Tag Archives: #Journolism

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Now you know why I call it Journolism! ** Updated! 9:05 PM EST ** #FreedomOfThePress includes the right not to publish what you don't want to publish, but concealing uncomfortable facts hurts the media's reputation

In the wake of the roughly 300 layoffs at The Washington Post, there has been a lot of blame spread, both among the subscribers who quit for owner Jeff Bezos refusing to endorse Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024, and the paper itself for it’s very liberal leanings. The Post managed to piss off both the conservatives who might have been willing to subscribe, and the liberals who cancelled their subscriptions. Mr Bezos, in trying to fix a long-ongoing problem, fouled up.

But let me be clear here: the Freedom of the Press includes the freedom not to publish something. That should be obvious: there are only so many pages a newspaper can print, though with digital publishing these days, those limits have expanded.

And now we see just what isn’t being published, when it doesn’t fit Teh Narrative. When the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in a small town in northeast British Columbia occurred, the Associated Press told us, at 8:59 AM EST, that the (alleged) killer was a “woman” and a “female suspect.” At 9:32 AM EST, CNN simply identified the killer as “they,” being careful to not use a pronoun to specify the killer’s sex. At 9:32 AM EST, The New York Times told us nothing about the shooter.

But, as early as 6:48 AM EST, Matt Van Swol was telling us on Twitter the news which was not politically correct, that the killer was a mentally ill boy who thought he was a girl. I checked the credentialed media, and found several instances of the media concealing the knowledge that the (alleged) killer was transgender.

The killer’s name is Jesse Van Rootselaar, though initially identified as Jesse Strang, 18 years old, and yes, he’s transgender.

I don’t get it. The credentialed media want to build trust in their accuracy, so why conceal information that they know will come out soon enough?

My 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. And now you know why I spell it that way.

Well, eventually even The New York Times had to admit what had previously been revealed, that young Mr Van Rootselaar was the killer, and that the “suspect” was born as biologically male and chose to identify as a female about six years ago. That acknowledgement was time-stamped at 2:45 PM EST, just three minutes short of eight hours after Mr Van Swol’s tweet. The Times also revealed that the “suspect” had quit school four years earlier, which would have meant he wasn’t in school since age 14.

From the Times at 3:19 PM EST:

“Police had attended that residence on a number of occasions over the last several years dealing with concerns of mental health with our suspect,” Dwayne McDonald, the deputy commissioner, said, referring to the home where the suspect’s mother and stepbrother were found dead. On one of those occasions, “firearms were seized.” The most recent police call to the residence was in the spring of last year.

So, the local police already knew that young Mr Van Rootselaar was just plain nuts. Isn’t being biologically one sex but believing you are the other one definition of just plain nuts?

Of course, the newspaper continued to use the feminine pronouns to refer to the killer, as did local officials, because for some stupid reason they think a guy calling himself a girl really is a girl; are the editors and writers at the Times just as nuts as Mr Van Rootselaar?

Yeah, I think that they are!

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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! Sadly, some newspapers are in a heap o' trouble, too

There are times when I wonder whether the newspaper industry is bent on committing suicide. In reading the story on the capture of 37-year-old Michael Dunn in the Lexington Herald-Leader, and planning to add to my “You in a heap o’ trouble, boy” series, I was sadly amused that the newspaper had used only a stock photo of a criminal’s wrists in handcuffs. Since it is the policy of this site to print mugshots, I initiated a Google search for Michael Dunn Kentucky, and there it was, screen captured on the right, with three television stations and what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal listed as the four top stories, with three showing the now-captured fugitive’s mugshot, and the newspaper not, exactly the type of thing which would cause people searching for this story to pick a source other than the newspaper.

Missing Kentucky child, 13, found with 37-year-old man wanted for escape

By Karla Ward | Saturday, January 10, 2026 | 7:00 AM EST

A missing 13-year-old girl from Louisville was found in Knox County on Thursday in the company of a 37-year-old man who was wanted on outstanding warrants, according to the Barbourville Police Department.

The girl had been reported missing Jan. 4.

The London office of the U.S. Marshals Service’s Central Kentucky Fugitive Task Force was notified on Thursday that she was thought to be with Michael Dunn, 37, the police department said in a social media post.

Dunn had been wanted in Jefferson County since June on felony warrants including second-degree escape and tampering with a prisoner monitoring device. He also was wanted for probation violations for receiving stolen property and possession of a handgun by a convicted felon, police said, as well as first-degree possession of a controlled substance.

That paragraph is important, because it informs us that Mr Dunn was not just a criminal suspect, but a convicted felon.

