No, that isn’t a typo in the headline: the spelling ‘journolism’ or sometimes ‘journolist’, 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.
Thomas J Siderio, Jr, in a photograph dated 2018, from The Philadelphia Inquirer Click to enlarge.
Another soul was sent untimely to his eternal reward in the City of Brotherly Love yesterday, but Philadelphia, which had been one ahead of its daily total for last year, fell behind by two, as four people were murdered on April 6, 2021. The numbers remain so close that no conclusions can reasonably be drawn as to whether 2022 will see more homicides than last year, but unless there is a very drastic change, 2022 will certainly exceed 2020’s 499 murders.
by Anna Orso | Wednesday, April 6, 2022
More than half of Philadelphia residents do not feel safe in their neighborhoods at night, two-thirds have heard gunshots in the last year, and an overwhelming majority see public safety as the biggest issue facing the city.
That’s according to a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which surveyed 1,541 Philadelphians in January on issues related to crime, policing, and the twin impacts gun violence and COVID-19 have had on residents’ outlook. It was conducted after 2021 saw record numbers of people killed or injured by gunfire.
Among Pew’s starkest findings was that the number of residents who said crime, drugs, and public safety was the No. 1 issue — about 70% — has increased by 30 percentage points compared with August 2020, the last time Pew conducted such a survey. It’s the highest percentage any topic has received since Pew started polling more than a decade ago, said Katie Martin, senior manager of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia research and policy initiative. . . . .
And while more than half of Black and Hispanic residents said gun violence has had a major effect on quality of life in their neighborhoods, less than 20% of white residents said the same.
There’s a lot more in the original, and while Philadelphia Inquirer articles are hidden behind a paywall, you can see a few free articles a month.
The last quoted paragraph I included reflects the city very well. Though the Inquirer has referred to Philadelphia as a “black city”, the 2020 census found that just 38.3% of the city’s population were non-Hispanic black, and Hispanics, who can be either black or white, made up 14.9%. Between non-Hispanic whites, 34.3%, Asians, 8.3%, and “other groups,” 4.3%, the city is 46.9% non-black, and it doesn’t take a terribly large percentage of the Hispanic population being white to get the city to majority non-black. The non-Hispanic white population of the city have certainly declined, but they are hardly gone. If white residents do not see crime as the most serious problem, the way black and Hispanic Philadelphians do, much of that can be attributed to the fact that, while the city’s overall population are quite “diverse” — a word I’ve come to despise — internally the city is highly segregated.
In being highly segregated, white residents can afford to see crime as a less serious problem, because crime hits white residents far less frequently. The Inquirer is very, very good at covering stories in which the victim was clearly an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or, most importantly, a cute little white girl. When Samuel Sean Collington, a Temple University student approaching graduation was murdered. Mr Collington was a white victim, allegedly by a black juvenile in a botched robbery. On December 2, 2021, the Inquirer published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him. Five separate stories about the case of a murdered white guy. The newspaper even broke precedent when it came to Mr Collington’s murder by including the name of the juvenile suspect in the case, and delving into his previous record.
Oh, it’s not as though the Inquirer doesn’t publish stories about black victims, at least when it comes to black victims who are ‘innocents’. The murder of Samir Jefferson merited two stories, and four stories about the killing of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes.[1]I did note my suspicion that young Mr Stokes might not have been quite the innocent the Inquirer, and writer Anna Orso, made him out to be. A story is merited if the victim was a local high school basketball star, and cute little white girls killed get tremendous coverage: a search of the newspaper’s website for Rian Thal returned 4855 results! But for the vast majority of black victims, Inquirer coverage is a couple paragraphs, mostly in the late evening, and which have disappeared from the main page of the newspaper’s website by morning, if even that much.
Why? It’s simple: reporting about black bad guys getting killed by other black bad guys, in the words of the Sacramento Bee, “perpetuat(es) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.” In her “apology to black Philadelphians and journalists,” publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes did not use those specific words, but the effect has been the same: no reporting of stories which might tell readers what they already know: that the vast majority of the murder victims, and their killers, in the City of Brotherly Love are black males who have been involved in the gang or criminal lifestyle.
However, despite the Inquirer’s attempt at minimizing crime in black neighborhoods, while reporting on it more diligently when the victims and perpetrators are white, because under Miss Hughes the newspaper is determinedly “anti-racist,” nobody is fooled. Part of the issue is that the newspaper’s paid circulation is pathetically low: the Philadelphia metropolitan area has roughly 6,108,000 people, meaning that the Inquirer’s circulation is paid for by a whopping 1.67% of what ought to be its service area. The circulation numbers are total, but even if all of its circulation was in the city itself, it would be paid for by just 6.35% of the population.
Pretty poor for the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper!
