons, I don’t find the student’s complaint that the book felt like “reading hate propaganda towards white people” to be improbable.

At least two parents complained, too. Within days, school administrators ordered Wood to stop teaching the lesson. They placed a formal letter of reprimand in her file. It instructed her to keep teaching “without discussing this issue with your students.”

Wood finished out the spring semester feeling defeated and betrayed — not only by her students, but by the school system that raised her. The high school Wood teaches at is the same one she attended.

Oh, she felt “defeated and betrayed” because students reported her to teaching a lesson which broke the law? People might genuinely disagree about the merits of the law in question, but it is still the law.

Here is the crux of the teacher’s problem:

Wood believes trust is fundamental to the classroom. She has to trust her students. They and their parents have to trust her. But trust, she believes, is impossible without authenticity. And for Wood, teaching authentically means assigning writers like Coates — voices unfamiliar, even disconcerting, to students in her lakeside town. Because of what happened last year, though, Wood now worried anything, from the most provocative essay to the least interesting comment about her weekend, might be resisted, recorded and reported by the children she was supposed to be teaching.

And if she couldn’t trust them, how was she supposed to make them trust her?

That trust was broken when Mrs Satterwhite began teaching her students something prohibited by law, yet she somehow sees the trust as having been broken by the students reporting her, not her teaching of a prohibited lesson. If the lessons she taught made some students feel “ashamed to be white,” how does that not violate “a South Carolina proviso that forbids teachers from making students ‘feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress’ on account of their race”?

Mrs Satterwhite was not discharged. She had a letter of reprimand placed in her file, and was admonished not to teach inappropriate lessons. Yet she has returned to the classroom this school year.

How can she trust her students? She can record her lessons herself, to prove that she has remained within the state’s and the school board’s guidelines.

And Wood believed the school district had come to accept her — respecting her students’ 80-plus percent AP exam passage rates year after year, above the national average — even if not everyone liked her methods. Chapin was her hometown. Chapin High School had been her school, the place she began to question the conservative, Christian views espoused by her classmates, friends and family.

No teacher ever assigned her someone like Coates, Wood said, but her father Mike Satterfield, a teacher and later principal at Chapin, encouraged her to pursue whatever outside reading she found interesting. That led her to left-leaning authors. By the time she graduated from University of North Carolina Wilmington, she was a self-professed liberal.

The Post reporter tried to put that innocuously, but the meaning is clear: Mrs Satterwhite is not just “a self-professed liberal,” but she was choosing to teach that liberalism to the students in a mostly conservative area. Lexington County, in which Chapin is located, gave 92,817 votes, 64.20% of the total, to President Trump in 2020, versus 49,301 votes, 34.10%, to the dummkopf from Delaware.

But amid a red sea, Chapin’s English department was a blue island. And Wood was known as the bluest of the bunch — conspicuous for decorating her classroom with posters of Malcolm X, Ruth Bader Ginsburg quotes and LGBTQ pride stickers.

Though the Post didn’t want to say it directly, the above paragraph tells us all that we need to know: Mrs Satterwhite was bringing her politics into the classroom.

As one would expect, Mrs Satterwhite attempted to use an “I know better because I am a professional” argument, the type of thing the liberal teachers’ unions try, but it didn’t work: parents have, and should have, the ultimate authority over what their children are taught.

The Post article is a very long one, and it is a left-leaning editorial, slanted to make Mrs Satterwhite a martyr, attempting to masquerade as a news piece.

References

References
↑1 While the teacher did not respect her husband, Ryan Satterwhite, enough to have taken his last name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect to him, and always refers to married women by their proper names, though we do not change the direct quotes of others.
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The Lexington Herald-Leader gets a new executive editor

We have noted, many times, that the Lexington Herald-Leader has been significantly out-of-touch with the views of the people in the central-and-eastern Kentucky counties it (supposedly) serves. So, when Executive Editor Peter Baniak was promoted by McClatchy to become its vice president of news for small and medium markets, why what better place to go than Santa Rosa, California, and The Press Democrat for a new Executive Editor! Sonoma County, where Santa Rosa is located, gave 199,938 (74.52%) of its votes to Joe Biden in 2020, to just 61,825 (23.04%) for President Trump, an even higher percentage than Mr Biden’s 63.48% to 34.32% advantage statewide.

Herald-Leader names award winning former Kentucky journalist as new executive editor

by John Cheves | Monday, August 28, 2023 | 4:15 PM EDT | Updated: 4:40 PM EDT

The Lexington Herald-Leader on Monday named as its new executive editor Richard Green, the former editor of The Courier Journal in Louisville who led that newspaper to a 2020 Pulitzer Prize and two 2021 Pulitzer finalists.

Green is currently executive editor at The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, Calif., north of San Francisco. He will start work in Lexington on Sept. 25.

“I am so honored and incredibly excited to be returning to Kentucky and for the opportunity to work with the talented Herald-Leader newsroom. I have admired that staff for decades, and I cannot wait to roll up my sleeves and join it,” Green said.