Dunn “was known to be armed, dangerous, and trafficking narcotics,” police said.

At about 10:50 p.m. Thursday, the U.S. Marshals, with help from the Knox County Sheriff’s Office and the Barbourville Police Department, learned that Dunn and the girl were walking south on the 3100 block of U.S. 25E in Barbourville.

Task force officers, deputies and officers confronted them and took Dunn into custody, police said.

The missing child was safely recovered and taken to a local hospital. She was medically cleared and reunited with her family at about 3:30 a.m. Friday.

There’s more at the original. It will be the natural assumption that a 37-year-old fugitive with a 13-year-old girl is indicative of a perverted sexual situation, but none of the news sources indicates that is the suspicion, and at least one source has actually named the girl, complete with a link to the missing persons notification that includes her photograph, something unusual if the possible sexual assault of a minor is concerned.

That the Herald-Leader did not include the mugshot of Mr Dunn would be part of the McClatchy Mugshot Policy[1]McClatchy Mugshot Policy: Publishing mugshots of arrestees has been shown to have lasting effects on both the people photographed and marginalized communities. The permanence of the internet can mean … Continue reading, though that policy shouldn’t really apply. The policy is meant to protect those arrested and accused but not yet convicted of a crime, as well as “the inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness,” but the accused is a white male, and has already been convicted.

We note this because, as we reported in November, the Herald-Leader has moved to print publication only three days a week, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, to be delivered not by carriers, but mail, with the Sunday edition being delivered in Saturday’s mail, because the United States Postal Service does not deliver mail on Sundays.

I am reminded of Vernon Dursley’s happiness that “there’s no post on Sunday.”[2]J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Chapter 1.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which had previously gone to a thrice-a-week print schedule, announced just a few days ago that it would cease all publication, print and digital, on May 3rd.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is shutting down

Earlier this week, owner Block Communications also announced the closure of City Paper, a Pittsburgh alt-weekly.

by Emily Bloch | Wednesday, January 7, 2026 | 2:41 PM EST

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will fold after nearly a century. The paper will cease operations entirely — both its digital and physical versions — on May 3.

The announcement comes on the heels of years of declining ad revenue and internal strife within the newsroom, including a yearslong labor strike.

With the paper’s closure, there are concerns that Pittsburgh could become a news desert, leaving locals without a range of diverse and credible outlets to turn to in an age of increasing misinformation.

The Post-Gazette was led by former Inquirer senior vice president and executive editor Stan Wischnowski. He resigned from The Inquirer in 2020 after a controversy following a headline after the murder of George Floyd.

That last was a mealy-mouthed way to put it. Mr Wischnowski’s ‘resignation’ was forced due to a revolt among the #woke[3]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading staffers at the Inky for writing a catchy headline, “Buildings Matter, Too” designed to catch the eye and attract people to actually read the story, but staffers apparently thought that this was downplaying the seriousness of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, a movement which was torching buildings, including black-owned businesses and residences, in the City of Brotherly Love as well as other places.

Why did I cite a story from The Philadelphia Inquirer concerning the Post-Gazette’s closure? It was because the Post-Gazette’s own story was hidden behind a paywall!

The upcoming closure of the Post-Gazette has generated all kinds of stories, including two separate ones asking if the newspaper can be saved, plus at least one calling the closure a “threat to democracy.”

Is it really a threat to democracy? As we reported on the 8th, the credentialed media were very slow and sparse in their reporting on the popular uprising in Iran. This site, and many, many others, noted how the credentialed media pointedly ignored President Joe Biden’s descent into dementia, something obvious enough that William Teach noted it in August of 2021, yet the legacy media, wholly in the bag for the Democrats, wouldn’t report anything that might have endangered Mr Biden’s re-election prospects against then-former President Donald Trump.

We saw how well that worked out for them!

If the Post-Gazette could not survive printing just three days a week, in Allegheny County, population 1,231,814, how can the Herald-Leader do so with 329,437 people in Fayette County?

McClatchy has already been cutting staff.

We previously noted how the Lexington newspaper, which has always specialized in covering University of Kentucky sports, gave scant coverage to the women’s volleyball team, which made it all the way to the national championship game, and the #6 ranked women’s basketball team, while publishing scads of stories on the middling, 9-6, and unranked men’s basketball squad and disastrous, 5-7, football team. How can a newspaper survive if it doesn’t actually print much news?

