Tag Archives: #Journolism

Posted on by

A stunning lack of perspective

Well, perhaps not that stunning after all.

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong tells us how tears came to her eyes as she witnessed a Black Lives Matter demonstration in remembrance of the death of addled drug user and convicted felon, George Floyd:

    Tears came to my eyes during a visit to a West Mount Airy neighborhood

    Each night, residents walk to one of four corners at the intersection of Emlen Street and West Mount Airy Avenue and stand for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in memory of George Floyd.

    by Jenice Armstrong | Monday, October 11, 2021

    People think I’m so tough, but I cried at work on Thursday.

    I didn’t break into the ugly cry, thankfully, but a few tears fell. I was in West Mount Airy, visiting a neighborhood where for the last year, residents have been coming out each night and standing in silence for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, marking how long a murderous Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck.

    Dozens participated each night during the summer of 2020, in the aftermath of the killing of the unarmed Black man. Lately the numbers have been down. Still, at least a handful of residents emerge from their homes just before 8 each evening and walk to the corners at the intersection of Emlen Street and West Mount Airy Avenue for the observance.

    The evening I was there last week, something else was afoot that led to even more participants: Twice in less than a week, a Black family had been the target of vandalism. First, someone smashed the windshield of their parked car with a rock. Days later, another rock came crashing through a window on their enclosed front porch.

    “An incident like this is unusual in Mt. Airy and is a reminder that there are still people who are unfriendly to anti-racism and that even our peaceful, diverse neighborhood is not insulated from divisiveness, fear and hatred,” Keely McCarthy wrote me in an email.

There’s more at the original, including two photos showing the public out holding Black Lives Matter signs.

But let’s tell the truth here: black lives don’t matter, at least not to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which only reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love is an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl is the victim. We noted, on Saturday, the killing of a 13-year-old boy sitting in a car with “several others” at the intersection of North Judson and West Clearfield Streets, in what the Philadelphia Police and the Inquirer will not say was a targeted hit, but of course, it was. Someone shooting at least ten rounds at a parked car full of people isn’t exactly an accident.

While law enforcement has not released the identity of the victim, The Philadelphia Tribune, a publication for the city’s black community, noted that, in 2020, black victims accounted for about 86% of the city’s 499 homicide victims, and 84% of the 2,236 shootings; non-Hispanic black Americans make up only about 38% of the city’s population. In all probability, on that corner, in that neighborhood, the 13-year-old victim was black.

And now there’s this:

Let’s just stop with the subtitle: the victim, sitting in a parked car after 9:00 AM, was not on his way to school; the E Washington Rhodes School website states “Breakfast will be served from 8:15 am to 8:45 am each day. All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.” The victim was more than 15 minutes late, and not making any move to get to school, which was eleven blocks away at 2900 West Clearfield Street. The shooting intersection is in the middle of the 2300 block of West Clearfield.

    A 15-year-old was shot in the leg in North Philadelphia on Sunday night as he was leaving a vigil for a 13-year-old boy who was killed Friday morning, police said.

    At least 10 shots were fired just before 7 p.m. Sunday on the 2600 block of North 22nd Street, where dozens of people had gathered to release blue and white balloons in remembrance of a boy who was fatally shot Friday just blocks from his school.

    The 15-year-old shot Sunday was struck in the left calf and hospitalized at Temple University Hospital in stable condition, police said. No one was arrested in connection with the shooting, which took place just outside the Cecil B. Moore Recreation Center. Police said it’s unknown if the two shootings are related.

There’s more at the original, but one thing is absolutely true: with each day that passes, the good people of the City of Brotherly Love, and the #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 journolists[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading of The Philadelphia Inquirer prove that black lives don’t matter, don’t matter much at all. If the shooting on Friday was a targeted attack, then the one at the vigil on Sunday was as well. “At least ten shots” rang out at a vigil for the murder victim, and if the shooter displayed the gang bangers’ notoriously poor accuracy with bullets, it was very accurate in sending the intended message: whatever beef the gang had with the victim, or perhaps someone else sitting in that parked, and possibly disabled,[3]Police Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it. vehicle, thinking anything good or nice about the victim was not allowed thinking.

Perhaps the Sunday shooter was trying to knock off one of the people sitting in that car but who wasn’t hurt.

I have to ask: what good are the few dozen people in Mt Airy doing, holding up signs and gathering for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in the memory of a career criminal like George Floyd, rather than working to make Philly’s streets safe for the black, and white, and Hispanic, and Asian, people still alive in that city? Don’t tell me how horrible it is that Mr Floyd died while being restrained by a white policeman when nobody gives a damn about the hundreds of people spilling out their blood in the city’s mean streets.

——————————

Update: Tuesday, October 12, 2021 | 8:30 AM EDT

The last referenced story has already disappeared from the Inquirer’s website main page, though truly important stories like this one about a British golf ball remain up and how the paper’s deputy food editor described an egg sandwich as his only comfort food while deciding to ‘come out’ as homosexual. How does revealing to its readership one of the paper’s writers sexual orientation outweigh the murders in the city, and why do we even need to know about it? If he is going to be reviewing a restaurant, why should it be important for anyone who doesn’t know or interact with him personally to know with whom he sleeps?

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page was finally updated after the long holiday weekend,[4]Only government employees get Columbus Day Indigenous People’s Day off. and, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Monday, October 11, 2021, 431 souls have been sent untimely to their eternal rewards. 431 Philadelphians murdered in 284 days works out to 1.5176 per day, and if that rate holds constant for the rest of the year, 554 people will bleed out their lives’ blood in the city’s mean streets.

The city has already seen its eleventh highest homicide total ever, with 81 days remaining in this bloody year. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw have already presided over the city’s second bloodiest year, missing tying the record by just one dead body, and now they are on track to not just break the record set in 1990, the depths of the crack cocaine wars, but shatter it, decimate it, blow it out of the water by more than 10%, and nobody at the nation’s third oldest newspaper gives a damn.