There follows a long section detailing Mr Green’s curriculum vitae, which I shall not reproduce here. Rather, I shall drop down to the closing two paragraphs: Continue reading →

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Once again, the Lexington Herald-Leader endangers citizens by refusing to publish a mugshot

The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States specifies:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

And thus we come to the case of George Aldridge:

Man charged in 3 Lexington sexual assaults has been tied to another case, police say

By Christopher Leach | Monday, August 28, 2023 | 9:17 AM EDT | Updated: 10:01 AM EDT

George Aldridge, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

A Kentucky man previously charged in three Lexington sexual assault cases is now facing charges in another sexual assault due to a breakthrough discovery by a Kentucky State Police investigative team, officials announced Monday.

George Aldridge, 53, was indicted last month on a charge of first-degree rape in Jefferson County, according to court records. KSP said the incident happened in 2005 and investigators solved it nearly two decades later thanks to DNA evidence.

The new indictment adds to several other offenses Aldridge has been accused of: he was indicted on two counts of first-degree rape, two counts of first-degree sexual abuse, two counts of first-degree sodomy, three counts of kidnapping and one count of first-degree wanton endangerment in April, according to court records.

Those charges stem from three abductions and sexual assaults between 2009 and 2016 in Fayette County, Lexington police previously said.

No, of course, following the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, the Lexington Herald-Leader did not include the suspect’s mugshot; I had to get it from the Fayette County Detention Center records.

But this 5’9″ tall, 285 pound man is clearly a danger to any woman he encounters, and he does have a bail amount set. Shouldn’t the women in Fayette County knows what this fine gentleman looks like, so they can be on alert should they happen to see him? Continue reading →

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The Associated Press will happily tell you what their biases are . . . if you pay them!

We have frequently mocked The Philadelphia Inquirer’s very much unpublished stylebook, a manual and guide concerning how things should be expressed, in its use of “Black and brown” to refer to minority communities. While I cannot document this, it appears that the Inquirer use the Associated Press Stylebook, which was modified , in June of 2020,to capitalize “black” in reference to race, but not capitalize “white.”

After changing its usage rules last month to capitalize the word “Black” when used in the context of race and culture, The Associated Press on Monday said it would not do the same for “white.” The AP said white people in general have much less shared history and culture, and don’t have the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color. Protests following the death of George Floyd, which led to discussions of policing and Confederate symbols, also prompted many news organizations to examine their own practices and staffing. The Associated Press, whose Stylebook is widely influential in the industry, announced June 19 it would make Black uppercase. In some ways, the decision over “white” has been more ticklish. The National Association of Black Journalists and some Black scholars have said white should be capitalized, too. “We agree that white people’s skin color plays into systemic inequalities and injustices, and we want our journalism to robustly explore these problems,” Daniszewski said. “But capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.”

Translation: this was all political. Capitalizing ‘Black’ but not ‘white,’ or, in the Inquirer’s amusing permutation, ‘brown,’ is really kind of silly, and has caused some people to notice it, but it really shouldn’t lead to much overt bias.

But some of what is in the AP Stylebook is overtly biased. From National Review:

AP Stylebook Issues Guide for Transgender Coverage

by Abigail Anthony | July 22, 2022 | 7:23 PM EDT

The Associated Press Stylebook, which for decades has served as the default style manual for most news organizations, has issued a “Topical Guide” for transgender coverage that encourages writers to use “unbiased language” and to “avoid false balance [by] giving a platform to unqualified claims or sources in the guise of balancing a story by including all views.”

Yet the guidance appears to explicitly embrace the language and claims of transgender activists, a move likely to steer newsrooms away from objectively framing the issue.

The AP Stylebook has issued prior guidance related to gender and sexuality, and some of that is repackaged in the Topical Guide. But it does include some updates, together providing an extensive reference for journalists.

The Transgender Coverage Topical Guide explains: “A person’s sex and gender are usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate. Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure consisting of only men and women, that can vary among societies and can change over time.” The guide encourages writers to refer to subjects according to their preferred gender identity. The guide condemns “deadnaming,” or referring to a transgender person’s previous name, because that “can be akin to using a slur and can cause feelings of gender dysphoria to resurface.”

The guide explains that the word “identify” can be useful, but alternative phrasing “like ‘is a woman’ is more to the point than ‘identifies as a woman.’”

Translation: the Associated Press Stylebook carries the implicit assumption that a ‘transgender’ person is the sex he[1]In English grammar, properly understood, the masculine subsumes the feminine, and thus, in cases in which the sex of the person to which a pronoun refers is not known, the masculine pronouns are … Continue reading claims to be, not his actual sex.

Deadline noted, on June 3, 2023:

The Associated Press style guide – which sets the agenda for how most major media uses its words and phrases in reporting, thus shaping society views – has come out with new guidelines on gender.