References

References
↑1 McClatchy Mugshot Policy:

Publishing mugshots of arrestees has been shown to have lasting effects on both the people photographed and marginalized communities. The permanence of the internet can mean those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever. Beyond the personal impact, inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness. In fact, some police departments have started moving away from taking/releasing mugshots as a routine part of their procedures. To address these concerns, McClatchy will not publish crime mugshots — online, or in print, from any newsroom or content-producing team — unless approved by an editor. To be clear, this means that in addition to photos accompanying text stories, McClatchy will not publish “Most wanted” or “Mugshot galleries” in slide-show, video or print. Any exception to this policy must be approved by an editor. Editors considering an exception should ask:

  • Is there an urgent threat to the community?
  • Is this person a public official or the suspect in a hate crime?
  • Is this a serial killer suspect or a high-profile crime?

If an exception is made, editors will need to take an additional step with the Pub Center to confirm publication by making a note in the ‘package notes‘ field in Sluglife.

I have not been able to access the McClatchy Mugshot Policy directly, as it does not seem to have been published externally. The only reason I have it is that two McClatchy reporters tweeted it out after it was imposed in August of 2020, and it is possible that some changes have been made to it subsequently.

↑2 J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Chapter 1.
↑3 From Wikipedia:

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

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Why are we getting so little news on the Iranian uprisings?

Social media has been full of information about the anti-government demonstrations in Iran, and one of the biggest complaints is that the credentialed media are not seriously covering it, something I have pointed out as well.

And on Thursday, January 8, 2026, at 12:30 PM EST, our nation’s greatest and most respected newspaper, The New York Times, had exactly zero stories on the subject visible on their website main page. Fortunately, I had looked earlier this morning, and there was one, and only one article:

Protests Spread in Iran, and Crackdowns Escalate

Bazaars were shuttered and demonstrators met with violence from security forces amid rising anger about the country’s dire economic situation.

By Farnaz Fassihi | Wednesday, January 7, 2026

As strikes and protests spread to several major cities across Iran on Wednesday, the head of the judiciary threatened to intensify crackdowns and prosecute protesters.

Merchants and business owners in the traditional bazaars in the cities of Tabriz, Isfahan, Mashhad and Kerman closed to protest the dire state of the economy and the plunging currency, according to videos on social media, interviews with witnesses and Iranian media reports. The bazaars of Iran have both practical and symbolic significance — not just where people buy things, but also an emblem of the economy, like stock markets in the West.

In Tehran, shops in the traditional bazaar, where the recent wave of protests began, remained shuttered for an 11th day. Inside its labyrinth of passages, security forces deployed tear gas and beat some in the crowd of shopkeepers and workers gathered there, according to interviews with two shop owners who asked that their names not be published because they feared retribution.

The two shopkeepers, who are members of trade unions, said in telephone interviews that the government’s efforts to mediate with trade representatives so far had failed. One of the shopkeepers said that despite fears of financial losses, solidarity had prevailed to keep shops closed and pressure on. It was unclear how long this could last.

There’s more at the original.

Reporter Farnaz Fassihi, about whom the Times> told us, “has covered Iran for three decades and has lived and traveled extensively in the country,” was pretty circumspect in her journalism. From what she wrote, a reasonable reader could not conclude which ‘side’ was winning, and perhaps that was exactly the message she was attempting to convey. We are not told whether Miss Fassihi was reporting from inside Iran, so we do not know if her safety is compromised.

The impression one gets from seeing the social media reports is that the government of the mad mullahs is about to fall, and maybe it is, but it is at least as likely that the government, engaged in serious measures to stifle dissent, will survive.

Anti-riot police officers have taken to the streets of Tehran and other cities on motorcycles, chasing crowds and beating demonstrators, according to videos on BBC Persian and social media. Some videos show security forces firing shots at the crowd; in other videos, gunshots can be heard. In Shiraz, military roadblocks were set up on a tree-lined boulevard with military vehicles patrolling.

Yet the government of President Masoud Pezeshkian struck a conciliatory tone, with Fatemeh Mohajeran, a spokeswoman, saying on social media on Wednesday that “all protesters are our children and every blood spilled pains us.”

By contrast, the head of the judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, and the country’s chief of security forces, Gen. Ahmad Reza Radan, told Iranian media that stern measures would be taken against protesters.

“We promise the Iranian nation that these people will be identified at any time and in any place, and will be prosecuted and punished until the last person is arrested,” said General Radan, according to Iranian state media.

There have been uprisings against the theocratic government before, uprisings which faltered and failed, and as much as I would like to be optimistic that the Iranian government will fall, the realist in me says to hold back, to wait, to see what actually happens.

