Tag Archives: #MediaBias

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Two more Capitol kerfufflers plead guilty to misdemeanors

The seriousness of the Capitol kerfuffle is revealed in the fact that the feds are charging most with just misdemeanors. The bias of the Lexington Herald-Leader is revealed in how they played up the story.

Fired Kentucky nurse, husband plead guilty in Capitol riot case. Sentencing next.

By Jeremy Chisenhall | July 28, 2021 | 01:46 PM | Updated 1:52 PM EDT

A Kentucky couple who were at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot in Washington, D.C., have pleaded guilty to participating and face a maximum punishment of six months in prison, according to federal court records filed Tuesday.

Thomas and Lori Vinson, who were arrested on Feb. 23 and charged with participating in the riot and other related crimes, have each pleaded guilty to one count of parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol Building, according to plea agreements filed in federal court. In addition to a maximum prison time of six months, the two defendants could also face a fine of up to $5,000. Continue reading →

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Kathleen Sebelius advocates authoritarian controls; the credentialed media try to ignore it to death

Kathleen Sebelius was Secretary of Health and Human Services during the previous Democratic administration, but it seems that she has taken her lessons not from Barack Hussein Obama but Xi Jinping. First, from The Wall Street Journal:

    Get Vaxxed or Stay Home, Some Local Chinese Governments Say

    Some areas are planning to restrict people from public venues unless they get shots, sparking criticism

    By Chao Deng | Updated: July 15, 2021 | 7:17 AM ET

    Several local governments in China are planning to bar residents who haven’t been vaccinated against Covid-19 from accessing public venues, stirring controversy as the country makes a push for herd immunity.

    In recent days, a dozen counties and cities in the eastern provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian and Jiangxi set late-August deadlines for people 18 years or older to complete a two-shot vaccine regimen, according to similarly worded online statements. Many of them also set dates in late July by which unvaccinated people would be barred from entering schools, libraries, prisons, nursing homes and inpatient facilities at hospitals without a valid medical exemption.

    Some of the localities attributed their new policies to “national, provincial and municipal arrangements,” without explaining whether they received a decree from the central government.

    China is dealing with sporadic outbreaks of Covid-19 and authorities have been offering homegrown vaccines free of charge since last December.

    The government notices have sparked online pushback from some Chinese and triggered a debate—as in the U.S. and elsewhere—about whether people should be required to present proof of inoculation to travel, work or undertake other routine activities outside their home.

There’s more at the original.

Mrs Sebelius, previously the Governor of Kansas, apparently loves the way the Chinese Communists do things. From Breitbart, via The Pirate’s Cove:

Mrs Sebelius stated:

    Sebelius said, “We’re in a situation where we have a wildly effective vaccine, multiple choices, lots available, free of charge, and we have folks who are just saying I won’t do it. I think that it’s time to say to those folks, it’s fine if you don’t choose to get vaccinated. You may not come to work. You may not have access to a situation where you’re going to put my grandchildren in jeopardy. Where you might kill them, or you might put them in a situation where they’re going to carry the virus to someone in a high-risk position.”

    That’s, I think the point where we are, is freedom is one thing, but freedom when you harm others like secondhand smoke and issues that we’ve dealt with very clearly in the past you can’t drive drunk. You can drink, but you can’t drive drunk because you can injure other people. You can’t smoke inside of a public place where you can give cancer to someone else in spite of their never having been a smoker.

    So I think we’re reaching that point in the United States where those of us who are vaccinated, I want to take off my mask. I want to be able to live my life with vaccination, and right now, I’m being impinged on by people who say I don’t want to get vaccinated. It’s fine. I want them to maybe have a limitation on where they can go and who they can possibly infect.

