Tag Archives: #Journolism

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For print newspapers, tempus is fugiting The solution to being 18th century technology is not becoming 19th century one-party newspapers!

Mickey East, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky during the 1970s, when I was a student there, used a bastardized phrase to encourage his students to get their work done, “Tempus is fugiting.”

According to Wikipedia, the expression “Tempus fugit” comes from line 284 of book 3 of Virgil‘s Georgics, where it appears as fugit inreparabile tempus: “it escapes, irretrievable time”.

Well, time flies for newspapers, which I have previously called 18th century technology, because people are abandoning printed materials.

U.S. newspapers continuing to die at rate of 2 each week

Despite a growing recognition of the problem, the United States continues to see newspapers die at the rate of two per week, according to a report issued Wednesday on the state of local news.

by David Bauder, Associated Press | Friday, July 1, 2022 | 10:26 AM EDT

NEW YORK — Despite a growing recognition of the problem, the United States continues to see newspapers die at the rate of two per week, according to a report issued Wednesday on the state of local news.

“A growing recognition of the problem,” huh? The problem is that time has flown by, and technology has overtaken the print medium. Yes, I subscribe to newspapers, The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Lexington Herald-Leader, for my use as source material for my poor site. As I have previously mentioned, my hearing is seriously compromised, and I can read the news far more easily than I can watch and hear the news on television. More, when reading the news, if there’s something which was poorly worded or unclear, or that I somehow missed, I can go back to reread that portion, to lock it down correctly. To me, especially as a (poor) writer, trying to ascertain that I am getting things correctly, that’s important.

But, let’s face it: my subscriptions to those newspapers, and all the рублей I am spending — The Wall Street Journal in particular is not cheap, and though this site has changed, I had originally planned to concentrate more on economics — are all digital; I not only don’t get the print editions, but out in the rural area in which I live, I cannot get home delivery of the dead trees edition. Heck, I can’t even get the United States Post Office to deliver the mail to me, so I have to rent a post office box!

However, it’s more than that. Before I retired, I used to pick up a copy of the Inquirer from the Turkey Hill in Jim Thorpe, to take to the plant. The guys combitched[1]The word “combitch” is a Picoism, for which I would bet you can figure out the etymology. Feel free to use it yourselves, with an appropriate credit appreciated. that I should have picked up the Allentown Morning Call instead, because that was closer to local news, but it was, and is, a junk paper. Now that it’s been bought out by the hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, I’m pleased that I didn’t spend much money at all on the Morning Call.

Amusingly enough, for an owner of dead trees newspapers, Alden’s website opens up to an image of trees!

One of the issues with buying the Inquirer for the plant was that there were frequently sports stories which noted that ‘this game ended too late for inclusion in this edition.’ In the 21st century, we can always get our news up-to-date, by checking that internet thingy that Al Gore invented. And that illustrates the major problem for print newspapers: they are always several hours behind, in a world in which the news is reported minute-by-minute. I have no idea whether the Associated Press story referenced above will appear in the print edition of the Inquirer, from which I sourced it, but time stamped at 10:26 AM as it was, it cannot appear earlier than Saturday’s dead trees edition!

Areas of the country that find themselves without a reliable source of local news tend to be poorer, older and less educated than those covered well, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications said.

The country had 6,377 newspapers at the end of May, down from 8,891 in 2005, the report said. While the pandemic didn’t quite cause the reckoning that some in the industry feared, 360 newspapers have shut down since the end of 2019, all but 24 of them weeklies serving small communities.

Actually, even out in the sticks, we have not one but two local weekly newspapers, the Citizen’s Voice & Times and the Estill County Tribune, but who can know how long they’ll both survive?

An estimated 75,000 journalists worked in newspapers in 2006, and now that’s down to 31,000, Northwestern said. Annual newspaper revenue slipped from $50 billion to $21 billion in the same period.

