Tag Archives: #Journolism

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Has the Lexington Herald-Leader abandoned the McClatchy Mugshot Policy?

We have noted, dozens of times, how the Lexington Herald-Leader, in going along with the McClatchy mugshot policy, has declined to print mugshots of accused defendants, even when those defendants are already convicted felons, and even when the subjects are accused of murder and are still on the loose.

But now, the Herald-Leader is doing the community a service, with an accused murderer on the loose. Can you spot the difference?

Kenneth Strange, photo via Nicholasville Police Department. Click to enlarge.

Police: Central KY murder suspect on the run, ‘considered armed and dangerous’

by Jeremy Chisenhall | Wednesday, January 5, 2022 | 4:48 PM EST | Updated: Thursday, January 6, 2022 | 7:58 AM EST

Nicholasville police were looking for a local man who they believe killed a woman, the police department announced Wednesday.

Kenneth Strange, 54, was wanted for the alleged murder of a woman who was found shot dead at Strange’s residence on Lauren Drive in Nicholasville in the early-morning hours Wednesday, police said. Police have obtained warrants for Strange’s arrest, they said.

“Strange is currently on the run and should be considered armed and dangerous,” Nicholasville police said in a Facebook post. “We are currently working with several jurisdictions across the commonwealth in an attempt to locate him. If anyone knows where Strange might be please contact your local law enforcement agency.”

There’s more here.

Can you think of anything, anything at all, which makes publishing Mr Strange’s photo different from say, that of Jo’Quon Anthony Edwards Jackson, or Juanyah J Clay?

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The Philadelphia Inquirer tells us what’s important to them

I suppose that I shouldn’t really be surprised.

Not everybody reads the newspaper, or, in my case, the digital newspaper, in the morning of New Year’s Day, and, when it comes to The Philadelphia Inquirer, some of the stories the editors think less important disappear quickly. Oh, they don’t disappear forever, but unless you know where to look, you won’t find them on the main page of the Inquirer’s website.

But the tweet reproduced at the right[1]This is a screenshot, but if you click on the image, it will take you to the Inquirer’s original. sure seems to characterize the newspaper well. An actual gun battle in the city’s streets, something I would see as a rather important story, disappeared from the main page, though there were two stories on it buried deeply.

Instead, in the main page’s “Latest” column, screen captured at 8:44 AM EST today, and reproduced below — you can click on the image to enlarge it — those stories were gone, gone, gone, while the advertising article noted in the tweet was prominently featured. I’ve said it before: black lives don’t matter to the editors of the Inquirer, but it seems that advertorial money certainly does.

A site search for Club Risqué failed to turn up anything in the Inquirer over the Philadelphia Police spotting two suspects in the murder in front of Club Risqué, even though the local television station, Fox 29, covered it, as did, as did Robert Stacy McCain, a blogger with roughly zero connection to Philadelphia or Pennsylvania.

There are, however, five separate stories referencing the January 6th Capitol kerfuffle.

It’s so obvious that even the most dyed-in-the-wool liberal ought to be able to see it: the almost entirely white Capitol kerfufflers have already been mostly arrested and charged, and the Justice Department continues to try to identify others, while the two suspects in the Club Risqué murders, suspects who are still on the loose, probably still on the loose in Philadelphia, and whom the police could use help in locating and apprehending, are black.

Nope, much better to have an advertorial on buying glasses on the main page, and that’s because black lives don’t matter to the editors and publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer!

References

References
↑1 This is a screenshot, but if you click on the image, it will take you to the Inquirer’s original.
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For The New York Times, some news is just not fit to print!

From the Encyclopedia Britannica:

    On August 18, 1896, (Adolph Simon) Ochs acquired control of the financially faltering New York Times, again with borrowed money ($75,000). To set his paper apart from its more sensational competitors, Ochs adopted the slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print” (first used October 25, 1896) and insisted on reportage that lived up to that promise. Despite an early shortage of capital, he refused advertisements that he considered dishonest or in poor taste. In 1898, when sales were low and expenses unusually high, he probably saved The New York Times by cutting its price from three cents to one cent. He thereby attracted many readers who previously had bought the more sensational penny papers, especially the New York World and the Journal. By 1900 Ochs was able to purchase a controlling interest in The New York Times.

In its long and august history, the Times, through many editors and publishers, was our newspaper of record, printing many things that the government opposed, and winning its right to publish the so-called Pentagon Papers, despite the attempt by the Nixon Administration to prohibit such.