An Inquirer graphic shows how concerned Philly residents are. The people who are more heavily impacted by violence are more concerned, and most white residents simply are not; the gang bangers are shooting up Kensington and Strawberry Mansion, not Rittenhouse Square or Society Hill. The newspaper might not report much on killings in minority neighborhoods, but the people who live there know what happens. And while the Inquirer deliberately eschews publishing the photos of black victims and perpetrators, the television stations there are not so reticent.
Television is, after all, a heavily visual medium, and the television news broadcasts reach far more people than the Inquirer: the Inquirer itself reported that WPVI drew 287,000 viewers for it’s 6:00 PM local newscast, in February of 2018, and 163,000 for the 11:00 PM news show, while the newspaper had a circulation of 101,818 daily copies in May of 2019. WPVI, which has higher ratings than the other Philadelphia stations, is still only one of four.
Of course, local television news is free — although most people are paying for cable subscriptions — while newspapers cost money, but it would seem that a lot more people watch the local news on television than read the newspaper. There is something to be said for providing your customers what they want.
The Inquirer, under Miss Hughes and Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar, deliberately censor their coverage, to meet their “anti-racist” goals, but the truth leaks through. When the newspaper reported on the shooting of a 13-year-old boy at the intersection of 49th and Hoopes Streets, simply printing the location told Philadelphians that it was in a heavily black neighborhood, and while the newspaper didn’t report it, the victim was, in fact, black. When the paper reported on the targeted shooting death of a 15-year-old boy near Tanner Duckrey School, just printing the victim’s name, Juan Carlos Robles-Corana, told readers that the victim was Hispanic.
And so we have the report on how people feel about the issues in the city, and with the Inquirer publishing it, we can see that the propaganda the paper is trying to push has not resulted in people being misinformed. They know what is happening around them!
Perhaps even more pathetically, white Philadelphians are contributing to the crime wave. Yes, the city is plurality non-Hispanic black, and yes, black voters traditionally give around 90% of their votes to Democrats, but softer-than-soft on crime District Attorney Larry Krasner was re-elected with 71.81% of the vote in November of 2021. That number has to include a whole lot of votes from the liberal white areas, from the voters who saw the impact of violence on the quality of their lives as having a minor (49%) or no (33%) impact. It’s easy to be sympathetic to liberal causes when it’s not in your back yard.I have complained, more than once, that the Inquirer tries to hide the full truth, because the full truth does not match their editorial philosophy, but, in one very obvious sense, they really haven’t hidden the truth from the black and Hispanic populations of the city; those residents can see and hear and feel what has been happening around them. It’s actually the white residents of Chestnut Hill and Manayunk who have been deceived.
References
| ↑1 | I did note my suspicion that young Mr Stokes might not have been quite the innocent the Inquirer, and writer Anna Orso, made him out to be. |
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Seventy-six years after D-Day, British author J K Rowling enraged the left with her tweet suggesting that the word for “people who menstruate” is woman! Heaven forfend! Miss Rowling dared, dared! to suggest that menstruation is limited solely to women, that men can’t menstruate.
Yeah, I know: that’s pretty much what anyone would have said in the 20th century, and before, but last century’s people were just so unenlightened! Miss Rowling has been criticized as a TERF: trans-exclusionary radical feminist:
To some feminists, that notion is obvious: the experience of having lived as male for any period of time matters. But some trans scholars and allies say that notion is in and of itself transphobic, since it means that trans women are somehow different from women, or that they’re not women at all.
And today we have the apparently very #woke[1]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 Washington Post, kowtowing to modernism:
By Amy Goldstein and Dan Keating | Thursday, March 31, 2022 | 6:00 AM EDT
Pregnant people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus are nearly twice as likely to get covid-19 as those who are not pregnant, according to a new study that offers the broadest evidence to date of the odds of infections among vaccinated patients with different medical circumstances.
The analysis, based on medical records of nearly 14 million U.S. patients since coronavirus immunization became available, found that pregnant people who are vaccinated have the greatest risk of developing covid among a dozen medical states, including being an organ transplant recipient and having cancer.
The findings come on top of research showing that people who are pregnant or gave birth recently and became infected are especially prone to getting seriously ill from covid-19. And covid has been found to increase the risk of pregnancy complications, such as premature births.
There’s more at the original.
You know, I get it: the Post’s stylebook required “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women,” because it might just hurt some people’s precious little feelings, but I have to ask: how can the article authors, or the editors of the Post, expect readers to take this article, and the information it contains, seriously, when it was so obviously written unseriously? How many potential readers saw the headline, rolled their eyes, and just skipped it for something more intellectual, like the comics?
When I opened the article, there were 720 comments, and through as many as I skimmed, the vast, vast majority were commenting on the silliness of referring to “pregnant people”. One commenter, styling himself rwessel51, said, “I jumped from the headline straight to the comments.”