But part of waiting to see what actually happens is restricted by the serious lack of journalistic coverage on the uprising. In 1979, as the Iranian Revolution which deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was unfolding, it seemed though we got far more news about it the in the United States, with just three television networks playing 30-minute-long evening news shows — even CNN was not formed until a year later — and newspapers to cover the story, newspapers which did not have instant, 24-hour availability over that internet thingy Al Gore invented. In 1979, I could read about the Iranian Revolution in the Lexington Herald-Leader, a decent-sized newspaper for a city of 220,000 people[1]That was then. In 2026, it’s just junk, a failing McClatchy newspaper that only publishes thrice a week, and delivered by mail now, is always a day late., but The New York Times? That was something that people could get at the Joseph A Best Bookstore across Reynolds Road from Fayette Mall . . . a day later. Students could go to the Margaret King Library on the University of Kentucky campus, and read the Times, or The Washington Post, again a day late.

Yet we still seemed to get more news about the Iranian Revolution from those limited and delayed sources than we are now seeing in a world with near instantaneous internet connections, the major television networks, CNN, Fox, MS Now, News Nation, and the websites of multiple television stations as well as newspapers.

Why is that?

Chris Freiman tweeted:

An uncharitable view that I can’t shake: the left is silent on Iran simply because it can’t bring itself to criticize any regime that’s opposed to the US

A lot of our friends across the pond have been extremely critical of the BBC’s lack of reporting. Saul Sadka wrote:

NEW LOW FOR THE BBC: This is the current state of its homepage. There is happy news about the birth of twin mountain gorillas, and about Prince Harry meeting his father, the King, but nothing—not a single word—about the protests in Iran that threaten to bring down the IRGC.

Me? I have snarked that the credentialed media are worried that if the uprising does oust the Islamist government, President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might get some of the credit, and they can’t have that! on the other hand, if the uprising fails, and the government kills a bunch of the protesters, the media will give Messrs Trump and Netanyahu the blame!

References

References
↑1 That was then. In 2026, it’s just junk, a failing McClatchy newspaper that only publishes thrice a week, and delivered by mail now, is always a day late.
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#TrumpDerangementSyndrome: the left and the media go nuts over bruising on President Trump’s hands

Searching Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — for Trump bruised hand brings up scads of tweets, mostly from our good friends on the left, searching for something, anything! to somehow trash our 47th President. Shredder Girl wrote, “CNN ignored every concern about Joe Biden’s health but they’re all over Trump’s bruised hand”.

Bruising on Trump’s left hand sparks renewed questions about his health

By Adam Cancryn | New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2025

New bruising on Donald Trump’s left hand is reviving questions about his health nearly one year after he became the oldest president to take the oath of office.

Across a series of events last week, the 79-year-old Trump appeared with discoloration or light bruising on the back of his left hand, in addition to the more persistent bruise on his right hand that has been visible for months.

The new bruise appears to complicate the White House’s explanation that the right-handed Trump developed the bruising through constant handshaking along with a regular regimen of aspirin that can make such discoloration more common.

And while medical experts told CNN there is no fresh cause for concern, calling it a likely benign condition common in older people, they warned that Trump’s reluctance to be more transparent about his health only threatens to intensify the scrutiny that he’s struggled all year to escape.

“They’re just feeding the curiosity cycle,” said Dr. Jeffrey Linder, chief of general internal medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “He’s in the public eye, he has a certain image he wants to portray, and even these minor things detract from that image.”

Donald Trump is President of the United States, and the President’s health is always something of a public concern, but somehow, some way, our credentialed media managed to ignore every concern about the health of our 46th President, even as he was tripping on stairs, losing his train of thought, and just plain zoning out in public, right up until they couldn’t hide things any more.

Didn’t President Joe Biden look handsome and strong and healthy there? That’s the image the Democrats and the Biden campaign tried to project, and you were supposed to believe it. The tweet screen captured to the right is time-stamped at 10:53 PM, after the debate.

Jennifer Rubin is the former ‘neoconservative’ columnist and warmonger for The Washington Post, always agitating for more money and weapons to keep the Russo-Ukrainian War going, and completely infected by #TrumpDerangementSyndrome. On May 19, 2024, she wrote:

President Biden took the media and political world by surprise in challenging Donald Trump to two debates — and then swiftly accepting offers from CNN and ABC. Trump accepted the debates, on June 27 and Sept. 10, but whether he will show up is another matter.

Yup, Mr Trump showed up! Oops! Then the whole nation saw what the credentialed media, the ones who tell us All the News That’s Fit to Print, the ones who say that Democracy Dies in Darkness, didn’t previously print, didn’t want to life the darkness.