You know what’s interesting? Breitbart is a definitely conservative site, and I like to cite liberal sources to prevent complaints by the left that my sources are biased, so I made a Google search for Mrs Sebelius’ first sentence. As you can see from the screen capture at the right, on which you can click to enlarge to make it more readable, all I found were conservative sources and individual blogs. Given that Breitbart had a video of the interview embedded, one which has two annoying commercials in it and one I cannot embed, the story is confirmed, but, oddly enough, the credentialed media seem loath to report it. Site searches for Sebelius on The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Philadelphia Inquirer yielded zero returns of this. Even a site search of CNN, where the interview was broadcast, yielded only one article, Young children will pay the price if enough US adults don’t get vaccinated against Covid-19, expert says, in which Mrs Sebelius’ statement is buried down in the 19th paragraph.

The credentialed media absotively, posilutely do not want such a totalitarian statement from a former Secretary of Health and Human Services to get much publicity, and so the story is being quietly buried, quietly ignored to death. Such is apparently not news that is fit to print! But we can be certain of one thing: if President Biden proposed such a thing, the left would certainly go along with it, because the left love them some totalitarian controls!

“Democracy Dies in Darkness,” The Washington Post has as its masthead tagline. Yet it seems that a former Democratic Secretary of Health and Human Services’ advocacy of authoritarian controls is news the editors of the Post want to keep in darkness.

It’s interesting that the Wikipedia biography for Mrs Sebelius states, “She is strongly pro-choice,” but it seems that, like so many others on the left, she is pro-choice on exactly one thing.

It should be noted that I am, and have previously stated, that I have been vaccinated against COVID-19. That was my personal choice, a choice I took freely, and my decision is the one I think others should take. But I also believe that people have the right to decide that for themselves, and that the government ought not to have any authority to penalize or punish them if they choose differently than I have.

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Why won’t The Philadelphia Inquirer report on neighborhood conditions?

I am shocked, shocked! I tell you, that The Philadelphia Inquirer covered the shootings in the City of Brotherly Love over the weekend.

First, the numbers. The Philadelphia Police Department reported that there have been 294 homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, July 11th. Over 192 days in the year, that works out to 1.53125 per day, on pace for 559 murders for the entire year. That’s a 34.25% increase over the same day last year.

On the same day last year, the numbers worked out to a projected 415 killings, and we know that the city actually finished with 499. The record of 500 was set in 1990, during the height of the crack cocaine wars.

If the city continues on the same pace as established yesterday, it will tie the record of 500 on the 327th day of the year. That would be Tuesday, November 23rd, two days before Thanksgiving, with 5½ weeks left in the year.

15 people shot — one 14 times, another 11 — in a weekend of gun violence in Philly

Last week, the city’s total of those killed or wounded in shootings since 2015 surpassed a staggering 10,000 people, The Inquirer reported.

By Diane Mastrull | July 11, 2021

A sextuple shooting in North Philadelphia, during which one man was shot 14 times, was just one of eight episodes of gun violence from late Saturday night into early Sunday morning involving 15 victims, two of whom died, police said.

Killed were a man of unknown identity and age who was shot multiple times inside a business on the 1600 block of West Cumberland Street in North Philadelphia at 10 p.m. Saturday and a 23-year-old man shot 11 times in the back, chest, leg, arm and neck on the 100 block of Leverington Avenue in Manayunk at 12:54 a.m., according to police reports.

All shootings took place between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. Two were doubles, as Philadelphia continued on a trend seen in cities across the country. Last week, Philadelphia’s total of those killed or wounded in shootings since 2015 surpassed a staggering 10,000 people, The Inquirer reported. July was off to a violent start with 77 people struck by gunfire in the first eight days of the month, according to the report.

The one involving six victims was reported around 11:30 p.m. at West Butler and North Ninth Streets, in the city’s Hunting Park section. The victims were all males, ages 22, 23, 28, 31, 34 and 41. Four were in stable condition and two in critical condition Sunday at Temple University Hospital, police said. The 23-year-old was shot 14 times, they said.

According to police, a surveillance video shows two males walk up to a group gathered on the 900 block of West Butler Street and begin firing before fleeing in an unknown direction. A search for them continued Sunday evening.