References

References
↑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 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.

↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑3 Police Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it.
↑4 Only government employees get Columbus Day Indigenous People’s Day off.
Posted on by

The internet is forever . . . and so is stupidity. Journolists attempt to control the language to influence people's thinking

As regular readers — both of them — of The First Street Journal know, I have a tendency to do screen captures of things I suspect might be deleted. As Travis Lyles, “the first official Instagram Editor at The Washington Post,” now knows, the internet is forever.

    Washington Post adds ‘pregnant individuals’ to style guide

    by Luke Gentile, Social Media Producer | October 1, 2021 | 4:51 PM

    When referring to pregnancy, the Washington Post will strive to be more inclusive and use the term “pregnant individuals,” according to a Twitter post that has since been made private by the publication’s Instagram editor.

    “While biology dictates who can become pregnant, it does not always reflect gender identity,” the style manual reads. “If we say pregnant women, we exclude those who are transgender and nonbinary.”

    However, writers can’t use “pregnant individual” as a blanket term, as that would be at the expense of women who are already a marginalized group, according to the style guide.

    “If you are dealing with a situation in which you know the people identify as women , then you can appropriately use the phrase pregnant woman or pregnant women,” the directive stated. “In other situations, to be more inclusive, use pregnant women and other pregnant individuals.”

The Washington Examiner then included the screenshot of Mr Lyles Instagram post:

Washington Examiner screen capture of Travis Lyles’ Instagram post. Click to enlarge.

There’s more at the original.

So, what is the Washington Examiner? Originally a tabloid-sized daily in the nation’s capital, now a weekly publication and conservative website, it has been around for sixteen years now. Like The Washington Times, it originally hoped to supplant the post, but never did. Wikipedia has questioned its journalism, but at least here, Luke Gentile, the site’s social media producer, had the documentation.

Also see: Abigail Shrier, via Bari Weiss: Top Trans Doctors Blow the Whistle on ‘Sloppy’ Care

Conservatives routinely mock what journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading have been using as politically correct terminology, but it’s more than just political correctness at work here. It is a leftist attempt to normalize transgenderism, to normalize the cockamamie notion that, in the words of the Kinks, girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

We have previously noted how the left have been trying this, even altering a quote from liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the ACLU having to apologize for such obvious stupidity.

Even Mr Lyles recognized the biology, saying, “While biology dictates who can become pregnant, it does not always reflect gender identity,” a statement which attempts to decouple the as-long-as-we-have-had-language associations between man and male, woman and female. The control of language is the control of ideas, something the left well know, and something we must resist to preserve the common sense of millennia of known human language and history. The left are attempting to prey on conservatives’ sense of courtesy against us, to get conservatives, and everyone else, used to the idea of transgenderism as somehow being normal and acceptable, as a way to undermine our thinking and our ideology.

It’s simple: it is better to be discourteous than suborned.

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.
Posted on by

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is something the credentialed media don’t seem to like

We have already noted that some hospitals have been firing nurses for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccines, and we had hardly covered them all. The Lexington Herald-Leader reported that some Kentucky hospitals have begun firing staff who refused a COVID vaccine.

    Though the vaccine mandate announcement was made in a unified voice alongside Gov. Andy Beshear, each hospitals’ enforcement of the requirement varies. The Herald-Leader surveyed each hospital, and though it was couched as a requirement, only some have made it a condition of employment.

    The initially agreed-upon deadline for many was September 15, but some have extended it and few have yet to disclose what percentage of their staff fulfilled the requirement, or what will happen to staff who didn’t. Some have confirmed they will offer weekly testing as an alternative, while others are moving more swiftly to write-ups and, in some cases, immediate firings.

    By the end of the day Wednesday, for instance, 23 staff had refused vaccination and were fired at St. Claire Regional Medical Center, one of the hospitals hardest hit by the most recent and severe surge in coronavirus cases. Fifteen personnel were approved for a religious or medical exemption. At the time the mandate was announced in early August, 30% of staff were unvaccinated, CEO and President Donald H. Lloyd said in a statement.

In yet another example of what I have frequently referred to as 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. shows just how great their journolism[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading is.

    ‘I see someone quit every day’: Nurses share horror stories from hospital staff shortage, in their own words

    Nurses, already physically and emotionally drained from a year and a half on the front lines of a pandemic, are being asked to care for more patients than is safe for either the patient or the nurse.

    by Maureen May[3]Maureen May, R.N., is a longtime Temple University Hospital nurse and president of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, which represents 9,500 nurses and health-care … Continue reading | Thursday, September 23, 2021 | 9:00 AM EDT

    Nurses quite literally have their fingers on the pulse of patient care — and we’re sounding the alarm: There are not nearly enough of us at the bedside. What this means in ERs and on hospital floors in our area, throughout the state and even across the nation, is that nurses, already physically and emotionally drained from a year and a half on the front lines of a pandemic, are being asked to care for more patients than is safe for either the patient or the nurse.

Full disclosure: My wife is a registered nurse, working in a hospital.

    When this happens — when nurses are routinely required to care for more patients than is safe — it’s called chronic nurse short-staffing, and care suffers. Nurses suffer, too. These are our stories.

      I see someone quit every day

      by Peg Lawson[4]Peg Lawson, R.N., has worked as an ER nurse at Einstein Hospital for 30 years. She is co-president of Einstein Nurses United.

      We are experiencing a turnover rate now that I’ve never seen in the 30 years I’ve been at Einstein. Every day, someone leaves. Nurses used to be here for three or four years before moving on; now, it’s three or four months. It’s scary on so many levels.

      Nurses who are brand-new, just coming out of school, are being thrust into assignments with high acuity even as they’re forced to handle more patients because the units are short-staffed. Experienced resource nurses are just not available to help, and these new nurses are getting burned out very quickly due to the lack of support and great demand put on their shoulders.