The information in the article was serious:
People Women who were fully vaccinated either before or during their pregnancies had significantly less protection from contracting COVID-19, and more likely to have become seriously ill with the disease, than women who were not pregnant. That’s serious, and serious information, and much of it was just wasted because the Post descended into the silliness of political correctness.
References
| ↑1 | From Wikipedia:
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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The maxim “If it bleeds, it leads” has long been a part of journalism. Many of the Google search returns for If it bleeds, it leads want to put that as something unique to television news broadcasts, but it long predates television news, and has frequently been used by newspapers as well.
We have often noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer, the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, doesn’t like to tell its readers the unvarnished truth, likes to censor what its readers see. The Inquirer only rarely reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. I’ve told the truth previously: unless the murder victim is someone already of note, or a cute little white girl, the editors of the Inquirer don’t care, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the murder of a young black man in Philadelphia is not news. The paper paid more attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s four separate stories; how many do the mostly black victims get?
And now, the Inquirer, with so few readers that circulation is paid for by a whopping 1.67% of what ought to be its metropolitan service area,[1]Full disclosure: even though I no longer live in the Keystone State, I am a digital subscriber to the Inquirer. and wants the public taxed to support it, is criticizing the media which do report the news the newspaper will not:
A 35-year-old won’t let Tyrone Williams forget the day Action and Eyewitness News trucks rolled down his block.
“I remember July 27, 1987, a Saturday, like it was yesterday,” Williams said, “because, at this time, I’m scarred for life from this stabbing.”
Williams was 20 years old when a group of white men and teenagers attacked him and his family outside their Olney home. One of the attackers, he remembered, used the N-word before jumping his brother Barry and attempting to stab their mother. Williams was trying to protect her when a knife went into his torso, puncturing his lung.
“I could’ve died,” Williams, now 55, recalled.
His attackers targeted the family in a case of racist mistaken identity after they’d exchanged words with a different group of African American men and boys near the now-shuttered Fern Rock Theater, Williams said.
There’s been trouble like this many times before. It’s just that no one bothered to report it. That was how Eyewitness News reporter Joyce Evans summed up coverage of the white-on-Black beating that put Williams in the hospital. When Action News’ Vernon Odom covered the same crime that evening, surviving footage described the area, then predominantly white, as “one of the town’s most racially explosive neighborhoods.”
There’s a lot more at the original, but this is the introduction to the story’s documenting that KYW-TV, Channel 3, the CBS local owned-and operated station, originated Eyewitness News in 1965, and WPVI-TV, Channel 6, the ABC local owned-and-operated station, began Action News in 1970.
This format launched in Philadelphia, first with the birth of Eyewitness News in 1965, and then with Action News in 1970. Over the next few generations, the pervasive and seductive twin broadcasts would spread to stations across the country — and with them, negative narratives about neighborhoods that would effectively “other” certain groups based largely on race, class, and zip code.
More than half a century later, the impact of this efficient and pioneering approach remains, but continues to be condemned as harmful, as critics call for a reimagining of stories that tell a fuller story of communities, one that more accurately captures the humanity and dignity of all who live there.
To what does the Inquirer object? It seems that local television stations do radical things like send cameras and reporters to local breaking news stories and, Heaven forfend! take pictures and video at the scene.
The new breed of local news would transform how Americans received the day’s headlines. It would even change the substance of the news itself. Before Eyewitness appeared on America’s small screens, local television news hardly existed, with national stories dominating the day’s headlines as anchors vied for spots at big-city network markets. And it was delivered largely behind a desk, by a suited white man in a series of passive sentences.
Primo repackaged the day’s events as infotainment — a fast-paced series of vignettes delivered by a “news family,” complete with a male-female pair of attractive, bantering anchors and intrepid reporters interviewing sources on the scene.
The station quickly climbed the ratings charts and inspired imitators nationwide. Soon, the networks were drawn to a new approach that hooked viewers with a mix of sensational headlines and emotional human interest stories.
Must’ve been what the audience wanted: the Inquirer itself reported that WPVI drew 287,000 viewers for it’s 6:00 PM local newscast, in February of 2018, and 163,000 for the 11:00 PM news show, while the newspaper had a circulation of 101,818 daily copies in May of 2019. WPVI, which has higher ratings than the other Philadelphia stations, is still only one of four.
Of course, local television news is free — although most people are paying for cable subscriptions — while newspapers cost money, but it would seem that a lot more people watch the local news than read the Inquirer. There is something to be said for providing your customers what they want.
As local TV news ratings rose and ad earnings rolled in through the end of the 20th century, Philadelphia lost hundreds of thousands of white residents to the suburban locales seen in newcast commercials for four-door sedans, Ethan Allen bedroom sets, and real estate brokerages. Images of white families in tidy subdivisions and spacious homes broke up dispatches that more often than not cast the city and its Black residents in a negative light.LOL! “(C)ommercials for four-door sedans, Ethan Allen bedroom sets, and real estate brokerages”? Kind of dripping with condescension there! Perhaps the author doesn’t believe that black Philadelphians might want Ethan Allen bedroom sets?