901 West Butler Street. Screen capture from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

Well, at least the Inquirer didn’t tell us that two inanimate guns levitated and shot these people themselves. A photo in the Inquirer shows the scene, with two police evidence people working the scene, amidst dozens of evidence markers, and what appears to be three neighborhood loiterers. The photo to the left shows the address, a bodega at 901 West Butler Street, and it isn’t exactly a middle-class area.

This was a targeted hit: shooting one guy 14 times isn’t some sort of accident, and two “males” — note, not “white males” or “black males” or “Hispanic males”, describing either the shooters or their victims[1]Note that in one of the internally referenced stories in the Inquirer, it states, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. … Continue reading — walking up and opening fire isn’t just “gun violence,” but clearly attempted murder. The shooters knew who their targets were, and had a pretty good idea where to find them.

If the survivors decide to tell the police who shot them, and odds are very great that they know their assailants, we’ll eventually find out that the shooters have long rap sheets, and District Attorney Larry Krasner treated them leniently.

909 West Butler. Click to enlarge.

A photo just a couple of buildings away shows that this is an unsafe neighborhood, as the residents at 909 West Butler Street spent good money to completely bar in their front porch. 909 looks like someone has been trying to take care of his row house, but there are a lot of buildings in view with peeling paint and other signs of not being well maintained.

721 West Butler Street. Click to enlarge.

A couple blocks down the street, at 721 or 723 West Butler, the owners have completely barred in their property. Why, it’s almost as though they don’t feel safe in the neighborhood, as though they don’t trust the people there.

This is the part that the Inquirer doesn’t report. People are virtually locking themselves in jail to protect their families and themselves.

Use Google Maps for 3810 North Franklin Street, near 721 West Butler, and toggle up the street. The photos show a racially integrated neighborhood, but one in which several row homes, including three in a row, at 3846, 3848, and 3850 North Franklin, have barred in their front porches. Why doesn’t the Inquirer ever report on that? The paper loves to blame ‘systemic racism,’ but the photos from Google Maps show white people as well as black, show an integrated area.

These neighborhoods are overwhelmed not by inanimate guns, but by bad people living in a bad culture. They are relatively poor, but are trying to protect what little they have, not just from guns, but from theft, from assault, and from rape . . . but all that the “anti-racist news organization” reports on is “gun violence,” because the #woke staff are just deathly afraid of blaming bad people.

References

References
↑1 Note that in one of the internally referenced stories in the Inquirer, it states, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males,” but the Inquirer story won’t tell you that about the victims in the reported shootings. I wonder why that is. There’s something wryly amusing that the Inquirer follows the Associated Press stylebook change, in which the AP noted that they would capitalize “black” in reference to race, but not “white,” and in this case, the writers capitalized “black” but not “brown”. As per our stylebook, we do not capitalize ‘colors’ when referring to race.
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The Washington Post will never get the right answers because they refuse to look at uncomfortable data

It’s always good when a credentialed media source catches up with The First Street Journal, but one thing is certain: it only happens reluctantly.

    If progressives don’t start taking rising crime seriously, they risk getting mugged by reality

    Opinion by Helaine Olen Roshkow | Washington Post Columnist | July 10, 2021 | 8:00 AM EDT

    Democrats, Republicans and independents all say there is a “major crisis” in violent crime, according to a poll released this week. This a serious matter. Crime is up throughout the United States. The murder rate surged nearly 20 percent in 2020, compared with 2019. Road-rage shootings have doubled nationally, claiming victims such as 6-year-old Aiden Leos in California in May.

    But many among the progressive community don’t want to admit this. They seem to believe that acknowledging a covid-era crime wave will jeopardize hard-won gains fighting for bail and sentencing reform, attempts to reform the nation’s police forces, and the fight to address racial injustice. MSNBC host Joy Reid, for example, recently accused the media of riling people up over the issue, tweeting: “I’ve seen more TV stories about crime than the actual anecdotes from friends in [New York City] or other big cities bear out.” Others point out the levels are rising from numbers significantly lower than during the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, so why worry?

