The Philadelphia Inquirer beclowns itself . . . again How do you publish a story about Police released images without publishing the images?

This site has reported, many times, on how The Philadelphia Inquirer censors the news, at the direction of publisher Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes. Miss Hughes told us that “racial justice” concerns will be considered in the newspaper’s “crime and criminal justice coverage,” but today’s story raises it to the laughing out loud level.

Police release images of suspect in jeweled crown heist from Center City church

The burglar broke into St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church at 13th and Ludlow Streets by smashing through a stained-glass window and stole a golden crown, police said.

by Rodrigo Torrejón | Monday, January 13, 2025 | 12:51 PM EST

Image released by Philadelphia Police Department.

Police released images and video of the man they say stole a 125-year-old bejeweled golden crown from atop a marble statue of the Virgin Mary at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Center City and asked the public for help in finding him.Around 1:10 a.m. Saturday, police said, the man broke into the church on the corner of South 13th and Ludlow Streets by smashing through a stained-glass window. The burglar was captured on surveillance video breaking through the window, climbing into the upper nave and going straight to the statue and crown, the church’s archivist, Anne Kirkwood, said.

A short clip from surveillance footage released by police Monday shows the man, wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, a face mask, grey sweatpants, and red or pink sneakers, walking up an alleyway by the church before climbing what appears to be a fence and disappearing from view of the camera.

Other clips released by police show the suspect’s alleged getaway car, a grey Mitsubishi SUV.

There’s more at the original.

Yet, while talking about the released image and video, and having three photographs illustrating the article, which I used to obtain the images for this article, the Inquirer did not publish the image or video themselves. There were adequate hyperlinks to take readers to those things, but the Inky, for whatever cockamamie reasons they had, at least a of publication time here, 4:25 PM EST, left out the images about which the story was written!

The image at least appears to show a thin male with fairly dark skin, possibly a black male, breaking into the Center City church, but it isn’t quite clear enough for the viewer to be certain of his race.

Embedded video below the fold. Continue reading

Shedding a tear for Jennifer Rubin, who’s leaving The Washington Post.

We have reported on warmonger and #TrumpDerangementSyndrome sufferer Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post columnist, several times before. At a time when foreign terrorists have been rampant and murders in Philadelphia had spiked, she was whining about “domestic terrorism,” and Elon Musk opening Twitter to greater freedom of speech. Mrs Rubin, who has told us of her great commitment to democracy, was appalled that a party she doesn’t like was allowed to run in democratic elections. She combitched about Post owner Jeff Bezos spiking an endorsement for Kamala Harris Emhoff, but didn’t quit over that, as several other Post personnel has done.

But now, she’s hitting the road:

Jen Rubin exits Washington Post, joins Norm Eisen to launch new outlet countering ‘authoritarian threat’

by Brian Stelter | Monday, January 13, 2024 | 8:45 AM EST

Jennifer Rubin, photo via Libs of TikTok

New York: CNN — Veteran opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin is becoming the latest in a long list of Washington Post figures to leave the troubled institution.Rubin is partnering with former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen and launching something new: a startup publication called The Contrarian.

The startup’s tagline, “Not owned by anybody,” is a pointed reference to billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and other moguls who, in Rubin’s view, have “bent the knee” to President-elect Donald Trump.

“Our goal is to combat, with every fiber of our being, the authoritarian threat that we face,” Rubin told CNN in an interview ahead of the publication’s introduction.

Clearly, Mrs Rubin has been drinking her own Kool-Aid. While the incoming President might think that Mrs Ruban and her fellow travelers belong behind bars, there’s really no law under which she could be thrown in jail for expressing her opinions. She’s like the lovely Kathy Griffin, who’s been claiming that people need to come see her stand up comedy acts now, before she gets thrown into an ‘internment camp,’ is reaching people. I’d say her claim is overblown, considering that President Trump didn’t have her thrown behind barbed wire following her posting of a picture holding what was supposed to be the President’s bloody head, later saying that “she believes she’s been personally attacked by the president and the first family.” Continue reading

No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough! Another "journalist" tries to cover up the media's culpability in keeping Joe Biden's dementia a secret

Woodrow Wilson goes over papers at his desk with his wife Edith Bolling Wilson. Photo: Getty Images

Peggy Noonan is not some poorly-paid reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader, out in the hinterlands and isolated from the centers of elite power, but a Washington insider — though she now lives in New York City — beginning with the Reagan Administration, who now writes a weekly column for The Wall Street Journal, and is a regular contributor to other credentialed media sources. She is frequently a panelist on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” While she is described as being mostly “center-right,” but she distanced herself from the Republican Party when Donald Trump was winning the 2016 nomination. She called on Congress to censure President Trump following the release of the Mueller Report.

The President Who Wasn’t There

What we’re learning about the Biden White House is reminiscent of Woodrow and Edith Bolling Wilson.

by Peggy Noonan | Boxing Day, December 26, 2024 | 6:52 PM EST

We button up the astounding year with the scandal of 2024, which won’t take on its true size and historical significance until some time passes. Its facts—who did what, starting when, how it worked—will be fully reported not by journalists but by historians.

The story is the decline of Joe Biden’s mental acuity, a word we use because it sounds both clinical and polite, and by which we mean the president has been in apparent cognitive decline for some years, perhaps since before taking office, and wasn’t fully up to the job. His family and friends, top White House staff and other administration officials covered it up. Some no doubt thought his presidency was good for the country and some, perhaps, good for them.