Even though philanthropists and politicians have been paying more attention to the issue, the factors that drove the collapse of the industry’s advertising model haven’t changed. Encouraging growth in the digital-only news sector in recent years hasn’t been enough to compensate for the overall trends, said Penelope Muse Abernathy, visiting professor at Medill and the report’s principal author.

As I have previously reported, The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and 17th largest newspaper as measured by circulation, still thinks that the taxpayers should be taxed to support journalists, to the tune of a refundable payroll tax credit of up to $25,000 per journalist to help local news organizations hire and retain reporters and editors.

In other words, the publishers of the Inquirer believe that the taxpayers ought to pay up to $25,000 of the salary of reporters and editors! Does ABC News or CNN have to beg for the taxpayers to subsidize their journolists'[2]This was not a typographical error. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure … Continue reading salaries?

True “daily” newspapers that are printed and distributed seven days a week are also dwindling; The report said 40 of the largest 100 newspapers in the country publish only-digital versions at least once a week. Inflation is likely to hasten a switch away from printed editions, said Tim Franklin, director of the Medill Local News Initiative.

One of the newspapers to which I subscribe, the Lexington Herald-Leader, does not publish a Saturday edition, and what I see online on Saturdays makes it look like the reporters and editors are pretty much off on Saturdays.

But there’s more to it. When I look at the digital editions of the Herald-Leader and the Inquirer, since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization it has become obvious: if those were your only sources of news, you’d not be blamed for thinking that six Supreme Court Justices are the only people in America who don’t support an unlimited abortion license. These newspapers have been wholly one-sided in their reporting on the subject.

What my, sadly late, best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal just published a fairly long story on the disappearance of Democratic voters in eastern Kentucky. You’d have to be a Kentuckian to really understand it, but it points out the problem for the newspaper: a paper which used to circulate widely throughout the counties east of Lexington — and I delivered the morning Lexington Herald and afternoon Lexington Leader in Mt Sterling, two counties away from Lexington, when I was in junior high and high schools — has few subscribers now, because there is little or no local delivery, but also because the newspaper has become so thoroughly urbanized to the city that it really has nothing for the more conservative counties to the east. As we have previously reported, the newspaper has consistently endorsed the candidates, all Democrats, strongly rejected by the voters in every county of their (former?) service area other than Fayette. If you don’t give something for the readers in the outlying counties, can you really expect to have many subscribers there?

In Pennsylvania, the Inquirer is steadfastly liberal and Democratic in orientation, publishing all sorts of OpEds and barely-disguised opinion pieces camouflages as regular news articles slamming Republicans and conservatives, yet, while Joe Biden carried the Keystone State by 80,555 votes in 2020, that was only due to his 471,050 vote margin in Philadelphia; absent Philadelphia County, President Trump had a margin of 389,495 votes. Much of Pennsylvania was strongly “red” and even Philly’s collar counties were only slightly “blue.” But the Inky gives those more conservative voters no reason to be actual readers of the newspaper.

Newspapers have more than a single problem. Yes, print newspapers, despite fancy colored printing and photographs, are simply updated 18th century technology, and the reduction in print subscribers has meant a dramatic downturn in advertising revenue. But they also have a 19th century problem: in becoming so highly slanted, they have reverted to the one-party newspaper style of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. In the 19th century, there were competing newspapers in every city of any size, and if readers of one particular political stripe did not like the slant of one newspaper, they could turn to another.

Today, few cities have more than one newspaper, but newspapers do have competition, from television news. If MSNBC and CNN are slanted to the left, Fox News and the One America News Network are slanted to the right, and consumers can do something really radical like choose the sources they prefer. That newspapers face serious competition from television news and the internet is obvious; when they respond by pissing off half of their potential readership, they compound their problems.