There’s much more at the original. The author collected the stories of five different RNs on the front lines of fighting COVID-19 right now, and I recommend reading it. And while it’s a bit of a stretch to accuse the author of journolism, because she isn’t a professional journalist, the article, which shows the difficulty today’s RNs are having with understaffing, cannot be considered complete without noting that part of the understaffing has been artificially created by vaccine mandates, and the firing of, or quitting by, nurses who decline to be vaccinated. If the Maureen May didn’t include that point, an editor of the Enquirer Inquirer should have.

Media bias does not normally take the form of publishing falsehoods; there are few deliberate lies in the credentialed media. Rather, media bias usually takes the form of lies of omission, of not telling the whole truth in a way that distorts the entire story. We have previously noted that Philadelphia’s Acting Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole has a vaccine mandate in place for the city’s health care workers, and said, dismissively, “If you’re more committed to not getting the vaccine than to the safety of your patients, it’s time to do something else. Health care is not for you.”

The editorial position of the Inquirer is to support vaccine mandates. But such mandates have consequences, one being that some people will refuse to be assimilated comply, and choose to either resign or be fired over their refusal. Not reporting that, not reporting that in an already short-staffed state, nurses are leaving or being dismissed for a refusal to take a vaccine which has not been out long enough for us to have complete information about its long term effects.

Though some doctors have pooh-poohed the idea that it’s harmful, researchers have collected over 140,000 reports by adult women who have seen significant changes in their menstrual cycles after getting vaccinated. Could this affect future fertility, or produce children with birth defects? Nobody knows yet; further research is needed.

    Thalidomide was first marketed in 1957 in West Germany, where it was available over the counter. When first released, thalidomide was promoted for anxiety, trouble sleeping, “tension”, and morning sickness. While it was initially thought to be safe in pregnancy, concerns regarding birth defects arose until in 1961 the medication was removed from the market in Europe. The total number of embryos affected by use during pregnancy is estimated at 10,000, of which about 40% died around the time of birth. Those who survived had limb, eye, urinary tract, and heart problems. Its initial entry into the US market was prevented by Frances Kelsey at the FDA. The birth defects caused by thalidomide led to the development of greater drug regulation and monitoring in many countries.

The COVID-19 vaccines were hurriedly developed and rushed to market due to the tremendous economic and social disruptions caused by federal and state governments’ reaction to, overreaction to, the spread of COVID-19; there are no long-term studies on the vaccines’ effects because it hasn’t even existed for very long. The New York Times reported:[5]Hat tip to William Teach for the story.

    Roughly 221 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine have been dispensed thus far in the United States, compared with about 150 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine. In a half-dozen studies published over the past few weeks, Moderna’s vaccine appeared to be more protective than the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in the months after immunization.

    The latest such study, published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, evaluated the real-world effectiveness of the vaccines at preventing symptomatic illness in about 5,000 health care workers in 25 states. The study found that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had an effectiveness of 88.8 percent, compared with Moderna’s 96.3 percent.

    Research published on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against hospitalization fell from 91 percent to 77 percent after a four-month period following the second shot. The Moderna vaccine showed no decline over the same period.

The vaccines are at least somewhat effective in preventing contracting the virus in the first place, and in reducing the impact of the disease for those who contract it despite being vaccinated. But it has become clear that the Pfizer vaccine, at least, came with exaggerated promises; in the real world, it does not seem to have matched the hype.

Overall, it appears to be a net good, despite some reports of serious side effects. But it isn’t perfect, and it is reasonable for people to have concerns. Too bad that The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t want you to know that.

If you are sworn in for a criminal trial, you will be asked to swear that what you are about to say will be “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Journalism, responsible journalism, requires the whole truth, and that’s what the Inquirer doesn’t want you to know.

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.
↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑3 Maureen May, R.N., is a longtime Temple University Hospital nurse and president of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, which represents 9,500 nurses and health-care professionals across the commonwealth. She has worked at the bedside for more than 35 years.
↑4 Peg Lawson, R.N., has worked as an ER nurse at Einstein Hospital for 30 years. She is co-president of Einstein Nurses United.
↑5 Hat tip to William Teach for the story.
Posted on by

I’ve said it before: when it comes to murder, The Philadelphia Inquirer is much more concerned about cute little white girls

I have previously noted what I called the racism of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and have noted, many times, that unless a murder victim is someone already of note, or a cute little white girl,[1]When accessed in September 21, 2021, at 2:05 PM EDT, the search returned 4,548 results. 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.

My point about the “cute little white girl” was in reference to Rian Thal, “a party promoter well-known in the city’s nightclub scene” and drug dealer, who was murdered on June 27, 2009. The city was captured by Miss Thal’s killing, and the local media were full of stories about it. The Inquirer and its sister publication, the Philadelphia Daily News, just loved splashing Miss Thal’s killing across their pages. After all, cute white girls sell newspapers!

But, as many times as I’ve used that, it was still twelve years ago, and since then, this year in fact, Inquirer publisher Elizabeth Hughes stated that her goal was to make the newspaper and its associated website “an anti-racist news organization.” So, wouldn’t the obvious result of that to be not concentrating on cute white girls as the victims of crimes?

Gabby Petito.

A site search for “Gabby Petito” returned 16 articles, the latest at 2:10 PM EDT today, just ten minutes before I made the search. Miss Petito is yet another cute little white girl, one whose disappearance has attracted a lot of social media, and credentialed media, interest.

Sixteen articles, though, to be fair, most were written by other than Inquirer reporters.

A photo taken during a block party last year of Dunkin’ Donuts manager Christine Lugo.

What about Christine Lugo? Miss Lugo was a 40-year-old Hispanic woman, the manager of a Dunkin’ Donuts on Lehigh Avenue in the city’s Fairhill neighborhood. The senseless murder was actually well covered by the city’s media, including the Inquirer, but a site search for “Christine Lugo” at 2:30 PM yielded only four returns, and two of them weren’t about her at all.