The AP now instructs journalists to respect LGBTQ subjects’ preferred pronouns and to avoid terms like “biological sex.”

The new guide also suggested avoiding phrases like “both sexes,” indicating there are more than two that people use. Journalists should also avoid referring to a trans person as being born a boy or girl, with “sex assigned at birth” the new preferred usage.

Think about that. Not only does Deadline note that the AP Stylebook is “shaping society views,” but has gone all in on attempting to push the cockamamie notions that there are more than two sexes, and that sex is somehow “assigned at birth.” We have known for a century that the sex of every mammal is determined by whether the male’s sperm cell which fertilizes the female’s egg is carrying either the X or the Y chromosome, and that the male has exactly zero biological role in procreation after sexual intercourse and fertilization of the egg. The sex of the offspring is determined at conception, and simply recognized at birth, but the AP Stylebook stresses something factually false.

Dawn Stacy Ennis of Forbes has more on this silliness, and she is writing from the perspective of someone who supports transgenderism.

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

What does all of this do? By controlling the language, the AP is attempting to control the discussion; by the broad acceptance of the AP Stylebook, most major media in the country are going along with it. The AP do not like, and advises against, “deadnaming,” which is referring to a transgender person by the name given at birth, which almost always corresponds to the person’s sex. Thus, virtually every credentialed media source referred to Lia Thomas rather than Will Thomas, because they were going along with the attempt to persuade people that Mr Thomas is actually Miss Thomas.

The Associated Press also do not want you to refer to a person being ‘transgender’ unless transgenderism is specifically the topic. Thus, according to the Stylebook, Dr Richard Levine, the United States Assistant Secretary for Health, is not only to be referred to as Rachel Levine, as he now claims to be a woman, but not to inform readers that Dr Levine is transgender; readers who do not actually know are expected to assume that Dr Levine really is a woman.

This has real consequences. How many people would simply trust Dr Levine’s medical judgement, because he is a physician, who would otherwise not if they knew that he really is a man male claiming to be a woman? This is a question the AP do not want asked!

So, why do I bring this up? Today, @APStylebook tweeted:

We don’t have a new print Stylebook this year, but there’s plenty that’s new on AP Stylebook Online.
Subscribe for our latest guidance. You can opt in to notifications when we update entries.

Translation: they will give you a guidebook of our journolistic[2]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 biases, if you will pay them for it!

The First Street Journal does not claim to be an unbiased news source, but what we have done is to create and publish our own Stylebook, which can easily be found on the menu bar below the site title. You may not agree with our point of view, but we do not hide anything.

Who knows, some of our readers may actually believe that girls can be boys and boys can be girls, but we very explicitly tell you if a person claims to be the opposite sex from what he was born, and if you disagree with our editorial position, you are at least able to take an informed decision. That’s something the Associated Press do not want you to be able to do.

References

References
↑1 In English grammar, properly understood, the masculine subsumes the feminine, and thus, in cases in which the sex of the person to which a pronoun refers is not known, the masculine pronouns are properly used, while formulations such as “he or she” are evidence that the writer does not understand proper grammar.
↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer does some good reporting . . . and then they hide it

We have previously noted some articles in The Philadelphia Inquirer marked as exclusive for paid subscribers. The newspaper has a digital paywall which allows non-subscribers a limited number of articles a month before it descends and blocks access to all articles, but even if you haven’t tried to open an Inky article for months, the subscribers only block will stop you from accessing those stories. Nevertheless, the story below is one that should have been available to more Philadelphia readers!

Yes, the Inquirer does have to make money to stay in business, and the economic condition has been serious enough that the Leftist Lenfest Institute for Journalism has sent out begging letters to subscribers at least thrice that I have documented, so perhaps the $285.48 that I’ve been paying still isn’t enough.

Jim Kenney raised money to boost progressive candidates but spent it on consultants and restaurant tabs

Of the more than $780,000 that Kenney PAC has spent over the last three years, only about $60,000 went to other campaigns. The money has also gone to political operatives and miscellaneous expenses.

by Sean Collins Walsh | Monday, August 7, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

In early 2020, things were looking good for Mayor Jim Kenney, who had just coasted to reelection after a productive first term and was eyeing statewide office.

In June of that year, he launched Kenney PAC, a political action committee that he said would “help progressive candidates in the forthcoming legislative races in Pennsylvania defeat extremist pro-Trump Republicans.”

Giving money to Democrats across the state would have built goodwill for a mayor little known outside Southeastern Pennsylvania, and news of the PAC helped fuel speculation that Kenney might run for U.S. Senate or governor in 2022.

Well, those “extremist pro-Trump Republicans” haven’t had much success in the Keystone State, but the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania sure hasn’t benefitted under those ‘progressive’ Democrats! Under Mayor Kenney, the City of Brotherly Love, the town he was (supposedly) running, in 2020, the year he launched Kenney PAC, went from 356 homicides — which the Philadelphia Police have now revised down to 353 — to 499, and there are serious reasons to believe that the number was actually 502, as initially reported.