References

References
↑1 The word “combitch” is a Picoism, for which I would bet you can figure out the etymology. Feel free to use it yourselves, with an appropriate credit appreciated.
↑2 This was not a typographical error. 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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I owe Seth Williams an apology

At 11:17 AM EDT on Monday, June 20th, Seth Williams, a former District Attorney for Philadelphia, tweeted, “I am now being told that from midnight Friday until midnight Sunday, Philadelphia tragically suffered 41 shootings, 14 homicides, and 6 victims remain in critical condition. What we are doing now is not working!” Not having seen numbers like that anywhere in the media, I responded:

Well, I suppose that I owe Mr Williams an apology, because the numbers from the Philadelphia Police Department — the report was not updated on Monday, I suppose because whoever does the updating was off for the Juneteenth holiday — finally came in, and they are ugly.

The previous report was that 230 people had been murdered as of Friday, June 17th, so yup, Mr Williams’ report was right on target.

I responded to Mr Williams that I had seen nothing in The Philadelphia Inquirer supporting numbers anywhere close to that, and, checking the newspaper’s website main page again this morning, I still don’t. There is a story about teenagers concerns about the proposed 10:00 PM curfew, which is being considered in the wake of the South Street shootings during a rowdy street celebration full of teenagers, a five day old story about serious problems at Prevention Point Philadelphia, and, Heaven forfend!, the hugely critical Local strike could impact availability of beer ahead of Fourth of July weekend! Moving on to the newspaper’s crime page, there was a story about the killing of John Albert Laylo, a visitor from the Philippines, who was shot dead in what is now being called a targeted hit, but one which hit the wrong car. There was a story from Friday about two fatal shootings, plus another which left a victim, shot in the head, in extremely critical condition, and another about a murder in February, allegedly committed by a closeted bisexual male who wanted to keep his boyfriend from revealing their relationship.

There was a story, dated Thursday, June 16th, about three homicides Wednesday evening into Thursday morning.

But that’s it; there’s nothing in the Inky, at least as of 9:14 AM EDT, to tell readers that 14 people were murdered over the Juneteenth weekend.

There was, however, a significantly sized advertising blurb, telling people that they could subscribe for unlimited digital access for just 99¢ per week for 12 weeks, followed by $3.99 per week, billed every 4 weeks, no commitment, cancel anytime.

But I have to ask: why should people subscribe to the Inquirer if the newspaper is not going to do something really radical like report the news?

We noted, in January, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas and her complaint, For two mothers touched by gun violence: ‘Pray, pray, and pray some more.’: Numbers tend to attract attention around here; the people behind them, not always so much.

On Thursday, she typed a similar lament:

Everyday gun violence goes unchecked, even as high-profile massacres capture the nation’s attention

We can’t accept the asymmetrical way people look at shooting victims based on race.

by Helen Ubiñas | Thursday, June 16, 2022

Within a few days of the mass shooting on South Street, two people were already in custody.

Two days later, two more.

And almost immediately came a familiar appeal from the loved ones of murder victims whose killings remain unsolved:

Where was the full-court press to identify suspects and make arrests in the deaths of their family members?

There’s more at the original. But perhaps Miss Ubiñas ought to look a bit more closely at her own newspaper in asking that question.

She had, in December of 2020, written an opinion column saying that we should at least know the names of the people slaughtered in the City of Brotherly Love, yet the newspaper at which she has worked for many years appears to have gotten even worse at reporting the news about homicides.

Fourteen people murdered? That’s almost five South Streets! 41 shootings, at least according to Mr Williams?[1]The city’s shooting database has not been updated to confirm this. That’s one shy of three South Streets, about which the Inquirer wrote story after story.

But last weekend, which ended two days ago? Barely more than crickets from our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, nothing, no one looked at the numbers, no one figured it out.

The thing is, I’ve figured it out. The Inky spends a lot of time when innocent people are killed. We saw that the paper paid attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s five separate stories, a whole lot more than the two or three paragraphs most victims get.