A cute little white girl, with no connection to Philadelphia, had sixteen mentions, while Philadelphia’s own Miss Lugo resulted in two.

Boy, it’s a good thing that Miss Hughes was determined to make the Inquirer “an anti-racist news organization,” or Miss Petito would have a hundred mentions, and Miss Lugo still two.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Joy Reid is . . . right?

So, while my previous links to the Inquirer’s coverage of Miss Thal, as evidence of the newspaper’s racism, remain, her death twelve years ago, which I remembered from reading the print edition that I used to pick up before work, can be characterized as old news. But the disappearance, and probable death, of Miss Petito is today’s news, and it remains as evidence of what I have said all along: when it comes to their priorities and integrity, cute little white girls are still much, much more important to the very #woke[2]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 journolists[3]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

References

References
↑1 When accessed in September 21, 2021, at 2:05 PM EDT, the search returned 4,548 results.
↑2 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. than anyone else.

↑3 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.
Posted on by

Journolism: The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to make a political argument for the city getting a WNBA team I might believe that the editors are concerned about women's sports if they actually covered women's sports

Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement, 2011 Knight Arts Challenge Winners - Flickr - Knight Foundation (cropped)Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer held a ‘debate’ over the question, “Should Philly get a WNBA team?” Denice Frohman, a former professional, but not WNBA, player, and a “Philly-based award-winning poet, performer, and educator who has featured on national stages from The White House to The Apollo,” wrote in support of the idea.

    With the WNBA celebrating its 25th season and playoffs on the horizon, I’m reminded why Philly needs our own team in the most progressive league in major sports.

That isn’t a great start; she is already telling you that her interest is primarily in ‘progressive’ politics more than sports. Miss Frohman’s Wikipedia biography, from which her picture has been taken, doesn’t mention her basketball career at all, but says this about her:

    Denice Frohman is a poet, writer, performer and educator, whose work explores the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Frohman uses her experience as a queer woman from a multi-cultural (Puerto Rican and Jewish) background in her writing. By addressing identity, her work encourages communities to challenge the dominant social constructs and oppressive narratives in place that are currently working against concepts of unity and equity. Her message is about claiming the power to be who you are. She was born and raised in New York City, and earned her master’s degree in education from Drexel University.

Miss Frohman is all about the politics, and any basketball she played is simply incidental. After seven paragraphs, including the one quoted above, she gets into this:

    Beyond the metrics, when I think of what it would mean for Philly to have a WNBA team. I think about how players have championed social justice in a league comprised of nearly 70% Black women athletes, and how that would resonate in a city undeniably shaped by Black women’s leadership.

    I think about the night Philly voters helped turn Pennsylvania blue in the last presidential election, coinciding with Atlanta Dream players’ successful campaign to elect Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock—the first Black senator in Georgia’s history—ousting former Dream owner and incumbent Kelly Loeffler. I think about WNBA player Angel McCoughtry spearheading the idea for players to wear social justice messages on their uniforms last year (an idea the NBA borrowed).

    Philly needs no introduction to the national stage, but having a WNBA team can say something powerful about who we are and who we believe in. It can speak to the women and girls from Norris Square to Southwest about what is possible when you dream out loud.

Screen capture, Philadelphia Inquirer website sports section, September 21, 2021, 9:10 AM EDT.

I suppose that this is typical for the oh so #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 Philadelphia Inquirer, the notion that basketball is primarily a political thing. I am reminded of Pavel (Pasha) Pavlovich Antipov’s, Strelnikov’s, statement in Dr Zhivago, “The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it.” Perhaps the editors ought to ask the question of who would actually attend WNBA games?

Miss Frohman wants a WNBA team in Philadelphia for political reasons, in her case, left-wing political reasons. I doubt that many people reading the sports section of the Inquirer, which is where I found it, are going to find those reasons good ones for putting a WNBA team in the City of Brotherly Love.

Kerith Gabriel, “a former Daily News sports writer and currently a digital editor at the Inquirer“, was assigned the task of writing the opposing view, and in his first paragraph, he apologized for being a man writing it:

    I already knew writing as a cisgender man to say that a WNBA franchise won’t work may subject me to cancellation, or at least dismissal that I’m just some guy who doesn’t like women’s sports.

LOL! But, after his initial apology, Mr Gabriel does that most horrid, horrid! of things, he writes about the economics, the capitalist concerns of a Women’s National Basketball Association team.

    Let’s start with the numbers. According to an online survey conducted by national statistics firm Statista, interest in the WNBA is around 28% for men and just 18% for women. Further segmented, only 9% of men surveyed and just 4% of women considered themselves avid fans.

    The WNBA has always focused on appealing to a younger generation, attempting to capture the horde of young hoopers who could look at legendary basketball players like Sue Bird and Tamika Catchings as idols. It’s a smart strategy considering that the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) pipeline, in which young kids are trained for serious basketball (and other sports), is big business. Even in the Philadelphia area, there are well over 100+ AAU teams, many of them girls-only leagues.

    But again, according to 2021 numbers from Statista, the WNBA is the ninth most popular sport among Gen Zers. In terms of live games? The WNBA ranked 13th in a survey of American favorite sports Americans enjoy watching live before the pandemic. That means more young adults would rather watch cars go around an endless circle for two hours (NASCAR, 26%), than watch a women’s professional basketball game.

Heaven forfend! Mr Gabriel isn’t talking about the politics of having a WNBA franchise, but on how such a team would do something really radical like support itself. He concluded with:

If you look at the viewer guides for ESPN and the NBA Network, you’ll see that, even in the summer, even in the off-season for the NBA, those sports networks would rather show reruns of old NBA and other men’s sports games than live WNBA games. Those network executives aren’t doing so because they hate women’s sports, but because they believe they will earn more advertising revenue from those choices.