We have noted, several times, the change in the Philadelphia Police Department’s statistics, down from the 502 homicides initially reported for 2020, down to 499, one short of the then-all-time record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, under the ‘leadership’ of then-Mayor Wilson Goode, he of MOVE bombing fame. I made a totally rookie mistake, and failed to get a screen capture of that, but a Twitter fellow styling himself NDJinPhilly was apparently smarter than me that particular time, took the screen shot, and then tweeted it to me.

2020 was the year of the unfortunate death while resisting arrest of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled convicted felon George Floyd in Minneapolis, and riots broke out in many cities, including Philly, but the change in attitudes continued far beyond 2020; Philly saw a whopping 562 homicides in 2021, a number which blew the old record completely apart, along with 190 deaths marked ‘suspicious’. 2022 saw an improvement of sorts, with the official number of homicides down to 516, which was still second all time.

Why, it’s almost as though Philly could have used those “extremist pro-Trump Republicans” running the city!

Back to the Inky:

But of the more than $780,000 that Kenney PAC has spent over the last three years, only about $60,000 went to other campaigns, according to an analysis of campaign finance reports. Instead, the PAC’s money has primarily gone to benefit operatives close to Kenney — who abandoned his hopes of higher office after his popularity tanked starting in 2020 — and to pay for miscellaneous expenses, such as events, hotel rooms, and restaurant bills.

You know what that is? That’s actually good, investigative reporting, which makes me wonder why the newspaper’s Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Gabriel Escobar decided to restrict the article to subscribers only. If there’s anything in the Inquirer’s reporting which should draw in new subscribers, it’s the “high-impact journalism“, “speaking truth to power“, and “high-impact election reporting” the Leftist Lenfest Institute told us the newspaper delivered, yet that’s just what Mr Escobar, or possibly one of his minions, restricted.

I’ve quoted a lot of the article, and cited my sources, as always, but unless you are a subscriber, you can’t even check to see if I’ve lied to you; that bothers me.

I can’t simply quote the whole thing, and I really wish that more people could read it for themselves, but I’ll note briefly here that reporter Sean Collins Walsh pointed out that the top ten donors to Kenney PAC, roughly $399,000 out of $850,000, were all building trade unions; the unions had also been the primary contributors to the Mayor’s two campaigns. Mayor Jim Kenney has just plain checked out, marking time until he’s no longer in the job. The members of those very same unions are the working men of the city who are at risk from the bullets flying around town, especially in the working-class neighborhoods.

What the unions bought with their support of Mr Kenney is greater danger for their members and their families! Perhaps some of those “extremist pro-Trump Republicans” could have done a better job? After all, it hardly seems that they could have done worse!

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Anti-Semitism is a serious problem, but restricting the Freedom of Speech and of the Press is not the way to fight it

We reported, on Thursday, how someone had distributed white supremacist flyers in Lexington’s Kenwick neighborhood, flyers contained in baggies, using rice to weigh them down enough not to be swept away by the wind. The Lexington Police Department was investigating, with Lt Dan Truex stating that the LPD were “very interested in identifying” “who possibly left those flyers,” yet, at the end of the Lexington Herald-Leader’s report, the Department spokesman was either unable or unwilling to specify just what actual crime had been committed or what charges the distributor of the flyers might face.

Now, thanks to a tweet from my good friend and occasional website pinch hitter, William Teach, I found this from WRAL News:

Hundreds of anti-semitic flyers distributed in at least 5 north Raleigh neighborhoods overnight

Hundreds of anti-semitic flyers appeared in at least five north Raleigh neighborhoods overnight.

Sunday, August 6, 2023 | 11:12 AM EDT | Updated 4:14 PM EDT

Anti-Semitic flyers distributed in Raleigh. Photo via WRAL News. Click to enlarge.

Hundreds of anti-semitic flyers appeared in at least five north Raleigh neighborhoods overnight.

Someone really needs to educate the WRAL intern that subtitles are supposed to be significantly different from the main headline! 🙂

The flyers link to a website to an organization called Goyim Defense League, which is currently tracked as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law.

While I have exactly zero support for the so-called Goyim Defense League, telling me that the hard-left Southern Poverty Law Center — the name of which WRAL got slightly wrong — classifies an organization as a “hate group” doesn’t impress me in the slightest. The SPLC has similarly trashed Moms 4 Liberty, a group trying to protect children from the far-left transgender agenda, even though the ‘transgender’ lobby are trying to impose control of people’s speech.

One woman, who wished to remain anonymous, discovered a multitude of fliers left on neighbors’ driveways while taking an evening walk in Fairfax Hills. Just three minutes away, another woman reported more hate flyers in her own neighborhood of Hickory Hills. Just a few more minutes away, another neighbor near North Hills reported finding one of the flyers.