Then there was the murder of Samuel Sean Collington, a Temple University student approaching graduation. Mr Collington was a white victim, allegedly murdered by a black juvenile in a botched robbery. The Inquirer then published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him. Five separate stories about the case of a murdered white guy.

To which shootings, to which killings, does the newspaper not pay attention? It doesn’t pay attention to the murders of young black boys and men by other young black boys and men, which happens to be the majority, the vast majority, of the homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. It’s easy to have sympathy for people like Mr Collington, or Mr Laylo. The Inquirer has even tried to drum up sympathy for kids like Marcus Stokes or Thomas Siderio.

But when one gang banger shoots and kills another gang banger? The editors and publisher of the Inquirer not only don’t care, but actively don’t want to publish stories about them, because it does not fit within the worldview they want to project.

References

References
↑1 The city’s shooting database has not been updated to confirm this.
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The journolism of The Philadelphia Inquirer

No, that’s not a typo in the title: 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.

As we have mentioned, The Philadelphia Inquirer is the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and has won 20 Pulitzer Prizes for its reporting. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are all significantly younger than the Inky. 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 Inquirer rank only 17th in circulation? Could it be because they censor the news?

Another pro-life clinic attacked, this one in Philadelphia

by Joe Bukaras | Wednesday, June 15, 2022 | 3:41 AM EDT

A pro-life pregnancy center in Philadelphia was vandalized last weekend with smashed windows and graffiti.

Latrice Booker, director of Hope Pregnancy Center in Philadelphia, told CNA that when she drove by her clinic Saturday, June 11, she found four windows smashed, with one written on with graffiti. It is unclear what the graffiti says.

Three glass doors were smashed as well, she said. She estimated the damages to be around $15,000. As of Tuesday afternoon, the windows were boarded up and the clinic is in the process of repairs. They are still open for business, she said.

Booker said that the clinic offers all its services to help women and families in need at no cost. She said that the clinic is not dissuaded in its mission by the vandalism and called on people of faith to “stand tall” despite the vitriol against pro-lifers.

There’s more at the original. Naturally, I searched the Inky’s website, to see if I could find this story, and to my very much not surprised self, I found nothing, nada, zilch, zippo, ничего. You can see the top of the search results if you click on the image to the right.

I did, however, find hundreds of articles on abortion, in a site search for pro life clinic, virtually all of them supporting the pro-abortion position in one way or another. The ‘pro-choice’ crowd do not like the term ‘pro-abortion,’ but it is economically accurate: to support having the choice to have an abortion, you must concomitantly want enough abortions to occur to keep the abortuaries open. President Clinton’s formulation that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” falls on its own weight, because if abortion is rare, abortion providers can’t stay in business.

From Politico:

Garland returns to Oklahoma City to warn that domestic terrorism is ‘still with us’

The attorney general has vowed to crackdown on a resurgence of violence linked to white supremacist and right-wing militia groups.

by Josh Gerstein | April 19, 2021 | 12:14 PM EDT

Attorney General Merrick Garland returned Monday to Oklahoma City — the site of the nation’s most deadly act of domestic terrorism and of his formative experiences as a young prosecutor — to deliver a warning that the threat of domestic extremism is again on the rise.

Delivering his first major speech as attorney general, Garland told a memorial service that the nation must remain vigilant against such dangers.

There were plenty of other stories, such as “Top law enforcement officials say the biggest domestic terror threat comes from white supremacists.” in The New York Times, while National Public Radio reported:

At Tuesday’s hearing, Jill Sanborn, the head of the FBI’s National Security Branch, told lawmakers that the threat posed by domestic violent extremists is “persistent and evolving.” The “most lethal threat” from domestic violent extremists, she said, is posed by white supremacists and anti-government militias.

So, I’m wondering: was the vandalism at a pro-life pregnancy center or one at a similar clinic in Washington DC the work of evil reich-wing extremists or white supremacists?