But now? The Times reported on the stabbing murder of Columbia University graduate student Davide Giri, but left out a lot of detail.

    Columbia University Student Dies in Stabbing Near Campus

    The graduate student, Davide Giri, was fatally stabbed near the Manhattan campus on Thursday night. A man has been arrested and charged with murder, the police said.

    By Troy Closson and Lola Fadulu | Friday, December 3, 2021

    A graduate student at Columbia University died and another man was wounded after the two were stabbed in Upper Manhattan on Thursday night, the police and college officials said.

    The student, Davide Giri, was traveling home from soccer practice just before 11 p.m. when he was stabbed in the abdomen about two blocks from his apartment building, the police and friends said. He was taken to an area hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

    The police arrested Vincent Pinkney, 25, of Manhattan, in the attacks and charged him on Friday with murder, attempted murder, assault, attempted assault and three counts of criminal possession of a weapon. He had been found in Central Park, and the police said that he had been menacing a third man with a knife.

    In a campuswide letter sent on Friday morning, Lee C. Bollinger, the university’s president, identified Mr. Giri, 30, as a student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and expressed sadness over his death.

There’s more at the original, telling us about the victim, and noting that a similar killing had occurred just a few blocks away, when Tessa Majors, a student at Bernard College, was killed during a robbery.

What you won’t find in the original are any details about the (alleged) assailant, Vincent Pinkney. For those, you have to go across the pond, to London’s Daily Mail:

    Gang member, 25, charged in fatal Manhattan stabbing spree that killed Columbia student and wounded Italian tourist has been arrested 11 times since 2012 and was on parole for gang attack

    • Alleged killer Vincent Pinkney, 25, has a lengthy rap sheet and 11 arrests on robbery, assault and other charges
    • He is accused of stabbing a Columbia grad student to death and wounding tourist in mad crime spree
    • Davide Giri, 30, a PhD candidate in computer science at Columbia University, was stabbed to death
    • Italian tourist, Robert Malastina, 27, was wounded in Central Park just 15 minutes after the murder
    • Pinkney was arrested after threatening another man, 29, who was walking in the park with his girlfriend
    • Police said Pinkney, who was out on parole, had 11 prior arrests dating back to 2012
    • The fatal stabbing took place just a block from where Bernard College student Tessa Majors was killed in 2019
    • NYC murders have shot up by 42 per cent since 2019, and overall crime this year is up by more than 3 per cent

    By Keith Griffith and Ronny Reyes | Published: 1:00 EST, 4 December 2021 | Updated: 01:29 EST, 4 December 2021

    The suspect accused of killing a Columbia University grad student and stabbing an Italian tourist in a demented Manhattan crime spree is a career criminal who was out on parole for a gang attack, it has been revealed.

    Vincent Pinkney, 25, was escorted into NPYD Central Booking on Friday night, as hundreds gathered on the South Lawn of Columbia in a vigil for Davide Giri, a PhD candidate in computer science.

    Giri, 30, died around 11pm on Thursday after police say he was stabbed in the stomach by Pinkney, who allegedly went on to wound an Italian tourist, Robert Malastina, 27, outside Central Park before ‘menacing’ another man, 29, with a large kitchen knife as the victim strolled the park with his girlfriend.

    Pinkney is a member of Bloods gang off-shoot, Everybody Killas, who has at least 11 prior arrests dating back to 2012 and was out on parole for a 2015 gang assault, police said.

    He was released from prison in June 2018 after serving a four-year sentence for a brutal attack in which he and three accomplices slashed, punched and kicked a victim in an assault that was caught on camera, according to the New York Post.

    On Friday night, Pinkney was transferred from the 26 Precinct to Central Booking, wearing a white Tyvek jumpsuit.

    The five-foot-five, 140-pound suspect was escorted in handcuffs by two burly NYPD detectives.

    Meanwhile, shocked Columbia students gathered on the school’s central quad for a candlelight vigil honoring Giri a sixth-year doctoral student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

That video of Mr Pinkney’s arrest tells you all that you need to know about why The New York Times found the details about the (alleged) killer not to be news which is fit to print. For the 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 in the Times’ newsroom, the ones who forced out liberal columnist Bari Weiss because she just wasn’t #woke enough, the fact that a young, black gang member (allegedly) stabbed to death a white PhD candidate in computer science at an Ivy League college just does not fit Teh Narrative. The leftists who decry ‘mass incarceration’ just can’t deal with the fact that Mr Pinkney should not have been able to stab Mr Giri, because he should have still been behind bars on Thursday night.