North Ridge also woke up to anti-semitic flyers in their driveways. According to neighbors, there’s a notable Jewish population in North Ridge due to its walkable distance to the Orthodox Synagogue on Falls of Neuse Road. The synagogue appears to be very close to all of the neighborhoods targeted.

Unlike the Lexington situation, in which the white supremacist flyers were distributed in the heavily white, as in 89.9% white, Kenwick neighborhood, the Raleigh incident was somewhat close to a Jewish neighborhood. Nevertheless, unless an actual threat was communicated, it should be protected speech.

Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman said a person caught distributing these flyers could be charged with ethnic intimidation if the it contains a threat.

That’s a Class 1 misdemeanor, meaning someone convicted of that crime could face up to 120 days in jail.

Unlike the Lexington flyers, which, from the single image I could find of them, simply directed readers to a website, the Raleigh flyers shown in the WRAL report had a much larger variety of things printed. However, in the admittedly limited views shown, I could see no actual threat. Rather, the flyers made fanciful and stupid claims about Jews, including a reference to the long-debunked Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the creation of Russian anti-Semites around 1902-3, a time in which Tsar Nikolai II was still an absolute monarch. Laughably, the Raleigh flyers date the Protocols as 1897, before they were written. No one with any knowledge of this stuff who isn’t already anti-Semitic is going to swallow this junk.

Anti-Semitism is a serious problem, but the way to fight it is not to restrict the freedom of speech and of the press. If you find anti-Semitic, or in the Lexington case, white supremacist garbage, just pick it up and throw it in the trash.

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Why was ‘Peanut’ out on the streets in the first place?

My good friend — OK, OK, I’ve never met him in person, but with the internet, I have a lot of good friends I’ve never physically met! — Robert Stacy McCain, in his continuing series Crazy People Are Dangerous, tells us about the suicide-by-cop of Ryant ‘Peanut’ Bluford of San Francisco.

The police video of the shooting was released Friday, showing that Bluford had a pistol in his waistband, which he later aimed at police before he was shot. Despite all this, however, some people continued to ask why police couldn’t “de-escalate” the situation. The obvious answer is that Ryant Bluford didn’t want it to be “de-escalated.” Ryant Bluford was crazy and wanted to die in the proverbial hail of police gunfire.

The police have yet to confirm whether Mr Bluford actually fired a shot at the police, though Mission Local reported:

Bluford’s friends and family also said he had a gun, and fired once at the officers; they pointed on Thursday to a chalk circle on the street, where they said the casing from Bluford’s bullet had landed.

In reality, it doesn’t matter: you aim a gun at the police, and they do not have to, nor should they have to, hold their fire until first fired upon.

Mr McCain’s theme is that Mr Bluford was crazy, which he was, but that’s not the part of the story I find most important:

Bayview neighbors lament police shooting death of Ryant ‘Peanut’ Bluford

Friends, family say slain man feared, detested police after more than decade behind bars

by Gilare Zada, Griffin Jones, and Joe Rivano Barros | Thursday, July 27, 2023

Peanut, before getting shelled. Photo via R S McCain.

The Bayview man shot and killed yesterday afternoon by San Francisco police officers, 41-year-old Ryant Bluford of San Francisco, was known as “Peanut” to friends and family. They recalled him as a loving father, brother, cousin and friend — while acknowledging the violent crime in his past.Neighbors interviewed Wednesday night and Thursday morning said Bluford struggled with mental illness and had a disdain for the police, the result of more than a decade spent in prison for various serious offenses.

Bluford was convicted in the 2006 gang rape of a 16-year-old girl in San Francisco, and spent more than a decade in prison as a result. He was again charged, in 2022, for domestic violence and sexual assault.

Oh, Heaven forfend! Mr Bluford “has a disdain for the police,” he “feared (and) detested police,” because he was locked up for the gang rape of a 16-year-old girl? Apparently the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the mission of which is, “building what will become the “California Model” – building safer communities through rehabilitation, education, restorative justice and reentry,” didn’t do much correcting or “rehabilitation, education, restorative justice and reentry” when it came to Mr Bluford. After spending “more than a decade” of a 14-year sentence behind bars for the 2006 gang rape, Mr Bluford was later accused with domestic violence and sexual assault. That means at least one more person was assaulted and raped by a man who was supposed to be corrected and rehabilitated for the same crime.

The details of the gang rape, and the fact that Mr Bluford orally, vaginally, and anally raped the victim, identified only by her initials, can be found here. Mr Bluford and his codefendants were sentenced to just 14 years in a plea deal. And that makes me wonder: why were Ryant Bluford, Eddie Perkins, Vincent Timmons, and Allen Releford offered a 14-year sentence, rather than taking this to trial and getting them locked up for the rest of their miserable lives. The plea deal was:

one count each of forcible kidnapping (count 1; Pen. Code, § 207, subd. (a)) with an admitted gang enhancement (§ 186.22, subd. (b)(1)(c)), and aggravated assault (count 12; § 245, subd. (a)(1)), for fixed aggregate prison terms of 14 years.