Decades ago, the Inquirer’s masthead declared itself to be a “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. Now it should have a blurb similar to the one that ought to be on The New York Times, “All the News That’s Politically Correct.” The Inky just doesn’t want you to tell its readers the truth, and that’s why the only real newspaper in our nation’s seventh largest metropolitan area is just 17th in circulation.

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Lies, damned lies, and statistics How The Washington Post manipulates statistics to mislead readers

Screen capture of Washington Post headline, May 25, 2022. Click to enlarge.

The headline was dramatic: More than 311,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine. Read that, and you’d think that half the schools in America were being machine gunned down, which is, let’s be honest about it, exactly what the editors of The Washington Post want you to believe.

But what, exactly, does “experienced gun violence at school” mean? From their methodology:

To calculate how many children were exposed to gunfire in each school shooting, The Post relied on enrollment figures and demographic information from the U.S. Education Department, including the Common Core of Data and the Private School Universe Survey. The analysis used attendance figures from the year of the shooting for the vast majority of the schools. Then The Post deducted 7 percent from the enrollment total because that is, on average, how many students miss school each day, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Reporters subtracted 50 percent from a school’s enrollment if the act of gun violence occurred just before or after the school day.

So, if a firearm was discharged on school grounds during school hours, but no one was struck, 93% of the school’s enrollment “experienced gun violence at school.

  • One of the incidents shown by the Post was on November 15, 2021, when an armed 13-year-old boy in Poughkeepsie High School, in Poughkeepsie, New York, fired “several rounds in front of the school, striking multiple vehicles”, but neither killing nor injuring anyone. The Post counted that as 570 students “experiencing gun violence at school”.
  • On November 19, 2021, at Hinkley High School in Aurora, Colorado, “Teenagers exchanged gunfire in the parking lot, wounding three students.” The Post counted that as 1,940 students “experiencing gun violence at school,” even though this was a gun battle between gangs, and not an attempt to shoot up the school.
  • November 29, 2021, at Cesar Chavez High School in Laveen, Arizona, a 15-year-old boy shot the 16-year-old who had just sold him the gun in a school bathroom. While it was hardly an attempt to shoot up the school, the Post counts this a 2,400 students having “experienced gun violence at school.”
  • December 1, 2021 at Sam Rayburn High School, in Pasadena, Texas, a 21-year-old man fired a shot into the air while robbing a student on campus, with no one injured or killed. The Post counts this as 2,530 students “experiencing gun violence at school.”
  • February 28, 2022, at Jonesboro High School, in Clayton County, Georgia, a student discharged a weapon in school, hitting nobody. The Post counts this as 1,282 students “experiencing gun violence at school”.

There are many, many more similar examples, of accidents, stray bullets, gang battles and one-on-one fights, things that make up the vast majority of the incidents compiled into the statistics, but which the editors hope you don’t read, which the editors hope the readers will conflate to thousands of Columbines or Marjory Stoneman Douglases.

Given that so many readers do not read closely enough, do not delve more deeply into the stories, the editors can reasonably hope that their propaganda is persuasive. Not lies, per se, but statistics compiled in such a way to have the effect of lies.

Here’s the money line:

The Post has found that at least 185 children, educators and other people have been killed in assaults, and another 369 have been injured.

Remember: that’s 185 killed, and 369 injured, since 1999. Both of those numbers are lower than the number killed and injured in Philadelphia so far this year.

Screen capture of The Washington Post’s website main page, May 25, 2022. Click to enlarge.

The school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, by a misfit high school dropout who was bullied while he was in school due to a “childhood speech impediment” was certainly a terrible thing, but in practicing journalism[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 rather than journalism, by publishing wholly sensationalized but nevertheless misleading statistics, the editors of the Post are pretty much lying outright in their attempt to push Congress into infringing upon our Second Amendment rights.

The Post had ten, ten! separate articles listed on their website main page on Wednesday morning, most geared toward a push toward unconstitutional gun control, because that’s what the editors do.