Most of the time, those cameramen were documenting crime in certain neighborhoods where poverty and decades of failed social policies had given way to higher rates of crime and population loss.
Note that the author was blaming “higher rates of crime and population loss” on “poverty and decades of failed social policies,” rather than the people, the criminals, committing the crimes! The not-so-subtle message: it’s not really their fault that they are out there shooting people.
Oddly enough, even though I grew up poor, I still knew that shooting people was wrong, and, amazingly enough, even though I owned a rifle and a shotgun as a teenager, I never shot anyone.
And here we come to the crux of the newspaper’s complaint, at least the crux other than Philadelphians paying more attention to television news than the paper:
The format didn’t often encourage reporters to return to the scene of the crime, follow up on root causes or the lives affected, or document the good in complex neighborhoods like Kensington— where, just like everywhere else, people live, work, and play.
If Mr Strug spent nights sitting in a police car at Kensington and Allegheny, waiting for a crime to occur, doesn’t that say that a lot of crime occurs in that area? The Philadelphia Badlands are notorious enough to have a separate Wikipedia entry, and the Inquirer itself reported, on August 17, 2020, on the open air drug market there:
“The blocks [where drug dealing takes place] never closed,” said Christine Russo, 38, who’s been using heroin for seven years. She waited Friday near Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, at the heart of the city’s opioid market, while a friend prepared to inject a dose of heroin. “Business reigns. The sun shines.”
The newspaper even included a photo of what appears, from the back, to be a man injecting drugs right out on Kensington Avenue, in front of SEPTA’s Allegheny Station.
Here’s where the Inquirer’s introspection fails: if television news doesn’t do much in the way of follow-up on crime stories, is that not a niche that the newspaper itself should fill? What we’ve actually seen is the paper trying to make martyrs out of 12-year-old Thomas J Siderio, Jr, who opened fire on the police, including trying to get the officer who shot and killed the punk himself killed, by investigating and publishing his name after Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw refused to disclose it for the officer’s safety, and 13-year-old Marcus Stokes, whom the paper falsely said “was fatally shot in North Philadelphia on his way to school“, when, in actuality, he was sitting in a parked, and possibly disabled, car, eleven blocks from his school, a quarter of an hour after he was supposed to be in school.
What we should see are stories in the newspaper about those shot and killed, where they lived, what their families were like, and how they lived their lives, but those types of stories seem limited to white victims like Jason Kutt and Samuel Collington. As of 2:19 PM EDT on Tuesday, March 29th, the paper has no such story on 15-year-old Sean Toomey, another supposedly innocent victim, gunned down in what was probably a wayward shot from another crime.
Of course, if the Inquirer actually reported in depth on the victims in Killadelphia’s combat zones, it would find that most of the victims were bad guys themselves, gang-bangers or wannabes, and, to be brutally honest, mostly black. That is something that Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar and Published Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes absolutely do not want to publicize.
As of Monday, March 28th, there have been 495 people reported as having been shot in the City of Brotherly Love, 373 of the victims being black (of which 55 were reported as being Hispanic), 116 white (of which 18 were reported as being Hispanic), 4 (including one listed as Hispanic) Asian, and 2 listed as being of unknown race.
It’s difficult to ignore those numbers: in a city that’s only 38.27% non-Hispanic black, 64.24% of all shooting victims are non-Hispanic black. Black Philadelphians including those who are Hispanic constitute 75.35% of all shooting victims.
The Inquirer laments that local television news is actually covering the news, but doesn’t cover the news in depth. Yet the paper itself not only ignores many of the stories superficially, but declines to cover the crime stories in depth, because those stories just don’t fit Teh Narrative.
References
| ↑1 | Full disclosure: even though I no longer live in the Keystone State, I am a digital subscriber to the Inquirer. |
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And the credentialed media drumbeat to validate the claim that ‘Lia’ Thomas, the University of Pennsylvania swimmer who now identifies as a woman is actually a woman continues. Born William Thomas, and ranked #562 as a male during his first three seasons on Penn’s men’s swim team, he’s now ranked #1 as a female, and won the NCAA Championship in the women’s 500 yard freestyle event.
First Twitter permanently banned Mark Margolis for saying that the ‘transgendered’ were a very small fraction of the population, which is objectively true — the Williams Institute guesstimated it at 0.6% of the population, and that organization also claims a higher percentage of the population are homosexual, 4.5%, than the Centers for Disease Control’s much lower figure[1]The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either … Continue reading — and that ‘transgendered’ “have a mental disorder.”
And now we have this, from the New York Post, one of the few credentialed media sources which covers the subject honestly:
By Jon Levine | March 26, 2022 | 8:02 AM EDT
Doctored photo of Will Thomas. Click to enlarge.