Me being very politically incorrect, I’ll note the women’s sports the sports networks do show: NCAA volleyball, beach volleyball, gymnastics and ice skating. Why? Because those are the province of pretty white women, while women’s basketball, as Miss Frohman noted concerning the WNBA, is nearly 70% black. Even The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the rest of the city’s media, do the same thing, as I have frequently noted in mentioning that the Inquirer only cares about murder victims when they are cute little white girls like Rian Thal.

You think I’m exaggerating? The Inquirer’s website lists 15 articles about the disappearance of Gabby Petito, a cute little white girl, but one with no connection to the city, yet only two about Christine Lugo, a 40-year-old Hispanic woman who was murdered in a widely-talked-about robbery in Philadelphia.

If the Inquirer editors are so concerned about women’s basketball, maybe they ought to increase their coverage of NCAA women’s basketball, in a city which boasts several collegiate basketball teams.

The media know their audience.

The Inquirer article was listed in the sports section of the newspaper’s website. As I noted previously, the Inquirer eliminated reader comments on articles, saying:

    Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.

The one place they do still allow comments? In the sports section! But for this “Pro/Con” opinion piece in the sports section, reader comments were not allowed, because the editors knew that this was far more of a political debate than a sports question. This isn’t journalism, but journolism,[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading the embedding of a political argument in the sports section. Of course, that means a lot of Inquirer readers will never see it, because a lot don’t bother with the sports section.

Me? I don’t care one way or the other whether the WNBA puts a franchise in Philly. I don’t live there, so the chances I would ever attend a WNBA game in that city are virtually nil. I don’t attend NBA games, either; the only one I ever attended was on October 8, 1971, when the Kentucky Colonels of the old American basketball Association lured — with money — the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played for them, to Louisville’s Freedom Hall for an exhibition game. I am far more likely to watch a college basketball game on television than a professional game. But the Inquirer’s ‘debate’ isn’t about basketball at all; it’s about liberal politics, and basketball was merely their platform.

References

References
↑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 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.

↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
Posted on by

A picture worth a thousand words. Why won't the credentialed media report the whole story?

I normally avoid photos that might be under copyright, but this one tells a tale that ought not to be avoided, and thus falls under ‘fair use’ standards. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

    SEPTA bus riders are frustrated by persistent delays. Officials say a shortage of drivers is to blame.

    The regional transit agency was not able to hire at the rate of attrition and has to play catch up.

    by Thomas Fitzgerald | Saturday, September 18, 2021

    SEPTA has a deficit of 105 bus operators, a lingering effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to delays on many of the agency’s bus routes. Alejandro A Alvarez, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer. Click to enlarge. Photographer

    For weeks, SEPTA’s real-time online bus service status page has been speckled with red triangles warning riders of delays on many routes “due to an operator shortage.”

    The transit agency is down 105 bus operators, officials said. Austerity measures during last year’s coronavirus shutdowns, including a four-month hiring freeze, have hampered SEPTA’s ability to keep up with attrition.

    As a result, thousands of frustrated riders wait longer at bus stops.

    And when operators scheduled for duty call in sick or have family emergencies, regular occurrences in a workforce of more than 2,600 people, managers in SEPTA’s nine bus garages have to scramble.

There’s more at the original, but the telling part of the photo is the sign on the front of the bus: “A mask or face covering is required on SEPTA”. You can click on the photo to enlarge it, and see the bus marquee more easily.

We have previously reported on mask mandates for certain jobs, including bus drivers, pushing people away from those jobs. People just don’t want to wear a diaper over their faces. But the only reference to that in the Inquirer article was this:

    The transit agency is down 105 bus operators, officials said. Austerity measures during last year’s coronavirus shutdowns, including a four-month hiring free(Nat Lownes, of the Philly Transit Riders Union) said some of his friends who are bus operators tell him they’re worn out with the demands of the job, which include enforcing federal mask regulations and often dealing with irate riders. “It can be brutal,” he said.

The Inquirer article didn’t have a single word about bus drivers themselves not wanting to wear masks, and while some passengers don’t want to wear the silly things for a thirty-minute ride, the drivers are required to have them on for an eight hour, or longer, shift.

This is why I frequently refer to journolists. The spelling ‘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. There’s really no way that Thomas Fitzgerald, the article author, didn’t know about the frustration of bus drivers and others having to wear face masks for hours on end, and the stories of the patricians going maskless while their ‘servants’ had to wear face diapers aren’t going to encourage people to take jobs requiring the wearing of masks.

An actual journalist would have reported on that, but the editorial position of the Inquirer is to support mask and vaccine mandates, and the credentialed media just don’t like reporting on things with which they disagree.

Posted on by

When The Philadelphia Inquirer censors the news

We have previously noted information which can be found, if you look, but which the credentialed media journolists[1]The spelling ‘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 … Continue reading mostly choose not to report, that COVID-19 restrictions and mask mandates are contributing to a shortage of school bus drivers.

And this morning we hear from a newspaper I frequently call The Philadelphia Enquirer:[2]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.

    Philly’s bus driver shortage is a ‘crisis,’ leaving kids missing school or stranded

    After a year-plus of pandemic-disrupted learning, persistent bus woes have kept some students out of school completely and left parents and school staff scrambling yet again.

    By Kristen A Graham | Saturday, September 11, 2021

    Most days, the yellow bus that’s supposed to take Denise Madre’s kids from their Germantown home to school in Roxborough doesn’t show up at all. A bus did come on one of the seven days school has been open so far — nearly four hours late.

    That happened after Madre, who doesn’t drive, paid for an Uber to get Jonan and Braylee to Shawmont Elementary, and also after the time the children — both of whom have autism — were left waiting at school for hours because no bus ever came to take them home.

    Philadelphia School District officials warned the community about worsening school bus driver shortages this summer, and shifted start times over community and school objections to streamline operations. The district is even offering families $1,500 annually to drive their children to school instead of putting them on a yellow bus.

    But the transportation reality has been much worse than anyone had braced for, affecting schools across the city, leaving some students stranded and others on buses for hours or dropped off in the wrong neighborhoods. After a year-plus of pandemic-disrupted learning, persistent bus woes have kept some students out of school completely and left parents and school staff scrambling yet again.