I’ve said it before: the problem isn’t mass incarceration, but that not enough people have been incarcerated, for not enough time.

As far as Mr Pinkney is concerned, a 5’5″, 140 lb pipsqueak punk, who (allegedly) proved what a big man he is, he’s looking at spending the rest of his miserable life in prison. If he had been treated more strictly by the state of New York for his past offenses, if he had been given longer sentences for past crimes and still been behind bars last Thursday night, he would still be looking forward to getting out of prison at some point in the future. Yeah, he was stupid Thursday night, almost surely is congenitally stupid, and it would not surprise me if we found out that he was drunk or stoned, but I come around to the fact that those who treated him so leniently in the past — remember: he has eleven previous arrests on his rap sheet — did him no favors.

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.
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Being taught about white privilege, by The Philadelphia Inquirer

As a white guy who grew up poor, I will admit to not having accepted the concept of #WhitePrivilege. As a now-resident in eastern Kentucky, a poor area with a population roughly 98% white, it’s sometimes difficult to see a whole lot of white privilege around me. When I lived in Pennsylvania, in Carbon County, 95.4% non-Hispanic white, with most people having to leave the county for a decent job, white privilege sure didn’t seem like a thing to me.

But the good, #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 people of The Philadelphia Inquirer changed my mind. Columnist Helen Ubiñas pointed out, in December of 2020, that the vast majority of homicides reported in the newspaper were just a few paragraphs long, rarely even noting the victims’ names. 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; the city’s population is only 38.3% non-Hispanic black.

What do I see in the Inquirer, a newspaper which publisher Elizabeth Hughes vowed to make “an antiracist news organization”? I see that 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 five separate stories, a whole lot more than the two or three paragraphs most victims get.

Two Philadelphia black women were recently murdered in the city, 32-year-old Jessica Covington and her unborn daughter, as well as that of 24-year-old Sykea Patton, shot in broad daylight in the 800 block of North Preston Street, while walking her sons home from school. The Inquirer, which does love to print more stories when seemingly innocent victims are murdered, had three stories which told readers about the killings of the two women, and the capture of a suspect in one case.

Samuel Sean Collington, photo shared by his mother with Channel 10, and from this tweet. Click to enlarge.

Now comes the murder of Samuel Sean Collington, a Temple University student approaching graduation. Mr Collington was a white victim, allegedly murdered by a black juvenile in a botched robbery. On Thursday, 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 Inquirer 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.

Compared to the coverage the Inquirer gives concerning black victims, that’s some real white privilege there!

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.[2]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.

Did the newspaper’s editors think that no one would notice this? Or is it that the editors have so internalized their own biases that they didn’t realize it themselves?

White privilege? I doubt that this was how the editors wanted to educate others, and me, about what it means, but they sure have done the job well. They have taught me that, to the editors of the Inquirer, white lives matter, and black lives really don’t. Their actions have spoken much more loudly, and more clearly, than their words.

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 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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At what point do purposeful omissions become deliberate lies? The Lexington Herald-Leader, the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, and the attempt to deceive the public

On The First Street Journal, I frequently refer to journolism. 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.

I have done several searches, over time, to find the McClatchy Mugshot Policy written down as an official communique from the company, without success. I have found it specified in this tweet from Nicole Manna, who described herself as an “Investigative reporter for the @StarTelegram focusing on criminal justice. Dog mom. Florida native. Olive enthusiast. Tip me, please: nmanna@star-telegram.com”. I have reproduced the photo of the e-mail, and you can click on the image to enlarge it for easier reading.

The Kansas City Star, a McClatchy newspaper, noted in this article that “The Star’s parent company, McClatchy, announced this summer that it would stop publishing mugshots unless approved by an editor”, but while I was able to copy that much from a Google search, the article is “subscriber-only content”, so I cannot access it. My digital subscription to the Lexington Herald-Leader, another McClatchy newspaper, does not give me access to other company sites.

The Columbia Journalism Review published an article by Cory Hutchins on October 24, 2018, “Mugshot galleries might be a web-traffic magnet. Does that justify publishing them?“, asking if the publication of mugshots of accused but not convicted criminal suspects is ethical; this was before the McClatchy Mugshot Policy went into effect.