It was 1999, and I was on the ‘management team’ with the company for which I then worked. A friend of mine named Ken, also on the management team, was responsible for our safety numbers, among other things. We were all under instructions from the corporate Vice President to have numerical goals for different things, and Ken was supposed to have a numerical goal for lost time accidents. He quipped, “So, if we’re below our target, does that mean we have to go out and deliberately hurt someone?”

Obviously, the goal for lost time accidents should be zero, but if it’s always zero, you’ll always fail. Mrs Roshkow at least seems to recognize this: going higher on a negative is always a failure, and no one is going to be satisfied with an “it’s not as bad as the 90s” answer.

Trouble is, she doesn’t recognize what happened in the 1990s, when Mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned up the horror story that was then New York City by being a Republican who was tough on crime.

    The denial needs to stop. The failure to engage and take on the issue of growing violence and lawbreaking now — no matter how unpleasant, distasteful or uncomfortable — will only harm the progressive agenda and potentially cause swing voters to pull the lever for Republican candidates.

You mean Republicans who will actually get things done in reducing crime?

    Traditionally, voters view Democrats and progressives as softer on crime than “law and order” Republicans. That’s why even right-leaning Democrats are sometimes vulnerable to getting pinned as supporters of the far-left slogan “defund the police.” Rising crime rates provide an opening to grandstanding Republicans, who claim it is the result of Democrats not adequately supporting cops. As House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said this week: “Crime is soaring in cities managed by Democrats.”

    Ridiculous. But the politics of backlash is a real thing. As we’ve seen in both the distant and near past, fear can lead otherwise left-leaning people to vote in a more right-wing direction. The violent crime wave of the 1990s ultimately gave us the now-reviled federal anti-crime bill in 1994 and California’s “three strikes” law, which sent shoplifters to prison for decades. More recently, the “defund the police” slogan is widely suspected of costing Democrats votes in tight 2020 congressional elections while in June’s Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, Eric Adams, running on a “law and order” platform, decisively defeated more progressive challengers, such as Maya Wiley.

Mrs Roshkow said that Mr McCarthy’s claim was “Ridiculous,” but it’s the stone-cold truth. I’ve harped on foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia on this site, but the numbers don’t lie: the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page showed that, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, 291 people had spilled their life’s blood out on the city’s mean streets. 291 ÷ 189 days so far in the year, = 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year. Philly’s record is an even 500, set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990, while 2020 came in second with 499. If the rate continues as is, the City of Brotherly Love will not just break the unfortunate record, but leave it far behind in the rear view mirror. The current pace is so bad that, if maintained, the city will tie the 1990 record on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, with six weeks left in the year.

Naturally, instead of supporting the get tough on criminals policies which worked in the 1990s, she blames not actual criminals, but those inanimate guns that seem to levitate and shoot people all by themselves!

    Progressives, instead of denying rising crime, should stick the blame right where it belongs — on Republicans. Gun sales increased significantly last year. The one thing that links almost all gun violence? Easy access to firearms. But Republicans refuse to back even minor restrictions on guns ownership. Another thing that stops crime? Summer jobs programs for teens living in poverty. Fund more of them — and remind people which party often opposes doing that.

Thing is, it might not be those evil reich-wing Republicans buying all of those guns. Also from The Washington Post, on the same day:

    ‘Fear on top of fear’: Why anti-gun Americans joined the wave of new gun owners

    Pandemic, police violence, calls to ‘defund the police’ fuel surge of first-time buyers

    By Marc Fisher, Miranda Green, Kelly Glass and Andrea Eger | July 10, 2021

    All his life, Jabril Battle was anti-gun. Then came the pandemic, the lockdown, the shortages and a feeling that at any moment, things could blow. Battle bought a Beretta.

