Journolist Linda Blackford needs to get out more often She was fooled by a statistic that anyone could have seen was bogus

No, that’s not a typographical error in the headline: The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

Linda Blackford’s biography blurb with what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal states that she “writes columns and commentary for the Herald-Leader. She has covered K-12, higher education and other topics for the past 20 years at the Herald-Leader.” You’d think that someone who has lived in and around Lexington for at least twenty years would be somewhat familiar with the Bluegrass State.

But, when the Williams Institute of UCLA’s law school reported that Kentucky had the highest percentage of homosexuals and transgendered people in the country, 10.5%, Mrs Blackford reacted with glee, and jumped right into a celebratory column. Unfortunately, that column is no longer available, because she had to issue a correction, using the same url:

It turns out Kentucky is NOT the gayest state in the U.S. | Opinion

by Linda Blackford | Friday, December 8, 2023 | 6:44 PM

Late Friday, the Williams Institute at UCLA issued an apology for a data error that said Kentucky had the highest rate of LGBTQ adults in the nation.

“We made a mistake, and we apologize to Kentucky and to you,” the release said. “We know there is a growing and thriving LGBTQ community in the Bluegrass State. But our report issued earlier this month incorrectly stated that Kentucky had the highest percentage of people identifying as LGBTQ. That percentage is 4.9 percent instead of 10.5 percent and in line with the national average of 5.6 percent.” Continue reading

Are you ready to surrender your rights for the “common good”?

I’m old enough to remember the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, a product of mostly leftist students on campus.

With the participation of thousands of students, the Free Speech Movement was the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American college campus in the 1960s. Students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students’ right to free speech and academic freedom. The Free Speech Movement was influenced by the New Left, and was also related to the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. To this day, the Movement’s legacy continues to shape American political dialogue both on college campuses and in broader society, influencing some political views and values of college students and the general public.

I’m not a leftist by any means, but I completely support the freedom of speech, and all of the rights enshrined in our great Constitution. Sadly, so many of today’s left do not support freedom of speech, at least not when they believe they have the power to restrain it.

Irish senator under fire for advocating bill to restrict free speech

One critic calls Ireland’s anti-hate law ‘draconian,’ adding it will have ‘severe implications’

By Brianna Herlihy, Fox News | First Sunday of Advent, December 3, 2023 | 4:00 AM EST

A speech delivered in June by an Irish lawmaker who said the work of legislatures is about “restricting freedoms” in the name of the “common good” has gone viral, with criticism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Senator Pauline O’Reilly of the Green Party, in defense of Ireland’s proposed Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences Bill 2022, spoke at the Houses of the Oireachtas in June, saying, “We are restricting freedom, but we’re doing it for the common good.

Well, of course she’s a member of the Green Party, of the hard left.

“You will see throughout our constitution, yes, you have rights, but they are restricted for the common good. If your views on other people’s identities go to make their lives unsafe, insecure and cause them such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace, then I believe that it is our job as legislators to restrict those freedoms for the common good.”

If a right is “restricted for the common good,” is it a right at all?

Senator O’Reilly’s speech is embedded below the fold, since videos take up a lot of bandwidth on the front page. Continue reading

How does The Philadelphia Inquirer not even cover the World Series?

I understand that Philadelphians are disappointed that the Phillies choked lost a World Series berth with their Game 7 loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks, especially after the Phils won the first two games at Citizens Bank Park. Lose a seven-game series when you have a 2-0 lead?

With 6,245,051 people according to the 2020 census, Philadelphia and its surrounding metropolitan area is the seventh largest in the United States. With a population of 1,603,797, the city of Philadelphia itself is the sixth largest in the United States. So why, then, does The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously-published newspaper, rank only 17th in circulation? The winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, and the newspaper of record for the entire Philadelphia area — the Wilmington, Delaware, News Journal is a Gannett-owned joke — have exactly zero stories on the World Series, which is going on right now, the Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks tied at one game apiece!

The screen capture to the right was taken at 10:06 AM EDT this morning, and shows 17 stories in the sports section. Yeah, I get it: covering the Philadelphia Eagles and the 76ers and even the Flyers is important to the newspaper, but this is ridiculous. Scroll further down in the online sports section — my subscription is digital only — and I found separate sections for the Eagles, 76ers, Flyers, individual sports columnists, sports betting, women’s sports, college football, and even soccer, as though anyone cares about soccer, but not a single story on the World Series!

It’s not as though the newspaper does not publish stories from outside of its newsroom production: there were at least two stories from the Associated Press on national news showing on the website main page. The Inky could have included something about the series.

I subscribe to the newspaper, because now that I’ve moved out of the Keystone State, it’s my best source of information on the news there, and because I prefer to read the news rather than watch or listen to the news. My unlimited digital subscription costs $5.49 per week, which, times 52 weeks a year, equals $285.48 a year, yet the newspaper doesn’t even cover the World Series?

Christine Flowers once mocked me for paying for the Inky. She might have been right.

Just because they like to behead babies is no reason to label Hamas “terrorists!

The First Street Journal has previously reported on the Associated Press Stylebook, and how the AP uses it to try to push political debates in one direction or another, which is almost always to the left. Well, now the AP believe that the credentialed media should not refer to terrorists as terrorists! Continue reading

When they show you who they are, believe them! Did The New York Times think that no one would notice?

In the first Avengers movie, Robert Downey, Jr, as Tony Stark, spots a SHIELD technician playing a video game at his terminal, and says, loudly, “That man is playing Galaga. He thought we wouldn’t notice, but we did.”

The tech quickly shuts down Galaga and returns to work . . . until the Avengers leave the room, when he brings up the game again.

NYT rehires Hitler-praising Soliman Hijjy to cover Israel-Hamas war

By Shannon Thaler | Friday, October 20, 2023 4:11 PM EDT

A New York Times reporter who came under fire last year for a praising Adolf Hitler in multiple resurfaced Facebook posts was rehired by the Gray Lady to cover the Israel-Palestine war.

Palestinian filmmaker Soliman Hijjy hailed the Nazi leader as recently as 2018 in a post on Facebook, when he shared a photo of himself captioned that he was “in a state of harmony as Hitler was during the Holocaust,” per a translation from Arabic by pro-Israel media watchdog site HonestReporting.

That same year, Hijjy was hired by the Times as a freelance journalist and worked on a slew of “visual investigations” published by the organization through 2021, including one on an Israeli airstrike that killed 44 people.

Hijjy’s 2018 post — including a 2012 Facebook post where he wrote, “How great you are, Hitler” in Arabic alongside a photoshopped image of Hitler seemingly taking a selfie — were unearthed last year, when pro-Israel outlets called out the Times for hiring antisemitic journalists as freelancers. Continue reading

Today’s American left really, really hate our individual rights! Or at least they do when those rights are exercised by conservatives!

We noted, a year and a half ago, how President Biden and his leftist minions, proposed the creation of a Ministry of TruthDisinformation Governance Board‘ within the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, and had chosen Nina Jankowitz, who for months told us that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation, to head it.

On April 25th, she told us how she feels about #FreedomOfSpeech:

I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities . . . which are already shouldering . . . disproportionate amounts of this abuse.

Then came Helen Ubiñas, who has a very visible platform as a regular columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, claiming that Freedom of Speech is dangerous and harmful to people like her: Continue reading

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.

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

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