The Post, perhaps inadvertently, undermined its own gun control reasoning:

In cases where the source of the gun could be determined, more than 85 percent of shooters brought them from their own homes or obtained them from friends or relatives, according to The Post’s analysis.

The ranks of school shooters include a 6-year-old boy, who killed a classmate after saying he didn’t like her, and a 15-year-old girl, who did the same to a friend for rejecting her romantic overtures.[2]Why do I suspect that, from the language stating that the 15-year-old girl killed a “friend” who rejected her romantic overtures that the slain friend was another girl?

Seven in 10 of them, however, were under the age of 18, which means that — often because of an adult’s negligence — dozens of children had access to deadly weapons.

In other words, most of the weapons used were legally purchased by other people, people with no criminal intent, and then taken by those who did have criminal intent in mind. The only way that ‘gun control’ stops that is if private ownership of firearms by the law abiding is banned . . . which is, of course, what the editors want anyway.

Supporters of dictatorial government always want a disarmed citizenry. Their fellow travelers in the credentialed media are only too glad to help.

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 Why do I suspect that, from the language stating that the 15-year-old girl killed a “friend” who rejected her romantic overtures that the slain friend was another girl?
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The Department of Fatherland Security ‘pauses’ creation of the Ministry of Truth The Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz is aghast!

If you hold your cursor over the page tab on an article, you can see the original title from when the article was first saved. The tab on The Washington Post article below shows that it was originally entitled “Disinformation Governance Board ‘paused’ after just 3 weeks”. Look at it now, once the Post’s editors got hold of it, and screen captured the original, reproduced at the left, for documentation. You can click on it to enlarge the image.

How the Biden administration let right-wing attacks derail its disinformation efforts

A ‘pause’ of the Department of Homeland Security’s newly created board comes after its head, Nina Jankowicz, was the victim of coordinated online attacks as the administration struggled to respond

By Taylor Lorenz | Wednesday, May 18, 2022 | 10:28 AM EDT

On the morning of April 27, the Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of the first Disinformation Governance Board with the stated goal to “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security.” The Biden administration tapped Nina Jankowicz, a well-known figure in the field of fighting disinformation and extremism, as the board’s executive director.

So, who is Taylor Lorenz? Miss Lorenz was most recently famous for her investigation and doxing of Chaya Raichik, a Brooklyn-based real estate saleswoman and creator of the Twitter site that the left hate, Libs of TikTok. Miss Lorenz’s article was, to put it mildly, harsh. Continue reading →

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Killadelphia Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother's eye.

Philly Police Department press release via Steve Keeley, Fox 29 News. Click to enlarge.

Two more Philadelphians bit the dust yesterday, but if The Philadelphia Inquirer was your only news source, you’d never know it. Nine people bled out their lives’ blood in the city’s mean streets over the last five days, but the “anti-racist news organization” won’t tell you anything. In December of 2020, columnist Heleb Ubiñas wrote, “What do you know about the Philadelphians killed by guns this year? At least know their names.” A year and a half later, the Inquirer, under publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes and Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Gabriel Escobar, don’t want you to know that anyone was killed.

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. The Inquirer is the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, older than The New York Times and The Washington Post. So why, then, does The Philadelphia Inquirer rank only 17th in circulation? Could it be because they censor the news?

The numbers are stark. At the end of Thursday, May 12, the city was seeing 1.295 homicides per day. Five days later, that’s up to 1.314 per day. More importantly, the City of Brotherly Love has gone from a projected 503 homicides in 2022 to 514.[1]Methodology: to compensate for the normal increase in homicides as warmer weather approaches, I have taken the number of homicides on a given date, divided it by the number on the same day in 2021, … Continue reading