On October 20, 2021, the American Press Institute welcomed Kamaria Roberts to the fold, saying in part:

During her time at McClatchy, Roberts served as a co-chair to the news division’s first Advisory Team, which focused on diversity and inclusion efforts in newsrooms and in the content that they produce. In that role, she and nine other colleagues delivered significant recommendations of many consequential initiatives, including McClatchy’s mugshot policy and the company’s style change to capitalize Black in references to people and culture.

Without an official link to the policy from McClatchy itself, that’s the best documentation up with which I can come, but I believe it sufficient to prove the point.

I documented in “The Lexington Herald-Leader does race-based reporting” how the newspaper’s digital version of “2 died in a robbery, gunfight spree in Lexington. Shooter pleads in 1 case” declined to print the mugshot of Jemel Barber, who pleaded guilty to “one of two fatal shootings during a string of robberies and gunfights in Lexington,” while, in “Hour-long standoff at Stanton gas station leads to arrest of sexual assault suspect“, published only four minutes after the update on Mr Barber’s conviction, the paper did publish the mugshot, a very disrespectful looking photo, of Craig Worm, 50, an arrested but not convicted sexual assault suspect.

It was on that story that I left a comment noting that the Herald-Leader has been publishing the photos of white suspects, but not black convicted murderers. Peter Baniak, the editor, certainly has noted the point, as have reporters Chris Leach and Jeremy Chisenhall, but, as of Monday, November 22, 2021, the photo is still on the story.

The paper did not stop when notified: on Thursday, November 18th, the web edition had Christopher Leach’s story, “Kentucky woman ran to neighbor for help. Boyfriend charged over what happened next.“, with this photo of suspect Mark Anthony Hoover, while on Friday, November 19th, Mr Leach’s story “Corbin man charged after allegedly beating father with pipe” included this photo.[1]For documentary purposes, I have included both the original link to the picture as well as my download of it, stored on this site. I do this in case the paper deletes the photo.

This is hardly something that has happened in just the past week or so. I noted, half a year ago, that the Lexington Herald-Leader does not like posting photographs of accused criminals, even when the suspect is an accused murderer and is still at large, and publishing the photo might help the police capture him. something which ought to have triggered the “Is there an urgent threat to the community?” exception in the mugshot policy.

The McClatchy policy states that any exceptions to the general policy of not publishing mugshots “must be approved by an editor.” The newspaper lists four (non-sports) editors who might be responsible for taking such decisions:[2]This list may be out of date; looking at it, I noted that reporter Daniel Desrochers, who has moved on, is still listed, while Christopher Leach, a recent hire, is not.

  • Peter Baniak, Executive Editor and General Manager;
  • Deedra Lawhead, Deputy Editor, Digital;
  • Brian Simms, Deputy Editor, Presentation:, or
  • John Stamper, Deputy Editor, Accountability

So, who is approving printing all of the mugshots of white suspects, or white convicted criminals, yet not wanting those of black suspects or convicted criminals published?

But more important than the “who” is the “why”. The answer to that may be found in The Sacramento Bee, the lead McClatchy newspaper, which led the way on the no mugshot policy. While much of the current policy, as stated, can be found in this article, this paragraph includes something not in the stated policy:

Publishing these photographs and videos disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

It’s that last, “perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community,” that is the key. The Herald-Leader, or so it seems to me, does not want to perpetuate those stereotypes, and, whether intentionally or otherwise, seems to be trying to reverse those stereotypes. From the Bee again:

(T)he San Francisco Police Department earlier this month announced it will no longer release mugshots, unless the public is in imminent danger.

“This policy emerges from compelling research suggesting that the widespread publication of police booking photos in the news and on social media creates an illusory correlation for viewers that fosters racial bias and vastly overstates the propensity of Black and brown men to engage in criminal behavior,” Police Chief William Scott said in a statement.

I will admit it: I fail to see how publishing the facts “overstates” anything.

The Lexington Police Department’s Shooting investigations page reports, as of November 19, 2021, 120 non-fatal shootings in Fayette County. That page lists the race of the victims, something the Homicides page does not.