It’s hardly the first time that the credentialed media stifled any criticisms of a presidential candidate’s health: they covered up for Hillary Clinton as well, her several falls and then her brief lapse into catatonia, minimizing what they couldn’t completely hide.

But, alas! it seems that the media being reticent only applies to Democratic candidates.

Is Mr Trump’s health in question? He is, after all, 79 years old, he’s obese, and he loves his junk food. He has been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a common condition among older adults, something which can explain his frequently swollen ankles. But somehow, some way, I don’t see that stuff as being disqualifying for Mr Trump to continue as President. Franklin Roosevelt managed to lead us through World War II when he was mostly dependent upon a wheelchair, and could only walk with heavy metal braces on his legs.

The Democrats thought that Joe Biden could run again, even though he was clearly sinking into dementia, all because they hate Republicans in general, and Mr Trump very, very specifically.

But now the left are fixated on our current President’s ankles and bruised hands.

Nevertheless, at his advanced age, it’s always possible that Mr Trump could fall too ill to do his job, or even die. But that’s where we are fortunate, in that the insipid Mike Pence is not Vice President, and J D Vance is. I suppose it would then be his turn to be ‘literally Hitler.’

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The journolism of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Ralph Cipriano of Big Trial Blog sent out the message to the left on Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏 — stating that The Philadelphia Inquirer scrubbed the story about Paul George, one of the George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney Larry Krasner’s top minions, being disbarred from the federal court system.

Since we had already noted the newspaper’s article in a previous story, it was easy for me to check: the cited article remains available . . . but only if you know where to look. The newspaper has a Crime & Justice section, and if you type that in — the section does not appear linked on the website main page this morning, though it does occasionally — your will find the story listed, but not near the top. As of 9:00 AM EST on Sunday morning, there are five stories at the top of the Crime & Justice page, with a single column list of other article below that. The story on Messrs Krasner and George is the fifth one down on that list.

A site search of the newspaper’s website for “Krasner” brings up the story, the second story listed as of 9:06 AM EST. A site search for “Paul George” yields the story as well, seven stories down the list, but with the Philadelphia 76ers having a player with the same name, it’s unsurprising that the story about the Assistant District Attorney is down the list a bit.

We have noted the journolism — not a typographical error, but deliberate as seen in the image to the right — of The Philadelphia Inquirer previously. We reported recently on how the newspaper chose not to cover the felony arrests of eight “youth football players” in Polk County, Florida, reported both nationally and, in the Philadelphia media market by WPVI-TV, the ABC affiliate on Channel 6, as well as Chennel 10, the NBC affiliate, but the Inquirer chose to ignore a Philadelphia story. Website searches for “Thoroughbreds“, “youth football“, “Polk County“, “Davenport“, the town in which the arrests occurred, and “Grady Judd” conducted earlier and then reconducted as this article was being written turned up nothing on the story. The editors of the newspaper simply chose to ignore a story that they couldn’t have missed.

This is what my $6.99 per week digital subscription delivers? News censored by the political correctness and “anti racist news organization” publisher Elizabeth Hughes and the Leftist Lenfest Institute for Journalism mandated for our nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper?

As much as our credentialed media denigrate and hate Twitter since Elon Musk bought it and removed most of the constraints and censorship — the left really do hate freedom of speech and of the press — without Twitter I would never have heard of the Polk County case, and if I had missed logging into the newspaper’s website on the 11th, I’d have missed the story about Messrs Krasner’s and George’s utter failures.

The Inquirer’s masthead, in 1955, proclaimed the newspaper to be a “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. These days, I’d suggest that they should use the logo I created to the left, because that’s what they publish.

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Journolism: CEO of Lenfest Institute for Journalism worries about Freedom of the Press when his own newspaper censors the news "What does not get printed is as important as what does" Jim Friedlich told us, but The Philadelphia Inquirer frequently doesn't print the politically incorrect

Jim Friedlich is Chief Executive Officer and executive director of the Leftist, oops, sorry, Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit organization that owns what I have sometimes called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.. In this morning’s newspaper, he is “Giving thanks — and offering up a prayer — for America’s free press: On this, more than any Thanksgiving in memory, a free and independent American press seems in peril.” It’s mostly boilerplate stuff, such as claiming that President Trump’s attempt to eliminate the Voice of America as somehow an attack on freedom of the Press, as though VOA is somehow not a government body rather than an independent news source. He decries the defunding of the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio, even though both still exist and can survive the way every other broadcaster survives, by selling advertising.

But this is the line which attracted most of my attention:

What does not get printed is as important as what does. The palpable chill of partisan press criticism has meant the self-censorship of even some of the nation’s wealthiest newspaper owners.