So, if the newspaper does not report on homicides in its own home city, on what does it report? How about his gem? Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 Methodology: to compensate for the normal increase in homicides as warmer weather approaches, I have taken the number of homicides on a given date, divided it by the number on the same day in 2021, and multiplied that fraction by 562, the number of homicides in 2021. I have also compared the numbers to 2020’s homicide rate, and come up with huge numbers, 623 and 642, but have not really given them much credence. There are several different ways of calculating the numbers, but I will note that I accurately projected 562 homicides for 2021 on July 9, 2021.
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The left worry about ten people killed by a deranged white shooter, but ignore the wholesale slaughter of young black men by other young black men There's just no political value for the left in worrying about street crime

Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

This reminds me of how anti-Semitic and anti-Asian hate crimes were spiking a few months ago, but because the perpetrators were black, liberals didn’t want to talk about the problem.

It is no longer enough to not be racist; you must now be anti-racist!

Anti-racism encompasses a range of ideas and political actions which are meant to counter racial prejudice, systemic racism, and the oppression of specific racial groups. Anti-racism is usually structured around conscious efforts and deliberate actions which are intended to provide equal opportunities for all people on both an individual and a systemic level. As a philosophy, it can be engaged in by the acknowledgment of personal privileges, confronting acts as well as systems of racial discrimination, and/or working to change personal racial biases. Major contemporary anti-racism efforts include Black Lives Matter organizing and workplace antiracism.

Today’s credentialed media have taken that to mean that news which could “perpetuat(e) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community” — quote taken from the Sacramento Bee but could have come from any number of newspapers — must be soft-peddled if not outright suppressed. Maybe that’s why the two murders yesterday in the City of Brotherly Love — both committed fairly early in the evening so there was plenty of time — were not mentioned on either the main page or crime page of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Continue reading →

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About that “accountability journalism”?

On Monday, May 9th, I received the email pictured at the right from Annie McCain Madonia, Chief Advancement Officer for the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the non-profit owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer, saying:

As an Inquirer reader, you know the importance of quality, in-depth local news. Inquirer journalists are dedicated to keeping you informed and connected to the latest news in the Philadelphia area.

The Inquirer is owned by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which makes it the largest American newspaper owned by a nonprofit organization. This innovative ownership structure helps support investigative news and accountability journalism, new technology, and a newsroom of growing diversity and community impact.

Thanks to the support of individuals like you, The Inquirer has the resources to report on stories that impact and improve our communities. Will you join me in making a gift to support The Inquirer’s journalism, and double your impact with this match?

“Investigative news”? “Accountability journalism”?

Why, then, is there not a single mention on the Inquirer’s website, of a story which appeared an entire day ago concerning Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s failure to pay his taxes? Continue reading →

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The pro-abortionists really, really don’t like it when someone uses plain and concise language If abortion is such a good and noble thing, why must the left mealy-mouth their words about it?

We have previously noted how the credentialed media use control of language to try to influence the debate toward their favored positions, which always seem to be toward the left.

Twitter did so by prohibiting “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” Simply put, if someone wanted to tweet something about William Thomas, the male swimmer who claims to be female and is on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team using the name “Lia,” that person would have to concede to Mr Thomas’ claim that he is a woman by using the feminine pronouns and his assumed name, not his real one. The New York Times laughably gave major OpEd space to Chad Malloy, a man male who claims to be a woman going by the name “Parker” to claim that Twitter’s Ban on ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech.

Twitter’s ban on ‘deadnaming’ — the reference to ‘transgender’ people by their birth names — and ‘misgendering’ — the reference to ‘transgender’ people by their natural, biological sex — tramples on the speech of normal people, people who do not believe that girls can be boys and boys can be girls. The argument is that, in effect, we can’t hurt their precious little feelings, and so we must concede their major point to engage in debate. Here’s hoping that Elon Musk changes that!

Now comes Jeffrey Barg, also known as the Angry Grammarian, getting upset that Associate Justice Samuel Alito used plain language, did something radical like tell the truth, in his leaked draft majority opinion on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization: Continue reading →