Of 120 shooting victims, 19 are listed as white, 11 as Hispanic, leaving 90 victims being listed as black. That’s an even 75.00%, in a city that the 2020 Census lists as being only 14.7% black. While the number of shootings which have resulted in arrests is really too low from which to draw numbers, we do know that most murders and attempted murders are intraracial, not interracial, in nature. In the vast majority of cases, white people kill other white people, and black people kill other black people. Unless there has been a substantial deviation from that norm, something which neither the Herald-Leader nor any other Kentucky media have reported, 75% of all shootings in the city having black victims means that a similarly high percentage of the shooters are black as well.

So what are the editors of that newspaper doing? Whether intentionally or otherwise, the paper’s coverage of crime and their choices in which photos to use appear to be aimed at persuading readers that the perpetrators of crimes in the region are primarily white. While in the eastern Kentucky areas of the Herald-Leader’s circulation area, that’s probably true, given that the percentage of the population in that area is very low, when you get to the city of Lexington, the numbers say that no, that’s not the case.

This is journolism, not journalism, this is the skewing of information to produce a false impression. If the editors are aware of what is being done in the newspaper and website they control, they are deliberately lying to their readers; if the editors are somehow not aware of what they have been doing, then they are not competent in doing their jobs, and need to be replaced.

 

References

References
↑1 For documentary purposes, I have included both the original link to the picture as well as my download of it, stored on this site. I do this in case the paper deletes the photo.
↑2 This list may be out of date; looking at it, I noted that reporter Daniel Desrochers, who has moved on, is still listed, while Christopher Leach, a recent hire, is not.
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Lock him up!

Aramis Murray, 30, is not your quintessential good guy. Despite his claim that it was self-defense, a jury in Fayette County convicted Mr Murray of murder:

    ‘Senseless act.’ Jury convicts man in Lexington murder despite self-defense argument

    by Jeremy Chisenhall | Wednesday, November 17, 2021 | 3:49 PM EST | Updated: Thursday, November 18, 2021 | 8:13 AM EST

    Aramis Murray, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

    A Fayette County jury on Wednesday convicted a man of murder in a Lexington shooting death despite the defendant’s claim that he fired in self-defense.

    Aramis Murray, 30, stood trial this week for murder in the death of 30-year-old Jason Lemer Smith in April 2018. Murray claimed self-defense, alleging that he believed Smith had a gun. But prosecutors said in court there’s no evidence to support Murray’s claim and this shooting was “another senseless act of gun violence.”

    The jury agreed with prosecutors and convicted Murray after several hours of deliberation Wednesday.

    Murray shot Smith on the front porch of Smith’s home, a residence on Corral Street where Murray had also been staying, according to court testimony. Prosecutors alleged that Smith was trying to confront Murray because Murray threatened his and Smith’s girlfriends with a gun. Murray had been arguing with the women and making threats to them all day, prosecutors said.

    Jurors had been told they could convict Murray of murder, second-degree manslaughter or reckless homicide if they found him guilty.

There’s more at the original. The mugshot in this article was not in the Herald-Leader website.

The Lexington Herald-Leader used to publish mugshots of accused criminals, and did so on April 23, 2018, before the adoption of the McClatchy Mugshot Policy. The newspaper used a slightly older mugshot, dated February 22, 2018, rather than the one taken the date of his reported arrest. The jail website also has mugshots of Mr Murray dated July 27, 2017, December 21, 2017, and December 28, 2017.

Mr Murray, it seems, had a bad habit of getting himself arrested. Sadly, whatever got him arrested on February 22, 2018, didn’t keep him behind bars on April 23, 2018, when he murdered Jason Smith. If he had been behind bars on that day, Mr Smith would (probably) still be alive today. More, Mr Murray would not be looking at spending the next 25 years of his miserable life, the sentence recommended by the jury, in prison. Lenient treatment, in the end, did Mr Murray no favor.

This is the problem with the left’s continual complaints about “mass incarceration.” The really bad guys are almost always the people previously treated leniently by the system, the people who could have, and should have, already been behind bars for a lesser term. when they committed the acts that got them the big time sentences.

The mugshot? Why of course the newspaper didn’t print the photo of a convicted killer! The photo of an accused, but not yet tried or convicted suspect, a white suspect, is still up on the newspaper’s website, because they engage in race-based reporting.