“The edited image has definitely undergone some sort of softening and smoothing effect,” Jonathan Gallegos, a former White House director of digital content for President Trump, told The Post. “It’s clear this job was not done by a professional. This level of skin smoothing is a hallmark sign of an amateur job.”
“Wow. That’s really bad,” said a photographer who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals from trans activists.
Thomas — a biological male — made headlines last week after blowing fellow female competitors out of the water to win the 500-yard NCAA title.
The allegedly doctored image of Thomas ran on The Today Show and posted to Twitter on March 17. The touched-up photo removed facial lines, skin discolorations, notable red impressions on her face caused by goggles, and blurred the adam’s apple. The show later ran the original photo — warts and all — in a clip posted to Twitter on March 18.
Undoctored photo of Will Thomas. Click to enlarge.
The differences between the two photos is subtle, but it is there. The most obvious change is in the coloration, as though it went through a filter, but the obvious question is: why would NBC News, purportedly a reliable journalistic source, alter a photo? The obvious answer is to present him as slightly more feminine than he is.
The credentialed media are attempting to influence the debate over whether girls can be boys and boys can be girls by using language tilted toward the idea that yes, people can change their sex.
Well, no, they can’t.
In the year 2525, if man is still alive, some anthropologist studying the United States prior to the devastation of World War III, is going to come across the grave of Mr Thomas. The records having all been destroyed, he will take accurate and scientific measurements of the remains. The soft tissues having long since decayed away, he’ll be dealing with the skeleton, and, taking measurements of the hip structure, he will write down in his notes, “The subject was male.” Probing more deeply, he gets lucky, and extracts a bit of DNA, examines it, and determines from the chromosomes, “The subject was male.”
Such will be objective determinations, based purely on science. The current claim, that ‘Lia’ Thomas is a woman, is based upon the entirely subjective claim by Mr Thomas that he feels like a woman.
Mr Thomas can claim to be a woman all he wants; as long as his claim is personal, and doesn’t infringe on other people’s rights, more power to him.
But his claim, having been taken seriously, has infringed on other people’s rights. He has robbed some real women swimmers of trophies, and the opportunity to swim in events for which they would otherwise have qualified were he not in the competition. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson avoided the question of how she would define a woman because she knew that the question would come before the Court sooner or later, with sooner being more probable, and that will result in a legal decision which will impact other people.
Every bird, every reptile, and every mammal have the ability to distinguish between males and females of their own species. Only human liberals have managed to educate that ability out of themselves.
References
| ↑1 | The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either stating that they were ‘something else’ or declining to respond. The Williams Institute previously stated that 3.8% identify as LGTBQ. |
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I use the term ‘journolism’ to refer to heavily biased reporting. It’s not a misspelling: my of 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. Many times biased journalism comes not from stating something false, but the omission of pertinent information, and boy, did Philadelphia Inquirer writers Ximena Conde, John Duchneskie, and Aseem Shukla do that here!
Chart from The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 25, 2022. Click to enlarge.
by Ximena Conde, John Duchneskie, and Aseem Shukla | Friday, March 25, 2022
Philadelphia lost almost 25,000 residents in a year, according to new census data looking at a full year of the pandemic released Thursday.
The drop in total population between July 2020 and July 2021 is the largest one-year decline since 1975 and follows almost a decade of population growth for Philadelphia, which topped 1.6 million residents in 2020. The losses were driven primarily by the residents who moved out of the city, which exceeded the number of people moving into Philly.
In the U.S. Census Bureau’s 12-month snapshot, Philly saw the highest disparity since 2001 between people moving in and those moving out. That difference led to a net loss of more than 28,000 residents, doubling what census numbers showed for the year prior.
There’s a lot more at the original, which you can read by following the link embedded in the headline.
The article gives some of the reasons for the city’s guesstimated population loss:
The article writers noted that the population estimates are not as accurate as the actual census counts, so the data are at least questionable.
But despite the “few possible factors driving the Philly departures” given, one was conspicuous in its absence: the writers never mentioned Philadelphia’s huge crime rate! 2020, the first year of the panicdemic pandemic, saw the city’s homicide numbers jump from 356 in 2019 — which was already the highest since 2007 — to 499, good for second place all time, and only one short of the record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990. Then, in 2021, that record was blown to smithereens, with 562 murders.
The police were hobbled by a social and racial justice prosecutor who is more interested in finding malfeasance among the police than he is with prosecuting actual criminals, the idiotic #BlackLivesMatter protests which further alienated the population from the police, and the Inquirer itself, which, under “anti-racist” publisher Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes and new Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar, has editorial policies very much in tune with District Attorney Larry Krasner’s philosophy of soft-peddling crime stories because they might negatively impact and stereotype the black community in the city.