The dropped charges were:

forcible rape in concert (count 2; §§ 261, 264.1), forcible vaginal insertion of a gun in concert (count 3; §§ 289, 264.1), forcible anal and vaginal insertions of a bottle in concert (counts 4-5; §§ 264.1, 289), forcible oral copulation in concert (count 6; §§ 264.1, 288a, subd. (d)(1)), forcible sodomy in concert (count 7; § 286, subd. (d)), gang participation (count 8; § 186.22, subd. (a)), carrying a concealed gun in a vehicle (count 9; § 12025, subd. (a)(1)), firearm identity tampering (count 10; § 12090), and possessing cocaine base for sale (count 11; Health & Saf. Code, § 11351.5). Most dismissed counts carried multiple enhancements ranging from handgun arming and use, increased risk from moving a kidnap victim, to gang furtherance. An amendment of count 1 to forcible kidnapping (§ 207, subd. (a)) from kidnapping in concert for purposes of rape eliminated sentence exposure to a life term (§ 209, subd. (b)(1)).

One thing we do not know is how willing the victim was to testifying against Messrs Bluford, Perkins, Timmons, and Releford. It has to be conceded that the plea bargain might have been reached to keep the victim from having to testify to such a traumatic assault. But the notion that Mr Bluford was ever let out of prison is repugnant; the gang rape of a 16-year-old, of anyone, should result in life in prison without the possibility of parole!

Back to Mission Local:

Neighbors described the shooting as a tragedy.

“He had four kids and a wife, two were twins. He did the best he could,” said a friend of Bluford’s, who gave his name as Tyke, saying Bluford’s mental health worsened after time in prison. “He was in the pen for 12 years; he had some mental issues from that.”

I don’t know about you, but, to me, the tragedy is that Mr Bluford got out two years early.

At the Bayview intersection, Bluford’s family lit candles. They described Peanut as a man who had been through the wringer, and criminal records show past convictions for rape and other violent crimes.

When 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 start using the subject’s nickname in an article, in other than a direct quote, you know that they are trying to raise sympathy for him!

He had a fearful association with police, neighbors said, one borne from a lifetime of negative experiences dealing with law enforcement: According to criminal records, Bluford was charged with kidnapping, rape, assault with a deadly weapon, and various other crimes in 2006; he was incarcerated in 2008, according to criminal records, and friends and family said he spent more than a decade in prison.

Then in 2022, he was charged again, with domestic violence, sexual assault, and criminal threats. It was not immediately clear if he was convicted and imprisoned for these alleged crimes.

“You have to think about the kind of trauma someone has experienced with the police,” said one neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous. “He looked done, driven to suicide by cop.”

Oh, so Mr Bluford experienced “trauma” because of the police? Some people might be more concerned with the trauma the girl he and three other thugs raped suffered.

“He had a lot of mental health issues,” said another anonymous neighbor. “He had a family. He loved his kids. A lot of people around here have mental issues.”

As Mr McCain pointed out, Joe Biden got 85.26% of the vote in San Francisco, so yeah, a lot of people there must have mental health issues! 🙂

That neighbor, for her part, wished there had been a non-violent response initially to de-escalate the situation — or at least a less-lethal one.

“It’s like there’s no logic. They don’t ask what’s going on, they don’t even think to just ask. They need more training with people with mental health issues,” she said. “When it comes to African Americans, they use force and think later. Even if they felt he was a threat, they could have Tased him or shot him in the leg.”

Well of course the locals were upset that Mr Bluford was sent to his eternal reward. But at least Mission Local added important information:

San Francisco police, however, do not carry Tasers. And are not trained to shoot-to-wound.

Shooting someone is the use of deadly force, and if you are legally justified in shooting someone, you are legally justified in killing him. Shooting to wound is neither legally required nor very smart.

Naturally, the news source had to throw in a racial angle:

Since 2000, 19 of the 61 people shot and killed by SFPD were Black — 31 percent; 18 of them were Black men. That rate is disproportionate to the city’s population: Black people make up about five percent of San Francisco.

The odd notion that perhaps, just perhaps, black men males might engage in activities, activities such as Mr Bluford aiming at and apparently firing upon the police, which get them shot at a greater percentage of the time seems not to have entered the minds of the reporters.

At some point, people have to drop their sympathy for criminals. Who knows, perhaps the bad guys can eventually mentally reform, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be treated responsibly for the criminal acts that they have committed.

Releasing Mr Bluford, which seems to have occurred in 2020, which would have put it in the same timeline with the releases of prisoners due to COVID-19, was the release of a violent criminal, and it was one which led him to be able to be charged with a subsequent sexual assault crime. Someone else, at least one someone, became Mr Bluford’s victim at a time when he could have been still behind bars.

I’ll put it bluntly: releasing violent criminals early, releasing them even one day before the maximum time that they can be kept locked up legally, increases the danger to the community.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Editorial cartoonists gobsmacked by reality In continuing to cut costs, newspapers are concomitantly making themselves worth less, and providing potential customers with less reason to spend money on them.