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The Lexington Herald-Leader does race-based reporting A white man accused, but not convicted, has his photo published; a black man who has pleaded guilty to killing a man, no mugshot published

Jemel Barber. Photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Jemel Barber is not a nice guy. The Lexington Herald-Leader reported this afternoon that Mr Barber has pleaded guilty to manslaughter:

    2 died in a robbery, gunfight spree in Lexington. Shooter pleads in 1 case

    by Jeremy Chisenhall | November 16, 2021 | 7:44 AM EST | Updated: 4:16 PM EST

    A Central Kentucky man has pleaded guilty in one of two fatal shootings during a string of robberies and gunfights in Lexington.

    Jemel Barber, 22, pleaded guilty last week to manslaughter and second-degree robbery more than four years after he shot and killed 40-year-old Tyrece Clark, according to court records. He was initially charged with murder and first-degree robbery, but his charges were amended down after a plea agreement was reached.

    Barber told police after the deadly shooting on July 23, 2017, that he showed up at a Lexington motel with a rifle, intending to rob Clark of narcotics and/or money, according to court records.

    But Clark started shooting after Barber knocked on his door, Barber told police, so he shot back. The plea agreement was reached after attorneys disputed whether or not Barber could claim self-defense. Barber maintained that Clark was the aggressor and his attorneys continued to blame Clark as the court case played out.

Prosecutors recommended a sentence of 15 years on manslaughter, and 10 years on the robbery conviction; sentencing is scheduled for February 11, 2022. Not yet determined is whether the sentences will run concurrently or consecutively.

There’s more at the original, but what is not at the original is the convicted killer’s mugshot. The McClatchy Mugshot policy holds that:

Publishing mugshots of arrestees has been shown to have lasting effects on both the people photographed and marginalized communities. The permanence of the internet can mean those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever. Beyond the personal impact, inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness.

Mr barber, however, is not someone who has been arrested but not convicted; he’s guilty.

Nor was he a very nice guy prior to his latest arrest. The Fayette County Detention Center page on Mr Barber had five separate mugshots of the malefactor, dated September 28, 2017, November 14, 2017, February 14, 2018, April 19, 2018, and then his last arrest, on May 2, 2018. Born November 25, 1998, he was just 18 when he was first arrested, at least as an adult, and wasn’t yet 19 when arrested the last time. He was still 18 when he killed Tyrece Clark.

However, while the Herald-Leader kept Mr Barber’s mugshot out of their website, they applied their mugshot policy rather inconsistently in the next story:

    Hour-long standoff at Stanton gas station leads to arrest of sexual assault suspect

    by Christopher leach | November 16, 2021 | 4:20 PM EST

    Craig Worm, photo by Stanton Police department, and published in the Lexington Herald-Leader, November 16, 2021.

    A sexual assault suspect from South Dakota was arrested at a gas station in Powell County after a nearly hour-long standoff with police Tuesday morning, according to a Facebook post by Stanton Police Department.

    Police said they were called to Airport Market in Stanton just before 8:30 a.m. for reports of a man who was firing a gun inside the store. When police and deputies with the Powell County Sheriff’s Office arrived, they found a man with a handgun inside a vehicle.

    That man was later identified as Craig Worm, 50, of South Dakota, according to police.

    Worm asked to buy cigarettes before firing at the store’s ceiling and saying, “now call police,” the store owner told WAVE 3.

    Worm barricaded himself inside his vehicle for approximately one hour before surrendering, police said.

There’s more at the original, including Mr Worm’s mugshot.

Unlike Mr Barber, who has been accused of a serious crime, but not convicted of anything, the editors at the Herald-Leader decided to publish his photo, despite their concern about “those arrested but not convicted of a crime hav(ing) the photograph attached to their names forever”. Mr Worm could still be acquitted.

The difference? Mr Barber, now a confessed killer, is black, while Mr Worm, accused but still innocent until proven guilty of sexual assault, is white. If there is another distinction, it certainly isn’t obvious.

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#MaskMandates and fewer fans in the stands Maybe if the Lexington Herald-Leader told the unshaded truth, the newspaper would have more subscribers

If there is one thing that keeps the Lexington Herald-Leader in business, it is the newspaper’s reporting on University of Kentucky sports. In our poor state, UK’s men’s basketball team has been a source of pride for decades, winning eight NCAA championships, the first in 1948. Rupp Arena, where the Wildcats play, was once the nation’s largest basketball venue.

Crowds were extremely limited last season, due to COVID-19 restrictions, and the team had an unexpectedly poor season. This year, with some veteran players returning, along with some experienced transfers and top freshmen, much is expected of the Wildcats.