    Drawn to last summer’s protests against police violence, Savannah Grace found herself face-to-face with a camo-clad officer’s long gun. She’d always hated guns, but went out and got a Glock 45.

    In blue cities and red suburbs alike, firearms purchases soared last year — to the highest level in half a century, based on federal background checks. A striking portion of those sales went to first-time gun buyers — 40 percent, according to the firearms industry’s trade association. Other studies show first-timers accounting for more like a fifth of sales in 2020, but that’s still unusually high, retailers said.

    Overall gun ownership nationwide jumped from 32 percent of Americans to 39 percent last year, according to University of Chicago survey data — well under the 50 percent level of half a century ago, but the biggest jump in recent decades.

    From the downtown streets left empty by the pandemic’s shutdowns to the sharp spike in homicides and the nationwide conflict over the role and behavior of police officers, a disorienting and often frightening year drove many decisions to buy guns, according to dealers and buyers alike.

That doesn’t sound like the bad guys buying guns — not that most of them buy them legally anyway — but by ordinary people afraid of the bad guys, and of policies by the left that would reduce police protection.

    Sales to women and people of color rose in 2020. Firearms industry data shows sales jumping 50 percent among Black customers, 47 percent among Hispanics and 43 percent among Asian Americans, though gun ownership remains proportionately lower among those groups compared with Whites.

Actually, the linked data show that “The highest overall firearm sales increase comes from Black men and women who show a 58.2 percent increase in purchases during the first six months of 2020 versus the same period last year.” Maybe this from The Philadelphia Inquirer is why:

    Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot (in Philadelphia) since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males.

There’s something wryly amusing that the Inquirer follows the Associated Press stylebook change, in which the AP noted that they would capitalize “black” in reference to race, but not “white,” and in this case, the writers capitalized “black” but not “brown”. As per our stylebook, we do not capitalize ‘colors’ when referring to race.

This is the real reason “anti-gun Americans joined the wave of new gun owners”: because the incredible surge in homicides has occurred in their neighborhoods! The very people they politically support are the ones among whom the surge in violence has occurred.

A lot of the city statistics released do not include the race of victims and known killers, but St Louis, our highest homicide rate city, does. According to the report dated July 11th, out of 99 homicide victims thus far, 92 (74 males and 18 females) were black. In a city that is not quite half black, 46.41% black to be more precise, 92.9% of the homicide victims are black. More, of the 42 identified suspects of those 92 murders, 41 are black, and the other is listed as ‘unknown.’

So, how dangerous is it to live in St Louis? Using the figures from the St Louis Police Department, I created the chart above. Taking the population of St Louis, 294,890, adjusting it for race and sex by percentages of the population, dividing the number of homicides by 191, for the number of days so far in the year (up to July 10th), then multiplying that number by 365, I arrived at projected homicides for 2021. Taking those numbers, dividing by population, and then by 100,000, I got the anticipated homicide rate per 100,000 population, the way figures are normally reported. If you are a white male, you are facing a homicide rate of 8.26 per 100,000 population; white women are looking at a homicide rate of 5.73.

But if you are black? Black women are facing a homicide rate of 46.62 per 100,000, while black males have the number 204.25 per 100,000 population staring them dead in the eye!

If the problem were just that there are too many guns, why is there such a discrepancy between the murder rates between whites and blacks, in the same city? That’s the question which nobody will ask, because nobody is willing to look at the answer.

Yes, I know: some people say that math is racist, but math just is. And if you are unwilling to look at the facts, without excluding things because you don’t look at where certain evidence might lead, you will never get the right answers.

The answer is simple: there is something in the urban black culture which teaches too many of its children that it’s perfectly acceptable to go out and shoot other people. Maybe why that is ought to be the question people should ask.

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Killadelphia The killers are playing catch up; The Philadelphia Inquirer is not

It was just yesterday that we noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t seem to pay much notice to the murders of young black males in the City of Brotherly Love. I pointed out, in the footnote, that with 287 homicides in 188 days (as of 11:59 PM on July 7th) equaled 1.5266 homicides per day, projecting a total of 557 for the year.