Would it be wrong of me to retort, “Learn to code“?

Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher, coined the phrase “the dismal science” to refer to economics in the 19th century, and for the print newspaper industry in the United States, economics has been a very dismal science. But in continuing to cut costs, newspapers are concomitantly making themselves worth less, and providing potential customers with less reason to spend money on them.

Editorial cartoonists’ firings point to steady decline of opinion pages in newspapers

Even in a year when media layoffs seem a daily part of the news, the firing of three Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists in a single day was a gut punch

By David Bauder, AP Media Writer | Sunday, July 16, 2023 | 3:27 PM

NEW YORK — Even during a year of sobering economic news for media companies, the layoffs of three Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonists on a single day hit like a gut punch.

The firings of the cartoonists employed by the McClatchy newspaper chain last week were a stark reminder of how an influential art form is dying, part of a general trend away from opinion content in the struggling print industry.

Oh, puh-leeze! There has been less of a “general trend away from opinion content in the struggling print industry” than there has been a not-so-creeping influx of opinion content in what are purported to be general news stories. While a fair amount of my content concerns the biased reporting of The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper is hardly the only offender.

Losing their jobs were Jack Ohman of California’s Sacramento Bee, also president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists; Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky and Kevin Siers of the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. Ohman and Siers were full-time staffers, while Pett worked on a free-lance contract. The firings on Tuesday were first reported by The Daily Cartoonist blog.

Full disclosure: after having retired back to the Bluegrass State, I once again became a subscriber to the Lexington Herald-Leader. Further, though never an employee of the Herald-Leader, I had several OpEd pieces published therein during the early 1980s. It is the only newspaper of any size at all in my area.

“I had no warning at all,” Ohman told The Associated Press. “I was stupefied.”

McClatchy, which owns 30 U.S. newspapers, said it would no longer publish editorial cartoons. “We made this decision based on changing reader habits and our relentless focus on providing the communities we serve with local news and information they can’t get elsewhere,” the chain said in a statement.

Can we tell the truth here? At least to judge by the Herald-Leader, the McClatchy newspapers already stink. When I left Kentucky, in December of 1984, the Herald-Leader was a decent newspaper for a mid-sized city, and did their best at covering the news not only in Lexington, but in much of eastern Kentucky.

Now? Not only can I not get delivery of the dead trees edition out in the boondocks — and I used to deliver the newspaper in Mt Sterling, Kentucky, then a small town of 5,100 people, when I was in junior high and high schools — but when I do see a print edition in a grocery store, it’s barely bigger than an advertising circular. Were it not for its coverage of University of Kentucky sports, there’s a reasonable probability that it would fail altogether.

We have, of course, noted the not-so-great journolism[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 Herald-Leader on many occasions, as well as the corporate-wide McClatchy Mugshot Policy. If McClatchy ever officially published its mugshot policy, a Google search has never turned it up for me, but former McClatchy reporter Nichole Manna received it in an intercompany e-mail, and tweeted it out.

The Sacramento Bee, the lead McClatchy newspaper, did have an earlier article noting that it was instituting a no-mugshots policy, before the policy went companywide.

The Herald-Leader has been quite diligent at adhering to that policy, at least as long as the offenders are black. If McClatchy is having to take these company-wide cost-saving measures, could it possibly be because they are censoring the news?

Whatever they’ve been doing, it hasn’t worked!

When I asked William Teach for his comments on the News & Observer, the McClatchy newspaper in his hometown of Raleigh, he responded, “Wasn’t even aware of the downsizing, I usually ignore the N&O since everything of interest is paywalled.” A blogger who depends on the news, and someone who does include local North Carolina stories, I’d have thought that the News & Observer would be important to him, but apparently it’s not good enough for him to shell out his hard-earned dollars to subscribe.

It’s hardly a surprise: McClatchy filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February of 2020, and was eventually bought out by Chatham Asset Management, a hedge fund, which gave a no layoffs promise at the time, but reality is reality: McClatchy took the decision that the editorial cartoonists were not worth the money they were being paid, and it’s certainly true that at least what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal doesn’t have much of an editorial section anymore.

There is a real question of how in touch the editors are with their readership. I would point out here the Editorial Board’s recent political endorsements:

  • 2022: Charles Booker for Senate. The newspaper made no endorsement for 6th District Representative, because no serious Democrat filed, the Democratic nominee was a perennial kook candidate, and the editors refused to endorse incumbent Representative Andy Barr, a Republican.
  • 2020: Joe Biden for President, Amy McGrath Henderson for Senate, and Josh Hicks for 6th District Representative;[2]Notably, the editors endorsed Charles Booker over Mrs Henderson in the Democratic primary, saying that he was the more progressive candidate. Mrs Henderson once said, “I am further left, I am … Continue reading
  • 2018: Amy McGrath Henderson for 6th District Representative
  • 2016: Hillary Clinton for President, Jim Gray for Senate, and Nancy Jo Kemper for 6th District Representative
  • 2014: Alison Lundergan Grimes for Senate, and Elisabeth Jensen for 6th District Representative

All Democrats, and all defeated in Kentucky and in the 6th District. It seems that the Herald-Leader Editorial Board isn’t exactly in tune with the voters of the Commonwealth. Note that the 2016 and 2014 Democratic nominees for the 6th congressional district were political novices, and the editors struggled to find much good reason to endorse them. Representative Andy Barr (R-KY 6th District) beat them both by landslide margins.[3]Dr Malcolm Jewell, one of my political science professors at the University of Kentucky during medieval times, defined a landslide margin as 10% or greater.