In a front-page story this month, the Journal’s Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer and Siobhan Hughes spoke to nearly 50 people in and around the presidency and outlined how the White House adapted to the needs of “a diminished leader.” He met infrequently with cabinet members and congressional leaders, and the president’s staff seemed to be running things. This system “insulated him from the scrutiny of the American public.”

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Journolism: Even now, the credentialed media try to blame their laziness on Joe Biden’s staffers

At 2:55 PM EST on December 17th, I asked the question to which The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal admitted the answer on the 19th: “Why didn’t the press play its ‘adversarial role’ when it came to Joe Biden?

How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge

Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.

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Why didn’t the press play its “adversarial role” when it came to Joe Biden?

Our regular readers — both of them — know that I am very much attached to the idea of print newspapers, despite them being slightly updated 18th century technology. I delivered newspapers as a teenager, and with my seriously degraded hearing, watching the news on television is difficult for me; even with close captioning, which is usually poor on live broadcasts, I can miss things. With the printed word, even though by printed I mean words on my computer monitor, not actual paper, I don’t miss much, and if there is a point on which I was confused, I can go back and read it again, to make certain I understood what was written.

So, quite naturally, I was reeled in by this story, that Rob Flaherty, the former deputy campaign manager for Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, claimed there was “just no value” in candidates speaking to mainstream newspapers like The New York Times or Washington Post. Naturally, my mind went to the complaints by people like The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard left columnist Will Bunch that newspapers specifically, and the credentialed media in general, were not hard enough on former and now future President Donald Trump.

But then came a second paragraph, which destroyed my preconceived notion of what the article was going to say: Continue reading

I’ll bet that Will Bunch and Taylor Lorenz are glad now that Joe Biden’s attempt to create a Ministry of Truth failed

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far left columnist Will Bunch skeeted an editorial by the UK’s left-wing The Guardian about protecting journolists, oops, sorry, journalists.

The Guardian view on Trump’s threat to the media: time to pass the Press Act

Bipartisan legislation offers historic protections for journalists, banning secret surveillance and ensuring source confidentiality

Tuesday, December 10, 2024 | 1:40 OM EST

Fears of a press crackdown under Donald Trump’s second term deepened with his nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director – given his calls for retribution against journalists. Yet a rare chance to protect press freedom has emerged. The bipartisan Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (Press) Act, the strongest press freedom legislation in US history, is on the brink of a vote. While President-elect Trump has urged Republicans to block it, the Senate could still deliver it to Joe Biden before the lame-duck session ends in January. Continue reading

No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough! The legacy media rarely lie outright, but their biases can be seen in their editorial choices of what to cover, and what to ignore

One thing I saw frequently on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — in the weeks before the election were claims, unsourced claims, that Kamala Harris Emhoff’s campaign had internal polling which was showing that she was losing to former President Donald Trump. Those were cheering, no doubt about that, but I am heavily biased toward verifiable claims, claims that I can back up on The First Street Journal. I make no claim that my site should be considered part of the credentialed media, nor do I claim it to be unbiased; my occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach, and I are both definitely politically conservative, even though we have some disagreements on a few issues.

But while the credentialed media have long told us that the contest between Vice President Emhoff and Mr Trump was a close one, one thing I never saw, in any of the credentialed media sources I do check — The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, to name just a few — was any hint that the Emhoff campaign knew they were behind. Yet someone, at the very least, was leaking that information, leaked it well enough that some conservative sites heard it. Continue reading

No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough!

Upon seeing this tweet from Eyal Yakoby, I had to check the article to see if it was as bad as I suspected. In some ways, it really wasn’t, because most of it was based on the legal problems for José Ibarra’s defense, and the decision to seek a bench trial, a trial by a judge rather than a jury.

Laken Riley’s killer never stood a chance

For all the political controversy surrounding Jose Ibarra, the outcome of this trial was never in doubt.

By Danny Cevallos, MSNBC legal analyst | Thursday, November 21, 2024 | 7:07 PM EST

Jose Antonio Ibarra was convicted on multiple counts of murder Wednesday in the February killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. Ibarra was immediately sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, along with other consecutive sentences for lesser crimes, including aggravated assault with intent to rape and “peeping Tom.”

Riley’s murder became a political rallying cry at this summer’s Republican National Convention because Ibarra entered the country illegally in 2022. But for all the political controversy, the outcome of this trial was never in doubt.

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The Washington Post, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s investigation of President Nixon and Watergate, bringing down a Republican president, chose to protect a Democrat.

“Democracy Dies in Darkness”, huh?

The Washington Post added that tagline to its masthead in February of 2017, claiming that it wasn’t an attack on newly inaugurated President Donald Trump, deciding “to come up with a slogan nearly a year ago, long before Trump was the Republican presidential nominee,” though nobody in particular believed that. I question the timing, as Robert Stacy McCain would say.

The paper’s owner, Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, used the phrase in an interview with The Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron, at a tech forum at The Post last May. “I think a lot of us believe this, that democracy dies in darkness, that certain institutions have a very important role in making sure that there is light,” he said at the time, speaking of his reasons for buying the paper.

I am glad that my favorite reporter, Heather Long, stepped back from the newspaper’s Editorial Board a couple of months ago, so that she can’t be blamed for this drivel.

Trying to protect Biden, Democrats sacrificed their credibility

Democrats’ coverup of the president’s decline hurt their claim of being the party of truth.

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