The Herald-Leader has now noted that attendance has been unexpectedly low:

    Empty seats in Rupp Arena are sending UK a message. Is anyone listening?

    by Mark Story | November 15, 2021 | 4:14 PM EST

    One of the pressing questions this year as America’s mass-spectator sports moved out of 2020’s pandemic-inspired attendance restrictions is whether the crowds were going to come back en masse to the ballgames?

    Locally, University of Kentucky football fans have answered with an emphatic yes.

    In the 61,000-seat Kroger Field, UK sold out three of its four home Southeastern Conference games this fall — Florida (announced attendance of 61,632), LSU (61,690), Tennessee (61,690) — and just missed on its fourth vs. Missouri (58,537).

Skipping further down was the impetus for the story:

    While the sample size is small, attendance has so far this season been soft for UK basketball games in Rupp Arena at Central Bank Center.

    For the Wildcats’ 2021-22 exhibition opener against Kentucky Wesleyan, the announced attendance in Rupp — the number of tickets distributed to the event — was 17,133 in the 20,545-seat venue.

    The figure for the second exhibition, against Miles College, was 17,814.

You can follow the link to read the rest for yourself.

Mark Story, one of the newspaper’s sportswriters, suggested that part of the reason was worry over the COVID-19 panicdemic. But, in the end, he said that it was his guess that paying customers were disappointed in the cupcakes UK was playing in the early part of the season, and that we’d see something different when the hated University of Louisville Cardinals come to town on December 22nd.

But it was this photo, accompanying the article, which caught my attention. If I counted correctly, there are 38 fans depicted whose faces can be seen clearly, and only 17 cam be seen wearing face masks correctly. Several others can be seen with masks below noses, below chins, at least one with a mask hanging down from one ear, and others with no masks visible at all. Yet UK mandates the wearing of facemasks at all indoor sporting events:

    Among the policies, fans will be required to wear a face mask as they watch the game and move around Rupp Arena, regardless of vaccination status. The policy also applies to staff and vendors.

We have reported, more than once, that despite individual venues requiring the wearing of face masks, those ‘requirements’ are being honored in the breach. Just yesterday, at the Kroger on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky, despite this sign being posted by the interior door of the vestibule, requiring masks of all customers, around half, and possible more, of the customers were not wearing masks. Another sign, outside the exterior doors, said “Masks strongly encouraged for fully vaccinated individuals,” meaning that the signs were inconsistent with each other, but there was, of course, no attempt made that I saw, or have ever seen, to enforce either sign.

Kentuckians just don’t like those masks!

Mr Story’s story? While he mentioned the COVID-19 panicdemic possibly having something to do with lowered attendance, he never wrote the first word about the mask mandate potentially contributing to fewer fans in the stands.

This is just poor journalism, or typical journolism,[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 from the Herald-Leader. To have mentioned that the mask mandate might have possibly caused lower attendance would have wholly violated the paper’s editorial stand in favor of masks. Whether Mr Story actually mentioned it, and an editor removed it, or he simply ignored it due to what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal’s editorial stand, I do not know, but the newspaper is not telling the whole truth to its readers.

Media bias does not normally come in the form of outright lies to readers. Rather, it is far more likely to come from the choices of what facts to report, and what facts to conceal. In this case, the Herald-Leader omitted a major potential cause in reduced attendance, when that major potential cause contradicted its editorial stance. Perhaps Mr Story sneaked that in, with the photo chosen to illustrate the article, but no mention of the mask mandate was made in the story; the source I used to note the mandate came from WLEX-TV.

Newspapers are suffering from reduced readership all across the country; maybe if they told readers the unvarnished truth, they’d have more subscribers.

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.
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A few real journalists challenge the #woke journolism of the credentialed media

Bari Weiss is not a conservative; she’s very liberal in her politics, though just plain not #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 enough for the young wokes in The New York Times newsroom. Glenn Greenwald is not a conservative; he’s very much on the political left as far as an American would be defined, though he now lives in Brazil. And Andrew Sullivan is hardly a conservative, either.

But these three journalists have one thing in common: they stand for freedom of speech and accuracy in journalism!

    When All The Media Narratives Collapse

    In case after case, the US MSM just keeps getting it wrong.

    by Andrew Sullivan | Friday, November 12, 2021

    The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.

    But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.