In fact, with the exception of the 6th district race in 2018, the editors’ endorsed candidates lost by landslide margins. Even in 2018, with Mrs Henderson outspending Mr Barr $8,274,396 to $5,580,477, she lost 51.0% to 47.8%. While Democrats have done reasonably well in Fayette County itself, the Editorial Board’s choices clearly reflect that they have abandoned the wider, eastern Kentucky subscriber base the newspaper used to have.

Still, laying off three editorial cartoonists, and getting rid of editorial cartoons companywide, saved McClatchy very little money over thirty newspapers, and with bandwidth so cheap, virtually no money or space in the digital editions. The obvious conclusion is that more cost-saving measures will be taken, and soon.

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 Notably, the editors endorsed Charles Booker over Mrs Henderson in the Democratic primary, saying that he was the more progressive candidate. Mrs Henderson once said, “I am further left, I am more progressive, than anyone in the state of Kentucky,” while at a fund raiser in Massachusetts.
↑3 Dr Malcolm Jewell, one of my political science professors at the University of Kentucky during medieval times, defined a landslide margin as 10% or greater.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer tells us all about Barbie and gluten-free meals at the shore. Criminals on the streets? Not so much.

Rasheed Banks, Jr, via WVPI-TV.

The Philadelphia Inquirer was more than willing to tell readers about how heroic Michael Salerno intervened to try to stop a carjacking, and was killed for his efforts:

Police identify man killed in South Philly trying to stop a carjacking

Michael Salerno was trying to prevent three young men from stealing his car while a woman was still inside, police said.

by Rob Tornoe | Thursday, July 13, 2023 | 2:22 PM EDT

A Philadelphia man is dead after police say he tried to stop three young men from stealing his car Wednesday night.

Police said the victim, identified as Michael Salerno, 50, was attempting to prevent his car from being carjacked around 10:45 p.m. in South Philadelphia. A woman was in the car, but officials declined to identify her, citing the ongoing investigation.

“Preliminary information appears that the motive for this homicide began with a carjacking of a female, and when the owner intervened, he was shot and killed,” Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small told reporters Wednesday night.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Death in Killadelphia

The episode occurred on Porter Street near South 12th Street. Salerno had just arrived at the location but wasn’t in the car when the attempted carjacking occurred, according to police, who declined to say whether it was near his home.

There’s more at the original, but at the time, all that we were told was that the suspects were to be three “young men, appearing to be between the ages of 15 and early 20s, dressed in dark clothing.”

WPVI-TV, known locally as Channel 6, the ABC owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia, had more on Friday, as the Philadelphia Police Department identified one of the suspects, 15-year-old Rasheed Banks, Jr., and published his photograph. Young Mr Banks is still on the loose as I write this, but if WPVI is trying to help, showing Philadelphians for whom to be on the lookout, as of 9:12 PM, The Philadelphia Inquirer has nothing about this.

Then there was this from Fox 29 News. The Philadelphia Police Department released surveillance photos of the suspects in the shootings on which we have previously reported. The editors of the Inquirer were naturally horrified at the fact an 11-year-old girl, almost certainly simply an innocent struck by a stray bullet — out of around 30 fired in what may have been a gunfight between gangs — but, when the Police released photos of the suspects, in the hopes that someone would recognize them and give information to the police, the Inquirer has chosen not to publish either the story or the photos of the suspects.

Given that two of the suspects are shown wearing hooded sweatshirts, with the hoods pulled up, on a Philadelphia evening where it was above 70º F, it would seem obvious that this wasn’t a snap decision, but gang members, oops, sorry, ‘street group’ members out with intentions that were less than kindly.

That the Inquirer chose not to inform its readers, readers who are paying for the privilege[1]My unlimited digital subscription: $5.49/week, billed every 4 weeks; that’s $285.48 a year. of reading our nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper, because publisher Elizabeth Hughes forthrightly told us that the newspaper would censor the news if it was too politically incorrect.

Not that the Inquirer didn’t give us important news!

But warning readers about killers and gang bangers still on the city’s streets, and perhaps, just perhaps, getting them picked up a bit earlier? Nope, not the Inky!

References

References
↑1 My unlimited digital subscription: $5.49/week, billed every 4 weeks; that’s $285.48 a year.