Well, it looks like the city’s thugs realized that they weren’t quite meeting their quota, because after two straight days of the Philadelphia Police Department reporting only one homicide, the gang bangers caught up: the Current Crime Statistics page shows 291 killings as of 11:59 PM on July 8th. 291 ÷ 189 days in the year, = 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year.

The Inquirer? Digging into several pages of their website at 8:30 AM — now at 4:42 PM, current update — this morning, I couldn’t find a single story, not so much as what Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas called a “handful of lines in a media alert,” although it’s possible I just didn’t dig into the right place.

Nevertheless, the editors and 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 at the Inquirer didn’t think that four homicides yesterday was worth noting on the website’s main page, where readers had a chance of spotting such.

Why? Because black lives don’t matter to the editors and staff of The Philadelphia Inquirer! Oh, they matter if taken by a white police officer, matter a very great deal, but when one black thug kills another black thug, which is what the vast majority of the city’s homicides are, it just doesn’t fit Teh Narrative that the “anti-racist news organization” wants to tell. Maybe it’s time for me to break out that 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. logo once more.

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.
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The “anti-racist” Philadelphia Inquirer shows how much it values white lives over black ones

We have previously noted that the vast majority of homicide victims in Philadelphia are black, but when one black gang banger kills another black gang banger, it isn’t really news anymore, not to the Inquirer. Instead, the paper paid more attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s four separate stories; how many do the mostly black victims get?

Well, now it’s story number five: Continue reading →

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More journolism from The Philadelphia Inquirer The Inquirer writes its headline to stir up resentment toward the Philadelphia Police Department

Screenshot from Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, July 7, 2021, 4:42 PM EDT. Click to enlarge.

Sometimes you just know what you have to do: take a screenshot as documentary evidence, before someone tries to make history vanish.[1]I pointed out the tremendous bias in a tweet to Gabriel Escobar, the editor of the Inquirer, so it’s at least possible that the headline will be changed, not that I expect it. The screen capture to the right was taken by me, at 4:42 PM EDT on Wednesday, July 7, 2021.

References

References
↑1 I pointed out the tremendous bias in a tweet to Gabriel Escobar, the editor of the Inquirer, so it’s at least possible that the headline will be changed, not that I expect it.
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For some in Philadelphia, “an anti-racist media system” means a propaganda system.

We noted, near the end of May, the opinion piece by Elizabeth Hughes, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer. In it, Miss Hughes began:

    June 2 will mark a year since The Philadelphia Inquirer published this racist headline: “Buildings Matter, Too.”

    If printing those words in 72-point type had occurred in a vacuum, it would have been a grievous and unpardonable offense. That it was published at a moment of national reckoning over social justice — prompted by the vicious murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police a year ago yesterday — amplified the outrage and brought us well-deserved scorn and scrutiny.

    There is somewhat of a playbook whenever a self-inflicted crisis like this threatens to define any institution and the people who work for it. And so it played out here. Apologies were issued, a change in newsroom leadership was announced, earnest promises of reform and redress were made.

By “a change in newsroom leadership was announced,” the publisher was saying that Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Stan Wischnowski was fired forced to resign.

I will admit it: I do not see how the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” is racist, especially in a city founded in 1682, 99 years before we won our independence at the Battle of Yorktown, a city in which our Declaration of Independence was signed, and a city with surviving 18th century residences.

What did the Buildings Matter, Too article actually say?

    Does the destruction of buildings matter when black Americans are being brazenly murdered in cold blood by police and vigilantes?

    That’s the question that has been raging on the streets of Philadelphia, and across my architecture-centric social media feeds, over the last two days as a dark cloud of smoke spiraled up from Center City. What started as a poignant and peaceful protest in Dilworth Park on Saturday morning ended up in a frenzy of destruction by evening. Hardly any building on Walnut and Chestnut Streets was left unscathed, and two mid-19th century structures just east of Rittenhouse Square were gutted by fire.