    And these mass deceptions have consequences. We are seeing this now in the Rittenhouse case — a gruesome story of a reckless teen with a rifle in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. The impression many got from much of the media was that a far-right vigilante, in the middle of race riots, had gone looking for trouble far from home and injured one man, and killed two, in a shooting spree.

    Here’s the NYT on August 26, the morning after the killings: “The authorities were investigating whether the white teenager who was arrested … was part of a vigilante group. His social media accounts appeared to show an intense affinity for guns, law enforcement and President Trump.” Rittenhouse’s race is specified; the race of the men he killed and injured were not (they were also white).

    Almost immediately, the complicated facts became unimportant. The far right viewed Rittenhouse as a hero — which he surely wasn’t. He had no business being there with an AR-15. The MSM and far left viewed him as a villain, appalled that he was being elevated, in Jamelle Bouie’s words, “as a symbol of self-defense.”[2]I have my own criticism of Mr Bouie’s work here. (Another NYT article, painting Rittenhouse as a MAGA fanatic, did note at the very bottom of the page: “Supporters of Mr. Rittenhouse said he was being attacked by the mob and acted in legitimate self-defense.” So they did have a caveat.)

    But notice how the narrative — embedded in a deeper one that the Blake shooting was just as clear-cut as the Floyd murder, that thousands of black men were being gunned down by cops every year, and that “white supremacy” was rampant in every cranny of America — effectively excluded the possibility that Rittenhouse was a naive, dangerous fool in the midst of indefensible mayhem, who, in the end, shot assailants in self-defense. And so when, this week, one of Rittenhouse’s pursuers, Gaige Grosskreutz, admitted on the stand that Rittenhouse shot him only after Grosskreutz pointed his pistol directly at Rittenhouse’s head a few feet away, it came as a shock.

There’s much more at the original, and I absolutely encourage reading it. Mr Sullivan goes into many examples of recent journalistic ‘errors,’ and notes what we wicked reich wing conservatives have been saying for years now: the mistakes the credentialed media make all seem to be on one direction, the direction which feeds into the narrative of the American political left, of the American Democratic Party.

Was Kyle Rittenhouse “a naive, dangerous fool in the midst of indefensible mayhem, who, in the end, shot assailants in self-defense”? While I have never called him a “naïve, dangerous fool,” I have said, “Young Mr Rittenhouse helped to create the situation by traveling to Kenosha and appearing on the scene with a firearm. That does not mean it wasn’t self-defense; it seems pretty clear that it was. But he should never have gone there, certainly not armed.”

    We all get things wrong. What makes this more worrying is simply that all these false narratives just happen to favor the interests of the left and the Democratic party. And corrections, when they occur, take up a fraction of the space of the original falsehoods. These are not randos tweeting false rumors. They are the established press.

The trial of Mr Rittenhouse reminds me of that of George Zimmerman. Mr Zimmerman should never have followed Trayvon Martin, and certainly should have backed off when dispatchers told him to do so, but that did not give Mr Martin the right to assault him. Local law enforcement knew that Mr Zimmerman’s actions were legal self-defense, but political pressure pushed the state of Florida to appoint a special counsel and prosecute him anyway. It was really no surprise that Mr Zimmerman was acquitted, because the state had no case. The left waxed wroth, but they’d had their trial, and the jury exonerated Mr Zimmerman. Prosecutors in Kenosha surely knew, unless they are just boneheadedly stupid, that they didn’t have much of a case, but my guess — and it really is a guess — is that they were unwilling to take the political heat for dropping the charges against the defendant; they’re leaving it up to a (supposedly) anonymous jury.

But, as Mr Sullivan noted, the liberals in the credentialed media — even ones who masturbate during Zoom meetings — can’t escape their own narrative that he simply must be guilty!

This is why I have so often referred to ‘journolists’ as opposed to journalists. 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 have noted, many times, how publisher Elizabeth Hughes has openly admitted that her goal is to filter reporting, filter (supposedly) straight news stories, in The Philadelphia Inquirer through a political sieve, rather than report the unvarnished facts.

Newspapers can, and should, have editorial and OpEd sections; with word count and column inch limits having been mostly replaced by nearly unlimited bandwidth, there should be more, not less, of such sections. The credentialed media ought to be perfectly free to engage in expressions of opinion. But for the credentialed media to regain lost credibility, they need to report the news as straight news, and not report opinion as fact.

That’s the difference between journalism and journolism.

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 I have my own criticism of Mr Bouie’s work here.