It’s a fairly long story, primarily filled with the horror stories of children not picked up, or dropped off at the wrong location, including one girl who is legally blind. But, far down, is this paragraph:

    (Danielle) Floyd, the transportation general manager, said the district is working on offering bonuses and paying for trainers for its own drivers, which represent about 20% of its driver workforce; vendors are also generally offering perks and upping salaries. But in this employee market, it’s been especially difficult to find workers who can get their CDL licenses, pass physicals and drug tests, and make it through safety training.

Having been in the ready-mixed concrete industry for thirty years, yeah, I can testify as to the difficulty of finding drivers who can pass the drug test. But Kristen Graham, the article author, never mentioned the elephant in the room, that some potential drivers simply won’t take the jobs because they don’t want to wear face masks.

It’s not as though she doesn’t know that, because the Enquirer Inquirer has reported on that in the past, in an article linked with the story above:

    In Pennsylvania, some drivers aren’t coming back to work because they don’t want to mask and others are concerned about the health ramifications of being around large numbers of people, said Ryan Dellinger, executive director of the Pennsylvania School Bus Association.

How, I have to ask, did the article author miss that part? Or, more probably, why did she choose not to include it?

The answer is simple: the Inquirer’s editorial position is that masking is a universal good, and noting that the mask mandate has the ‘unintended consequence’ of keeping those people who refuse to wear the infernal things away from such jobs undercuts the newspaper’s editorial position.

We noted an article by uber-feminist Jill Filipovic McCormick, The Importance of Being Honest: Sometimes we have to sacrifice for public health. But don’t deny the sacrifice itself:

    The impulse to downplay inconvenient outcomes of one’s own position has been in full force throughout Covid, and with the school reopening + Delta, it’s gotten even more extreme. I keep hearing, for example, that wearing a mask is no big deal and anyone who complains about masking is probably a Covid denialist reactionary. This is pretty weird, because it seems to me to be obviously, demonstrably true that wearing a mask is an inconvenience and a personal and cultural sacrifice — it means you can’t fully read other peoples’ facial expressions, it impedes basic human interactions, it makes you break out, it irritates your face, it fogs up your glasses,[3]In the only place I will wear a mask, at Mass, because our Bishop has mandated it, I have to pull it down to read, because it fogs up my reading glasses in seconds. Being partially deaf, I read the … Continue reading and I find that when I wear one I start to feel a little disoriented after a while, especially inside under bright lights. Wearing a mask sucks! But it sucks far less than giving someone else Covid, or getting Covid yourself. And so of course, in scenarios where people are not all fully vaccinated and infection rates are high, we should continue wear masks inside. I wear masks inside and I think indoor mask-wearing for essential activities should be mandatory (I also think vaccines should be mandatory for inessential activities, like dining out).

Another far-left liberal and strident feminist, Amanda Marcotte, complained about having to wear a mask:

    I really wanted to get back to my spin class. And for a couple of months, I did just that. Exercising at home for the past year was fine, but nothing beats a 45-minute spin class for leaving one red-faced and sopping wet with sweat. But it’s that “sopping wet” part that became a problem this week when the gym sent out a memo bringing back their indoor mask mandate. This isn’t a 5-minute jaunt in a grocery store with a mask. Exercising with a sweat-soaked mask is like being waterboarded. So I canceled my class and sent a polite but angry note to my gym.

If these leftists can combitch about wearing masks, why would it be a surprise to anyone that some people would choose not to accept what Mrs McCormick called “an inconvenience and a personal and cultural sacrifice,” and opt not to take a job that required wearing one? If you have a Class B CDL, what you need to drive a school bus, you could also drive a dump truck or a concrete mixer or a box truck, and not have to wear one of the infernal things. The left simply don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, that some people take their personal decisions based on things that the left think unimportant.

The credentialed media don’t outright lie as much as they simply don’t report information that would hurt their editorial slant.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘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.
↑2 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.
↑3 In the only place I will wear a mask, at Mass, because our Bishop has mandated it, I have to pull it down to read, because it fogs up my reading glasses in seconds. Being partially deaf, I read the readings from the missal before Mass, to help me understand what the lector is going to read, and to get a heads up on the responsorial psalm, because I don’t always hear it well enough to catch the individual words.
Posted on by

Lies, damned lies, and statistics If you have a good case to make, getting caught using skewed statistics doesn't help you make it

There it was, on the left hand side of the Lexington Herald-Leader’s website main page, a story about ‘breakthrough’ COVID-19 cases, which naturally got my attention.

    Fayette County vaccination rates inch up but so do breakthrough COVID cases

    By Beth Musgrave | August 24, 2021 | 5:52 PM

    Lexington’s vaccination rate for those over 18 has hit 70 percent as COVID breakthrough infections — typically far less serious — have increased in those immunized, health and city officials said Tuesday.

    Although 70 percent of those over 18 have been immunized, the overall vaccination rate, which includes those 12 to 17, is about 58.7 percent, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data as of Sunday.

OK, here’s the first statistical problem: the vaccines were not approved for use in patients 12 to 15 years of age until May 10, 2021, so of course the vaccination rate for minors is going to be lower . . . but the Herald-Leader doesn’t tell us that. The vaccines have still not been approved for use in patients under 12, though that is expected soon.

    The city also hit another more grim milestone this week — the number of coronavirus cases in Fayette County has now topped 40,000. In the past four weeks, the city has had more than 4,000 reported cases, with 486 of those new cases from Saturday through Monday, say city and health leaders who held a press conference Tuesday on COVID issues.

    Approximately 28 percent of all August cases have been in fully vaccinated people, according to health department data.

    “But that’s also because more people are getting vaccinated,” said health department spokesman Kevin Hall.

    Still, vaccinated people are much less likely to be hospitalized, Fayette County Health Department data shows.