According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, there have been 115 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, March 24th, three more than the same date last year, meaning that Philadelphia is on a path to come very close to, and possibly exceeding, the 562 record. Fortunately, the latest man killed was a criminal attempting to rob a Dollar General store, shot dead by the store manager after the would-be robber made threatening moves with what turned out to be a toy gun in his jacket pocket.
As Robert Stacy McCain would say, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”
The shooting occurred in the area of Mulberry and Devereaux Streets. The teen was taken by police to Jefferson Torresdale Hospital. He was reported in extremely critical condition.
Police received preliminary information that two males suspected in the shooting also attempted a gunpoint robbery a short time earlier in Mayfair.
Philadelphians see stories like this every day, perhaps not in the Inquirer, but the local television stations carry the stories. In a city in which the quality of life is spiraling downward, in which the voters have just re-elected a softer-than-soft on crime District Attorney, in which Dollar General store managers feel the need to carry a firearm to protect his employees and himself because, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away, how is it that three well-educated and well-paid Inquirer reporters can simply omit the fact that Philadelphia is wracked with crime and violence as one possible reason that people are moving away?
Well, perhaps I’m being unfair in blaming the three reporters; it’s entirely possible that they did include it, but Editor Gabriel Escobar or one of his minions blue penciled it.[1]Yes, I know: I’m showing my age! But, whoever is responsible is showing the journolism of the Inquirer, while Mr Escobar and Miss Hughes and the Lenfest Institute which owns the paper scratch their heads, wondering why the newspaper is losing readers.
References
| ↑1 | Yes, I know: I’m showing my age! |
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In 1971, President Richard Nixon sought a restraining order to prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from printing more of the so-called “Pentagon Papers,” technically the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, a classified history and assessment of American policy and operations in the Vietnam war. The Times and the Post fought the injunctions in court, the Times winning in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). The Times was all about the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press.
So, the Times is all for Freedom of Speech and of the Press, right? Friday saw this from the Editorial Board:
by The Editorial Board | Friday, March 18, 2022
For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.
This social silencing, this depluralizing of America, has been evident for years, but dealing with it stirs yet more fear. It feels like a third rail, dangerous. For a strong nation and open society, that is dangerous.
How has this happened? In large part, it’s because the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture. Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.
Many Americans are understandably confused, then, about what they can say and where they can say it. People should be able to put forward viewpoints, ask questions and make mistakes and take unpopular but good-faith positions on issues that society is still working through — all without fearing cancellation.
There’s a lot more from the original, but either the Editorial Board have a very short memory, or they are hypocrites.
By Andrew Marantz[1]Andrew Marantz (@AndrewMarantz) is a staff writer for The New Yorker. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the … Continue reading | October 4, 2019 | 6:01 AM EDT
There has never been a bright line between word and deed. Yet for years, the founders of Facebook and Twitter and 4chan and Reddit — along with the consumers obsessed with these products, and the investors who stood to profit from them — tried to pretend that the noxious speech prevalent on those platforms wouldn’t metastasize into physical violence. In the early years of this decade, back when people associated social media with Barack Obama or the Arab Spring, Twitter executives referred to their company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” Sticks and stones and assault rifles could hurt us, but the internet was surely only a force for progress.
No one believes that anymore. Not after the social-media-fueled campaigns of Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump; not after the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va.; not after the massacres in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and a Walmart in a majority-Hispanic part of El Paso. The Christchurch shooter, like so many of his ilk, had spent years on social media trying to advance the cause of white power. But these posts, he eventually decided, were not enough; now it was “time to make a real life effort post.” He murdered 52 people.
That the editors of the Times considered this an important article is demonstrated by the title graphic, a bit more ornate than is typical. It was spread full sized across the screen, taking up both the width and depth of my fairly large-sized monitor. This was a can’t-not-notice display, something the editors use to grab your attention.
A couple more paragraphs down, and Mr Marantz said this:
Mr Marantz’ article continued with several suggestions, which boiled down to one thing: the government should set up some sort of approved publication space to tell us the truth. What a great idea!
Mr Marantz’s OpEd piece followed, eleven months after, Chad Malloy’s[2]Chad Malloy is a male who believes that he is really a woman, and goes by the made-up name of ‘Parker Malloy.’ article claiming that a restriction on speech actually promotes freedom of speech:
by Parker Malloy[3]While The First Street Journal’s Stylebook states that the pronouns and name appropriate to a person’s sex at birth are to be used, we do not change direct quotes, and in The New York … Continue reading | November 29, 2018
In September, Twitter announced changes to its “hateful conduct” policy, violations of which can get users temporarily or permanently barred from the site. The updates, an entry on Twitter’s blog explained, would expand its existing rules “to include content that dehumanizes others based on their membership in an identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct target.” A little more than a month later, the company quietly rolled out the update, expanding the conduct page from 374 to 1,226 words, which went largely unnoticed until this past week.