“What does not get printed”? Such as the censorship and self-censorship of virtually every outlet among the credentialed media of then-President Joe Biden’s visibly declining mental status? Remember our coverage of Jake Tapper‘s and Alex Thompson‘s book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again? Only a fool would believe that the major television news networks, that the reporters of The New York Times and The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times didn’t see the President’s slips, falls, gaffes, and zoning out. That it was visible to all who paid attention is attested to by conservatives having seen it and publishing it and tweeting it out, but, alas! the credentialed media pooh-poohed all of that, and told their readership and audiences that it was nothing, that maybe Mr Biden had lost a step physically but mentally he was, according to Mary Peltola, “one of the smartest, sharpest people I’ve met in DC.” That was just before the disastrous debate on June 27, 2024. After the debate, the Associated Press tried to tell us that Mr Biden was “Often sharp and focused but sometimes confused and forgetful,” but most of the media admitted that his debate performance was a disaster, and, worst of all, the American public saw it, in ways the credentialed media couldn’t cover up.

I asked the Inquirer’s Will Bunch, on Bluesky, if there was “any discussion in the newsroom concerning Mr Biden’s growing incapacity before it all blew up during the debate?” but of course I didn’t get a response.

It’s simple: to the credentialed media, President Biden was running for re-election, and nothing, nothing! was more important than defeating the evil Donald Trump. And Mr Friedlich’s newspaper was definitely in the forefront of that effort: following the debate, the Editorial Board of The New York Times said, “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race,” to which the Editorial Board of the Inquirer replied, “To serve his country, Donald Trump should leave the race.”

So, Mr Friedlich, I had to laugh when you wrote what does not get printed is as important as what does. Your own newspaper chose not to report on the mental condition of the 46th President of the United States, at the time it was most important, when he was running for re-election, but Mr Bunch keeps crying that Mr “Trump’s rapidly deteriorating mental state remains mostly off-limits for the elite media. It’s a massive error of omission that the world will look back on and regret.” Perhaps the Lenfest Institute for Journalism needs to push the newspaper to actually engage in journalism.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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The death of the Lexington Herald-Leader?

I have written previously about the death of the Lexington Herald-Leader, a newspaper which is near and dear to my heart. I not only delivered the morning Lexington Herald and afternoon Lexington Leader in the late 1960s — yes, I’m that old! — but my sadly late best friend Ken Vermillion and I had several articles published in the paper in the mid 1970s. I noted the change in home delivery of the print edition to just three days a week, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, though the Sunday edition will be delivered on Saturday, by the United States Postal Service. Executive Editor and General Manager Richard A Green wrote, on May 31, 2024:

Beginning Aug. 5, we will transition to a 24/7 digital product with three days of high-quality, locally focused print editions a week.

Perhaps I have misunderstood what Mr Green meant, but I thought he was saying that the “24/7 digital product” would include the “high-quality, locally focused” product as well, not that the print editions would be the exclusively “high-quality, locally focused” publications.

I found this, first in my national feed, this morning:

Kentucky volleyball is just two wins away from total SEC perfection

Kentucky volleyball nears perfect SEC Season, eyes #1 NCAA seed

By Drew Holbrook | Monday, November 10, 2025

Craig Skinner doesn’t run from challenges, he hunts them. And once again, Kentucky Volleyball has answered the call.

Despite two early-season losses (both to ranked teams, including one to number 1 Nebraska), the Wildcats have run roughshod through the SEC, stacking ranked win after ranked win while climbing into the national top two. The schedule has been brutal. The response has been elite. Kentucky volleyball is nearing perfection.

You can follow the embedded link to read the rest of the story, but Kentucky has won all thirteen Southeastern Conference volleyball matches played, and has lost only seven sets in those thirteen matches. UK recently beat then #2 Texas 3-0, on the road. But you wouldn’t know it is your news source is the Herald-Leader! UK just beat #19 Tennessee 3-1, in Memorial Coliseum, a venue only a few miles from the newspaper’s offices

I informed Mr Green via a directly addressed tweet, something he should have seen anyway, since he follows me on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — as I had on November 5th, following the victory over Texas.

What Mr Vermillion used to call the Herald-Liberal maintains a specific UK Sports page on its website, which shows 24 stories as of 8:24 AM EST on Tuesday. Naturally, most are about the University’s football and men’s basketball teams, though there are a couple on women’s basketball, but somehow not a single story on a legitimate contender for the NCAA championship.