    Since February, 88 percent of people hospitalized locally have been unvaccinated or only received a single dose of the vaccine. Of the 94 Lexington residents who are currently hospitalized, 79 percent are unvaccinated, Hall said.

And here we go again: “Since February, 88 percent of people hospitalized locally have been unvaccinated or only received a single dose of the vaccine.” The vaccines were not even available to people under 70, who were not health care workers, until March, and even then, supply shortages meant that people under 70 could not get the vaccines in March. Nor does this account for children under 12, who have never been approved for vaccination; including children under 12 further skews the statistics.

More, even the people who were able to receive their first dose in early March — I was not able to get my first dose until April Fool’s Day, due to shortages of the vaccine — could not have gotten the second dose until early April, and would not have been considered fully vaccinated, meaning 14 days after the second dose, until mid-April. Thus, any statistic like the one given us above, using percentages from before almost anyone could have received both doses, is going to be seriously skewed. We’ve noted this previously, when Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) and state Health Commissioner Steven Stack released a wholly misleading graphic on Twitter. I do not disagree with the Governor that people should get vaccinated; I just see these tweets as wholly dishonest. Of course, I see the Governor as totally dishonest on just about everything.

If the case for vaccination is a good one, and I believe it is, why do public officials use skewed, obviously skewed, data to try to make their case? When you are trying to sell people on something — and trying to persuade people to do something they’ve previously been reluctant to do definitely qualifies as selling — getting caught using misleading information sure doesn’t help your case.

Would you buy a used car from Andy Beshear?

Beth Musgrave, from her Herald-Leader biography.

I have previously stated that the Herald-Leader employs journolism[1]The spelling ‘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 … Continue reading as much as journalism, and this is another example of it. According to her Herald-Leader biography blurb, Beth Musgrave, the article author,

    has covered government and politics for the Herald-Leader for more than a decade. A graduate of Northwestern University, she has worked as a reporter in Kentucky, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois and Washington D.C.

If she has covered government and politics for over ten years, I have no doubt that she’s at least reasonably intelligent, and ought to be able to spot the bovine feces which comes from the mouths of government officials. She should not have missed how misleading the statistics presented were, and if she managed to miss it, Peter Baniak, the newspaper’s editor, should have caught it.

I understand: it is the Herald-Leader’s editorial policy to push vaccination and mask mandates, and I absolutely support people choosing to take the vaccine. More, the newspaper is, like medium sized newspapers everywhere, on shaky financial footing. But it takes little energy and few dollars to ask the questions which get statistics which are not biased, not misleading, and this the Herald-Leader does not do.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘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.
Posted on by

A stunning lack of perspective

For the #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 it’s all about racism. From Sunday’s Washington Post:

    ‘Lynchings in Mississippi never stopped’

    By DeNeen L. Brown | August 8, 2021

    JACKSON, Miss. — Since 2000, there have been at least eight suspected lynchings of Black men and teenagers in Mississippi, according to court records and police reports.

    “The last recorded lynching in the United States was in 1981,” said Jill Collen Jefferson, a lawyer and founder of Julian, a civil rights organization named after the late civil rights leader Julian Bond. “But the thing is, lynchings never stopped in the United States. Lynchings in Mississippi never stopped. The evil bastards just stopped taking photographs and passing them around like baseball cards.”

    Jefferson was born in Jones County, Miss., which was an epicenter of the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror during the civil rights movement. “Coming from Mississippi and seeing stuff intersect, talking about this stuff is like talking about what happened down the road,” said Jefferson, a Harvard Law School graduate who trained as a civil justice investigator with Bond.

    In 2017, Jefferson began compiling records of Black people found hanging or mutilated across the country. In 2019, Jefferson began focusing her investigation on Mississippi. In each case she investigated, law enforcement officials ruled the deaths suicides, but the families said the victims had been lynched.

    Historically, lynchings were often defined as fatal hangings by mobs, often acting with impunity and in an extrajudicial capacity to create racial terror. Crowds of White people often gathered in town squares or on courthouse lawns to watch Black people be lynched.

There’s much more at the original.

DeNeen L Brown is an award-winning reporter, but she is also someone who very much has an agenda:

    Brown has written extensively about the country’s history of racial terror lynchings and massacres. After Brown’s 2018 story on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was published on the front page of The Washington Post, the mayor of Tulsa announced he would reopen the city’s search for mass graves of Black victims of the massacre. In October 2020, the city discovered a mass grave that may be connected to the massacre. Scientists will begin examining the remains this summer.

    Over more than three decades, Brown has been a ground-breaking reporter, with a strong writing voice uncovering stories about the Black community. At The Post, Brown covered night police, education, courts, politics, arts, theater and culture. She has been a staff writer in the famed Style section of The Washington Post and a staff writer for The Washington Post magazine, where she wrote award-winning narratives.

The problem is that, for an award-winning reporter, this article was not exactly the epitome of good journalism. Miss Brown extensively covers the mission of Jill Collen Jefferson, but provides virtually nothing in corroboration, and nothing that might call into question Miss Jefferson’s statements or conclusions.

    “There is a pattern to how these cases are investigated,” Jefferson said. “When authorities arrive on the scene of a hanging, it’s treated as a suicide almost immediately. The crime scene is not preserved. The investigation is shoddy. And then there is a formal ruling of suicide, despite evidence to the contrary. And the case is never heard from again unless someone brings it up.”

Is Miss Jefferson’s statement true? Miss Brown never investigates or questions it. She then proceeds to list the eight victims that Miss Jefferson alleges to have been lynched:

  • Raynard Johnson, 17: June 16, 2000: “There’s enough circumstantial stuff here that warrants a serious investigation. We will not rest until those who committed this murder are brought to justice,” Jackson told demonstrators before leading a march to the pecan tree where Raynard was found. “We reject the suicide theory.” In February 2001, the Justice Department announced it ended its investigation into Johnson’s death: “The evidence does not support a federal criminal civil rights prosecution.”