While much of the basic framework stayed the same, the latest version leaves much less up for interpretation. Its ban on “repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone” was expanded to read: “We prohibit targeting individuals with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”
The final sentence, paired with the fact that the site appeared poised to actually enforce its rules, sent a rumble through certain vocal corners of the internet. To trans people, it represented a recognition that our identity is an accepted fact and that to suggest otherwise is a slur. But to many on the right, it reeked of censorship and “political correctness.”
Twitter is already putting the policy into effect. Last week, it booted Meghan Murphy, a Canadian feminist who runs the website Feminist Current. Ms. Murphy hasn’t exactly supported trans people — especially trans women. She regularly calls trans women “he” and “him,” as she did referring to the journalist and trans woman Shon Faye in a 2017 article. In the run-up to her suspension, Ms. Murphy tweeted that “men aren’t women.” While this is a seeming innocuous phrase when considered without context, the “men” she was referring to were trans women.
There’s more at the original.
The policy to which Mr Malloy referred would apply to this site as well, as we do not lie here: males are males and females are females, and the sexes simply cannot be changed.
That, however, is not my point in this article. My point is that the Times very deliberately published OpEd pieces calling freedom of speech sometimes harmful — sometimes meaning when conservative opinions are expressed — and celebrating the silencing of some speech. Were I to submit this article to the Times, or any other organ of the credentialed media, for publication, it would be disallowed because I referred to Mr Malloy as Mr Malloy, while the stylebooks used by almost all organs of the credentialed media insist on using the honorifics, pronouns and names preferred by the ‘transgendered’ rather than doing something really radical and telling the truth.
Back to the editorial first cited:
This poll and other recent surveys from the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation reveal a crisis of confidence around one of America’s most basic values. Freedom of speech and expression is vital to human beings’ search for truth and knowledge about our world. A society that values freedom of speech can benefit from the full diversity of its people and their ideas. At the individual level, human beings cannot flourish without the confidence to take risks, pursue ideas and express thoughts that others might reject.
Most important, freedom of speech is the bedrock of democratic self-government. If people feel free to express their views in their communities, the democratic process can respond to and resolve competing ideas. Ideas that go unchallenged by opposing views risk becoming weak and brittle rather than being strengthened by tough scrutiny. When speech is stifled or when dissenters are shut out of public discourse, a society also loses its ability to resolve conflict, and it faces the risk of political violence.
Also see: William Teach: NY Times Is Suddenly Very Concerned Over Loss Of Free Speech
Oops! I guess that didn’t work for them!
The Times’ Editorial Board can tell us all they want how they support freedom of speech and of the press, but the truth is that they support their freedom of speech and their freedom of the press. Editors and publishers in general absolutely hate the fact that the rise of the internet took away their ‘gatekeeping’ function, and now anybody can publish whatever he wishes, without having to first be approved by someone else.
References
| ↑1 | Andrew Marantz (@AndrewMarantz) is a staff writer for The New Yorker. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.” |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Chad Malloy is a male who believes that he is really a woman, and goes by the made-up name of ‘Parker Malloy.’ |
| ↑3 | While The First Street Journal’s Stylebook states that the pronouns and name appropriate to a person’s sex at birth are to be used, we do not change direct quotes, and in The New York Times’ original Mr Malloy is referred to by his false name. |
The Patricians just aren’t like you and me. If you get canned for some reason — I’m retired now, so I’m beyond the ability of anyone to fire — you might, might! be able able to get a few hundred bucks a week in unemployment benefits. If you are terminated for cause, such as an inappropriate sexual relationship with a subordinate, something which could expose your company to a sexual harassment claim, you might not be able to get even unemployment compensation.
But life is different for the elites. From Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion:
Former CNN Chief Jeff Zucker to Get $10 Million Settlement, Agrees Not to Sue
“if WarnerMedia keeps their side of the deal, in the next week to 10 days, Zucker will receive a one-time payment of around $10 million”
Posted by Mike LaChance | Thursday, March 10, 2022 | 1:00 PM EST
CNN’s former president Jeff Zucker is getting a major golden parachute from his former employer, with the agreement not to sue them.
It’s a pretty good deal for a man who basically destroyed the network’s ratings and brand.
FOX News reports:
Ex-CNN chief Jeff Zucker to receive roughly $10 million from WarnerMedia, won’t sue: report
Former CNN boss Jeff Zucker has reportedly agreed to a deal with CNN parent company WarnerMedia over his swift exit from the network that will award him roughly $10 million in exchange for not suing after being forced to resign last month.
“Details of the confidential package are obviously being kept close to the vest, but sources tell us Zucker made the decision several weeks ago to accept what had been put on the table by his old bosses at the time of his cable news exit. What we do know is that, if WarnerMedia keeps their side of the deal, in the next week to 10 days, Zucker will receive a one-time payment of around $10 million,” Deadline’s Dominic Patten and Ted Johnson wrote, citing “sources.”