Perhaps this has something to do with yet further cutbacks at McClatchy, which owns the Lexington newspaper. Editor & Publisher reported on McClatchy’s “quiet cuts”:

On Monday (November 3, 2025) morning, staffers across McClatchy’s real-time news desk received an unexpected invitation to a hastily arranged Zoom meeting at noon. The calendar invite was vague, referring only in general terms to a restructuring update. The team wasn’t too taken aback by it; they knew change was coming. But they didn’t anticipate what awaited them when they logged on.

When the journalists on the nearly two dozen-strong team joined the call, they were hit with stunning news: McClatchy was eliminating the entire real-time news operation, which effectively operated as its national breaking news desk. The announcement left the team reeling. Their employment, they were told, would end on November 14.

Upon reading this, I checked to see if Mr Green was still the Editor and General Manager of the Herald-Leader, and he was still listed as such, at least as of the October 17, 2025 update to their About Us page.

The Columbia Journalism Review reported on staff cuts at McClatchy, as well as recent layoffs at CBS News, NBC News, Axios, and Teen Vogue, but the stress point of that story was the end of DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — and that many of the layoffs and job losses were among people who were not white males.

The newspaper did cover UK’s last volleyball NCAA championship, in 2020.

I still have a soft spot in my heart for the Herald-Leader, and for newspapers in general, because I much prefer to read the news than try to watch it on television. But if the Lexington newspaper, which has long specialized in UK sports, can’t cover a potential national championship team, I have to wonder just how much longer it can last. Newspapers cannot increase their sales by cutting back on the quantity and quality of their reporting.

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The journolism of The Philadelphia Inquirer Our good friends on the left somehow believe the barbarians in our country can become good, civilized men.

I will admit it: I have not always been charitable when it comes to our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, the winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, The Philadelphia Inquirer and it’s journolism. No, that’s not a typo: 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.

In a story about Sherrilyn Hawkins, who pleaded guilty to starving her 21-year-old disabled son to death, reporter Vinny Vella chose to use terms like “allowing him to waste away to just 59 pounds,” rather than tell readers the direct truth. Mr Vella responded, “I’m sorry you’re having trouble with your reading comprehension, Dana. Keep trying; I know you’ll get it someday.”

We continued our Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — discussion a bit further, but it was the newspaper’s main editorial that really got to me:

Lessons must be learned after criminal justice system fails Kada Scott | Editorial

Hindsight is 20/20, but a series of prosecutorial and judicial miscues may have enabled the young woman’s death.

by The Editorial Board | Tuesday, October 21, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT

The killing of Kada Scott is tragic on many levels, but hopefully, some lessons can be learned to honor her life.

Scott’s death is all the more painful for her family and friends because it could have been prevented. That’s because it appears District Attorney Larry Krasner and the Philadelphia court system failed her.

The man accused of abducting Scott had been previously charged with assaulting an ex-girlfriend twice in the last year, but prosecutors withdrew the charges after the victim did not show up for court.

After Scott’s disappearance, Krasner’s office admitted its handling of the earlier cases was a mistake. If the district attorney’s office had instead prosecuted Keon King, 21, then perhaps Scott, 23, would still be alive.

Kada Scott, victim, and Keon King, alleged murderer. Photos via WPVI TV, because, naturally, the Inquirer would never publish them.

There’s much more at the original, the next few paragraphs detailing the “miscues” which led to Keon King being a free man when he, allegedly, murdered Kada Scott. Then we come to this:

But once again, the victim and her friend refused to cooperate with prosecutors, so the charges were withdrawn in May.

This is not unusual, as victims of domestic violence often live in fear of the perpetrators. Reviewing the period between 2010 and 2020, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that 70% of victims of domestic violence cases failed to appear in Philadelphia’s courts.

A big part of the problem is that the accused are often out on bail and still threatening the victims. In King’s case, after the second set of assault charges, prosecutors requested bail of $1 million, but the magistrate lowered it to $200,000.

The Eighth Amendment prohibits the setting of “excessive bail,” so the magistrate did have to set a bail that Mr King could reasonably meet, something the newspaper reported that he was able to post immediately. But if the magistrate required Mr King to be fitted with a GPS monitor, none of the Inquirer stories I could find on the case mentioned it. An ankle monitor might have at least deterred Mr King, if he actually is the assailant, or provided more evidence to convict him if he was not deterred. Ankle monitors might provide the victims with a little more of a sense of security when their (alleged) assailants are released.

If all of the allegations against Mr King can be proven, he needs to spend the rest of his miserable life behind bars, with no possibility of parole. He is clearly a menace to the decent people of the City of Brotherly Love, and will almost certainly never change.