In other words, the federal Department of Justice, during the Administration of President Bill Clinton, investigated the evidence, and couldn’t find sufficient evidence to conclude that there was a lynching. Though the younger George Bush was President by the time this was announced, it was the first month of his term.

  • Nick Naylor, 23: January 9, 2003

Mr Taylor’s family claims that this was a murder, but no evidence other than that claim is provided.

  • Roy Veal, 55: April 22, 2004

A state police spokesman said that Mr Veal’s death was consistent with suicide, but that the case is with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. No other information is given.

  • Frederick Jermaine Carter, 26: December 3, 2010: Frederick Jermaine Carter was found hanging from a tree limb in a White neighborhood in Greenwood, Miss. The state medical examiner ruled Carter’s death a suicide. Relatives called it a lynching and demanded for a federal investigation. Derrick Johnson, then-state president of the Mississippi NAACP, told reporters that the community had “lost all confidence in the ability of local law enforcement to investigate” the case of Carter’s hanging. He called on the Justice Department to investigate. A spokesperson for the department declined to comment on the case.

Note that Mr Carter’s death occurred in December of 2010, and the federal Department of Justice was under the control of President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, men not at all inclined to cover up a lynching and, especially in the case of Mr Holder, men not at all afraid to stir up divisions if they believed there was an incident of racial injustice or civil rights violations.

  • Craig Anderson, 49: June 26, 2011

This case actually was proven to be a hate crime, and three teenagers were convicted in federal court.

  • Otis Byrd, 54: March 19, 2015

Mr Byrd was paroled in 2006 following a 1980 conviction for murder. Miss Brown’s article noted that the FBI and Justice Department launched an investigation, but stated that there was no evidence to prove Mr Byrd’s death was a homicide. This was under the Obama Administration.

  • Phillip Carroll, 22: May 28, 2017: Phillip Carroll was found hanging from a tree in Jackson, Miss. Police called the death a suicide. Early reports said Carroll had been found with his hands tied behind his back. Police denied that account. “If there’s any other information or evidence that anyone may have to make us believe that it may not be a suicide, again, we’re open to any information and any evidence to aid us in the investigation,” Jackson Police Commander Tyree Jones told reporters. “But as of right now, we don’t have anything other than the fact that his death has been ruled a suicide.”

Jackson Police Commander Tyree Jones is black, so he’s not the type to cover up a racially motivated lynching.

  • Deondrey Montreal Hopkins, 35: May 5, 2019: Deondrey Montreal Hopkins, who lived in Columbus, Miss., was found hanging from a tree on a bank of the Luxapallila Creek. Columbus Police Chief Fred Shelton said Hopkins’s death was not a homicide. The Justice Department declined to comment on the case.

That’s it, that’s the end of Miss Brown’s article. And other than one, which was a matter of public record, there is no evidence of anything other than speculation by concerned parties and family members that these deaths were lynchings.

That does not mean that some of these cases weren’t actually murders, murders by people clever enough to have left no incriminating evidence. It also does not mean that some of these cases, if homicides, couldn’t have been carried out by black men rather than white. This is the problem with the award-winning reporter’s reporting: it’s nothing other than the speculation of Miss Jefferson. Were I the editor of The Washington Post, I would have read this story, and rather than give it the huge title seen on the newspaper’s website, I would have returned it to her with the instructions to get more, because this is agenda-driven journolism,[2]The spelling ‘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 … Continue reading not journalism.

I entitled this article “A stunning lack of perspective,” for a very good reason. DeNeen Brown was very, very concerned with eight possible lynchings, over the past 21 years, yet in St Louis, Missouri, as of August 7th of this year, there have been 109 homicides, and of those 109 murders, 100 have been of black victims, 81 males and 19 females. St Louis, with a population of 294,890 is almost evenly divided between black and white residents, yet 91.74% of the murder victims there are black. Miss Brown is very concerned with eight homicides of black men over 21 years, while more than eight black men have been murdered in the Gateway to the West every single month!

And of the 49 known suspects in those killings, 48 are also black, while one is listed as race unknown.

Why doesn’t that concern Miss Brown? While I cannot read her mind, one suspicion immediately comes to mind: there is no political advantage for the left to note the tremendous black-on-black homicide rate in America.

I use St Louis statistics because St Louis is not only a very high murder rate city, but one of the few to publish the racial statistics along with the other numbers. Other murder centers like Chicago and Philadelphia publish the numbers, but we generally don’t find out the racial breakdowns until the end of the year. P F Whalen noted, near the end of July, that Philadelphia has the Highest Murder Rate Of The Largest U.S. Cities,[3]In something of a stunning development, in the two weeks between the end of Thursday, July 22nd and Thursday, August 5th, Philly has only eight reported homicides! As often as I have reported on the … Continue reading but as far as the racial numbers are concerned, we don’t have the breakdown. We only know that last year, 86% of homicide victims were black, in a city that is only about 44% black. Of course, I have noted, uncounted times, that The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t care about homicides in the city unless the victim is an innocent, like Christine Lupo, a “somebody,” like a local high school basketball player, or a cute little white girl, like Rian Thal.

At least the Inquirer’s motives are clear: publisher Elizabeth Hughes has stated that she wants to make the Inquirer an “anti racist news organization,” and paying attention to the appalling black-on-black homicide rate in the city runs quite contrary to her goals.

Whether that is how the editors of The Washington Post think, I do not know.

Perspective is important. Yes, those eight men who died, over 21 years, in Mississippi, are important, but are they really more important that the 322 people who have poured out their life’s blood in Philadelphia’s mean streets? The only difference that I can see is DeNeen Brown’s apparent assumption that some or all of them were killed in lynchings by Evil White Men.

References

References
↑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 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.

↑2 The spelling ‘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.
↑3 In something of a stunning development, in the two weeks between the end of Thursday, July 22nd and Thursday, August 5th, Philly has only eight reported homicides! As often as I have reported on the carnage in the City of Brotherly Love, I am shocked.