    Their chances of survival are slim, which means there could soon be a gaping hole in the heart of Philadelphia, in one of its most iconic and historic neighborhoods. And protesters moved on to West Philadelphia’s fragile 52nd Street shopping corridor, an important center of black life, where yet more property has been battered.

It seems as though Inga Saffron, the article author and architecture writer for the Inquirer, was concerned about buildings, historic buildings, in some heavily black neighborhoods.

So now we come to Malav Kanuga, a researcher with the Media, Inequality, and Change Center and a cooperative member of Making Worlds Bookstore and Social Center in West Philadelphia. He was granted OpEd space by the editors of the Inquirer:

    Philadelphia deserves anti-racist media

    It is time for a deep reckoning of our existing media system and the role it often plays in reflecting classist and racist interests that threaten safety for all.

    by Malav Kanuga | July 5, 2021

    In the last year, organizers and activists, youth and elders in Philadelphia and across the country came together to sustain perhaps the largest mobilization against police violence in U.S. history. Between May 26, 2020, and the end of that June, the country averaged 140 demonstrations a day.

    This movement also compelled deeper reflection inside local and national newsrooms about their role in upholding police narratives and their responsibility to challenge systemic racism in their reporting.

    A year since the uprisings in response to the police murder of George Floyd, we don’t just need diversity and inclusion initiatives and sensitivity trainings on white privilege in newsrooms. We need an anti-racist media system.

Wait, what? Mr Kanuga is saying that “we need an anti-racist media system,” but isn’t that exactly what the Inquirer’s publisher already promised?

    If our call then was to become an anti-racist news organization, what has been done?

Apparently, Mr Kanuga thinks Miss Hughes has yet to accomplish, or even come close to her goals:

    An anti-racist media system means addressing the real dangers that our media system puts on Black, Indigenous, migrants, and communities of color in our city, and no longer shirking the responsibility to answer calls for redress and reparations to historical and ongoing harms.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain in 72 Shot in Chicago This Weekend

Well, one thing is certainly true about that: the Inquirer only rarely reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. I’ve told the truth previously: unless the murder victim is someone already of note, or a cute little white girl, the editors of the Inquirer don’t care, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the murder of a young black man in Philadelphia is not news.  The paper paid more attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s four separate stories; how many do the mostly black victims get?

On Friday, December 11, 2020, columnist Helen Ubiñas published an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer entitled “What do you know about the Philadelphians killed by guns this year? At least know their names.”

    The last time we published the names of those lost to gun violence, in early July, nearly 200 people had been fatally shot in the city.

    Just weeks before the end of 2020, that number doubled. More than 400 people gunned down.

    By the time you read this, there will only be more.

    Even in a “normal” year, most of their stories would never be told.

    At best they’d be reduced to a handful of lines in a media alert:

    “A 21-year-old Black male was shot one time in the head. He was transported to Temple University Hospital and was pronounced at 8:12 p.m. The scene is being held, no weapon recovered and no arrest.”

    That’s it. An entire life ending in a paragraph that may never make the daily newspaper.

Of course, Miss Ubiñas followed the Inquirer’s stylebook in claiming that these Philadelphians were “killed by guns.” No, they were killed by bad people, people who used guns as their tools. But the Inquirer doesn’t want to ever say that part. Nevertheless, she confirmed what I said about the paper’s coverage of homicides in Philadelphia.

But more coverage of homicides is not what Mr Kanuga wants:

    This requires abolishing harmful narratives that criminalize people experiencing the trauma of poverty stemming from the systemic withholding of resources. It means journalism ending the reinforcement of police-centered solutions to social welfare issues, instead promoting, for example, mental health alternatives to the typical police responses that led to their murder of Walter Wallace Jr. last October.