The Editorial Board said that “Lessons must be learned” from Mr Krasner’s and his minions’ inept handling of this case, but it’s hardly the first time that the District Attorney and his lenient and lax treatment of criminals have been noted. Despite all of the evidence of his lenience, the Editorial Board endorsed him for re-nomination in both 2021 and this year. Though the newspaper has yet to make its endorsement for the general election, I would be stunned if they endorsed moderate Democrat turned Republican Pat Dugan, despite the Board’s knowledge of Mr Krasner’s failures. After all, the Board does love Mr Krasner’s attempts to prosecute and imprison police officers!

There is a lesson to be learned alright, but it isn’t the lesson the Editorial Board would like. The lesson should be that American civilization must be protected and defended, even from those Americans in our cities who choose savagery over civilization. In the Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror,” in which Captain Kirk and three others from his crew were transported to a mirror universe in which savagery was the rule of the day, when the transport was finally undone, Mr Spock said that it was far easier for the Captain and crew, civilized people, to play savages than it was for the savages from the alternate universe to behave as civilized men. Our good friends on the left don’t quite seem to have taken that lesson, and somehow believe that the barbarians in our country can become good, civilized men.

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Whenever There Is a Truth You Cannot Tell, That Is a Truth You Must Tell! Our Credentialed Media: All the News That's Politically Correct!

I have previously suggested that it was Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s devilishly clever scheme to let the thugs get away with ‘smaller’ s(tuff) until they graduated to a crime which could keep them locked up forever, and if that crime happened to eliminate other thugs, it was a win-win for the DA, getting two or more bad guys off the streets for good. Robert Stacy McCain was less charitable:

Democrats are objectively pro-crime. It is the de facto policy of the Democratic Party that mentally ill criminals should be turned loose on the streets until they stab somebody in the neck. Democrats are the psycho killer party, and the people who vote for Democrats don’t care how many people get killed as a result of their policy.

The Democrats would deny that, of course, but is there any evidence, any evidence at all that Mr McCain’s statement isn’t true? Forget what the left say; look at what they do, and Mr McCain’s statement makes perfect sense.

My good friend Matt Van Swol tweeted a list of major news sources, the credentialed media writ large, which did not cover this story, so I checked my primary newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a site search for the (alleged) killer’s name, Decarlos Brown, returned nothing. I didn’t check Mr Van Swol’s list in its entirety, but doing site searches of the websites of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN resulted in just what Mr Van Swol said, nothing.

Remember: bandwidth is ridiculously cheap, and there are no real limitations on space for those news organizations.

It was an old joke that New Yorkers riding the subway would have the Times very visible, while actually reading the New York Post hidden inside, and yup, the Post covered the murder with three separate stories.

I guess this story wasn’t part of the news that’s fit to print.

We’ve seen this before. The Inquirer’s publisher specifically said that, to achieve her goal of making the newspaper an “anti-racist news organization,” she was establishing guidelines that would reduce the newspaper’s coverage of crime, because it often “stigmatized” certain “Philadelphia communities”. Decarlos Brown is black, and he (allegedly) stabbed a white woman to death, for no known reason other than he is just plain crazy.

But there’s more. Mr Brown is a career criminal, with a rap sheet which dates back to his juvenile years, but while there are many arrests noted, only one actual criminal conviction is listed; he’s been let go without any serious action several times since he got out of prison. This is exactly the thing about which sensible people have been complaining, and liberals ignoring, in their zealous attempts to not ‘stigmatize’ black Americans.

Thus there are two problems for the credentialed media when it comes to Mr Brown:

  1. Mr Brown is black, while his victim was a very pretty white woman, and the media certainly don’t want to point out that; and
  2. The Brown case demonstrates what liberal law enforcement yields.

With President Trump’s actions to send in National Guard troops to help with law enforcement in our more dangerous communities, the left are saying that it’s raaaaacist to do that, because it disproportionately impacts black communities.

Imagine this story in 1985! Because the credentialed media didn’t want you to know about it, it wouldn’t have been published much beyond the local Charlotte Observer, so for the vast majority of the nation, that crime didn’t happen. It’s only due to social media and this internet thingy that Al Gore invented that this is a story at all, because as far as The New York Times is concerned, it never happened.

The Inquirer? That august newspaper is all-in on demanding new funds for SEPTA, and a story about an innocent woman stabbed to death for seemingly no reason at all certainly won’t push more Philadelphians to take public transportation!

Mr Brown should never have been out on the streets, and should have been in the loony bin, but no one wants to say that. It took the sacrifice of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska to bring this to the fore.