It seems that Mr Zucker’s girlfriend, who was not initially fired forced to resign, but quit a couple of weeks later, is also getting a golden parachute of a cool million.
As we have noted previously, Mr Zucker had a net worth of $60 million, plus an annual base salary of $6.3 million, before any bonuses — and how he could ever qualify for a bonus the way CNN’s ratings tanked is beyond me, but he certainly did get them — and Miss Gollust wasn’t exactly living paycheck-to-paycheck herself, with an estimated net worth of $5 million.
It seems that CNN has some dirty laundry the network wants desperately to keep out of the public’s sight. Given that the relationship between the two has been reported, by multiple sources, as an “open secret,” it has to be asked why CNN forced them out over that, rather than the ratings disaster the network had become.
Remember: the excuse for the resignation given was that Mr Zucker and Miss Gollust, both of whom are divorced, failed to report the relationship. But the head of human resources for CNN, Lisa Greene, is also an Executive Vice President, as was Miss Gollust, and the idea that someone who hobnobs with the network’s top brass didn’t know the “open secret” everyone else did is pretty difficult to swallow.
So, what does Mr Zucker know that CNN is so desperate to keep quiet?
Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, who has presided over an ever-increasing homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love, had promised an impartial investigation into the shooting death of 12-year-old Thomas “TJ” Siderio, who shot at police officers, then turned and fled, with a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol in his hand, when he was shot and killed. About the only thing not clear was whether young Mr Siderio had tried to ditch his weapon “moments before a fatal bullet struck him in the back”.
The Commissioner has now announced that the officer will be fired.
The Philly police officer who fatally shot a 12-year-old boy will be fired, Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said
Outlaw declined to identify the officer, citing potential threats to the officer’s safety.
by Chris Palmer, Max Marin, and Rodrigo Torrejón | Tuesday, March 8, 2022
The Philadelphia police officer who fatally shot a 12-year-old boy in the back last week will be fired, Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said Tuesday.
Outlaw said the officer will be suspended for 30 days with intent to dismiss, the process by which officers are typically removed from the force.
So much for that fair and impartial investigation! Of course, the appropriately-named Commissioner Outlaw is really just Mayor Jim Kenney’s stooge, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that she was just following orders. If the police officers union decided on a job action over this, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
But here’s where The Philadelphia Inquirer really messes up!
She declined to identify the officer, citing potential threats to his safety. But police sources with direct knowledge of the investigation said the officer was Edsaul Mendoza, a five-year veteran assigned to a task force in South Philadelphia. Attempts to reach him for comment Tuesday were unsuccessful, and the police officers’ union representing him declined to comment.
So, the Commissioner at least attempted to keep the officer’s name private, due to threats to his safety, threats on his life, but the Inquirer investigates, determines who the officer is, and then publishes his name!
If Gabriel Escobar, Senior Vice President and Executive Editor of the Inquirer, and Elizabeth Hughes, the Publisher and Chief Executive Officer, wanted to get the officer targeted and killed, what would they have done differently? And does anybody believe that the article authors, Chris Palmer, Max Marin, and Rodrigo Torrejón, would have included his name if Mr Escobar had not approved?
Steve Keeley of Fox29 news reported on a triple murder in the West Oak Lane neighborhood, and included the press release from the Philadelphia Police Department. The press release identified the victims as three “black males.”
Yet, when the Inquirer reported on it, writer Jenn Ladd, though she took the descriptions of the victims’ injuries almost verbatim from the police report, eliminated the fact that the victims were black. The “anti-racist” Inquirer once again censored the news Miss Hughes and Mr Escobar don’t want the public to know!
The Inquirer enjoys absolute freedom of the press, as it should. Perhaps Miss Hughes and Mr Escobar believe that revealing the accused officer’s name falls under the notion of the public’s “right to know.” But given the newspaper’s nearly everyday censorship of crime stories — Miss Hughes stated, directly, that the paper was “Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime,” — it would seem that the Inquirer is not nearly so concerned with the public’s “right to know” if it’s not information the publisher and executive editor want people to know.
Of course, a triple, clearly targeted fatal shooting in West Oak Lane? Everybody who knows anything about the city knew that the victims were black! By self-censoring that detail, the newspaper was inviting readers to guess, to speculate, and we all know what their guesses and speculations would be.
When it came to the officer’s name, however, most of the public couldn’t guess . . . and the Inquirer made sure that it wasn’t necessary to guess.
The Inquirer’s Editorial Board had already opined that the killing of a young, gun-toting punk who opened fire on police young Mr Siderio should “should make every Philadelphian outraged.” I guess that outrage means that the Inquirer ought to put a target on the officer, to try to get him killed, because that’s exactly what they have done.
If the officer named is assaulted, if he is shot and wounded or even killed, his blood will be on the hands of Gabriel Escobar and Elizabeth Hughes.