Of course, Mr Wallace wasn’t murdered; the police acted within their training, in dealing with an armed man advancing on them, a man on whom the police had been called four times that day. A “mental health alternative” to Mr Wallace? Yeah, that would have gotten a social worker or two stabbed, possibly to death, by Mr Wallace.

Channel 10, the NBC station in Philadelphia, reported:

    A review of the 1,316 homicides in Philadelphia between January 1, 2018 and March 22, 2021 shows:

    • 6% of Philadelphia murder victims are White. Police made an arrest in 63% of those cases.
    • 82% of Philadelphia murder victims are Black. Police made an arrest in 33% of those cases.
    • 11% of Philadelphia murder victims are Hispanic. Police made an arrest in 38% of those cases.
    • Less than 1% of Philadelphia murder victims are Asian. Police made an arrest in 55% of those cases.

    When asked why arrests rates lag when a murder victim is a person of color, the head of the Philadelphia Police homicide unit cited witness cooperation.

    “We need the cooperation of the community,” Capt. Jason Smith said. “Without the cooperation of the community, we are not going to be able to effectively do our jobs.”

What does Mr Kanuga want? “abolishing harmful narratives that criminalize people” means concealing what everybody already knows: that black Philadelphians are being murdered at a prodigious rate in Philadelphia, and that the vast majority of their killers, when known, are also black. More, as Captain Smith noted, people within the city’s black community would rather the killing of one of their own go unsolved than see another member of their community go to jail for it.

    This includes challenging routine newsroom reporting practices that play a part in silencing community voices and eliding their experiences and needs in a city that has overpoliced and economically under-resourced much of its Black and Brown communities. It involves pushing newsrooms to meet with community organizations to have honest conversations about coverage on “criminal justice” issues and question single-source reporting that relies on accounts of community affairs offered by police and their spokespersons, when those accounts are often unreliable.

    It asks journalists to think about how the language they use undermines the dignity of those reported upon, including a commitment to “human-first” language that avoids dehumanizing descriptions like “felon,” and trauma-informed reporting that acknowledges harm to communities in order to not perpetuate it.

“Felon” has a definition; a felon is someone who has been convicted of a felony. In many stories, that is an apt and concise description.

What does Mr Kanuga want when he says that the city needs “an anti-racist media system”? He means a media which will publish or broadcast the heartwarming stories of success of every ‘minority’ community he could list,[1]In one short paragraph he lists “Black, Indigenous, migrant, and communities of color by addressing the intersection of voices, cultures, and textures of our achievements and issues. It … Continue reading but one which will ignore the heavy crime rate in the black community, blaming it all, if it has to be mentioned, on “the trauma of poverty stemming from the systemic withholding of resources.” To him, “anti-racist” means the consideration of race in reporting the news, and hiding news that might some might see as reflecting poorly on some ‘minority’ group.

Basically, Mr Kanuga wants a propaganda media for Philadelphia. Thing is, with the inquirer and its publisher, he’s already half way to his goal.

References

References
↑1 In one short paragraph he lists “Black, Indigenous, migrant, and communities of color by addressing the intersection of voices, cultures, and textures of our achievements and issues. It highlights gender and sexual diversity in these communities.”
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Journolism at its finest: The Philadelphia Inquirer and one-sided reporting

We learned it in high school, if not earlier, how the Bill of Rights protected our rights as the citizens of a free republic. The First Amendment to the Constitution states:

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The hand-written copy of the proposed articles of amendment passed by Congress in 1789, cropped to show just the text in the third article that would later be ratified as the First Amendment.

Over the course of our history, the Supreme Court has ‘incorporated’ most of the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, to include protections for the people from actions by states and local governments, and Americans alive in the 21st century are all used to the concepts of freedom of speech.

We have, sadly, noted how some of our major media sources are no longer so adamant about protecting our First Amendment rights.

Now comes The Philadelphia Inquirer, with a very slanted article about how some people have exercised their freedom of speech, and freedom of peaceable assembly, and how horrible it is! Continue reading →