Tag Archives: #MediaBias

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The whole truth doesn’t interest newspapers these days

While checking on Lexington Police Department data to update the information in Bullets flying in the Bluegrass State, I found that the police had finally updated the city’s shootings investigations page. In 2020, a year which saw the city set its annual murder record with 34 homicides, there were also 140 non-fatal shootings. As of October 10, 2020, there had been 107 non-fatal shootings.

And the thugs are keeping pace, as there have been 109 non-fatal shootings as of October 10, 2021!

Out of 140 non-fatal shootings in Lexington last year, the victim was white 32 times, and listed as Hispanic on four occasions. Out of 140 non-fatal shootings, 104 of the victims, 74.29%, were black, in a city the 2020 census determined was 68.3% white; 14.9% black; 4.2% Asian or Pacific Islander; 7.1% two or more races; and 9.2% Hispanic or Latino.

So far in 2021, there have been 17 non-fatal shooting victims listed as white, and another 10 listed as Hispanic, leaving 82, or 75.23%, listed as being black.

Naturally, 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 at a politically correct newspaper like the Lexington Herald-Leader won’t tell its readers this!

The Sacramento Bee, the lead newspaper of the McClatchy Company MNI: (%), led the way for the group, of which the Herald-Leader is part, in deciding not to publish mugshots:

    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.

Further down:

    And the 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.

Perhaps that correlation is not so illusory!

The data are there, but the Herald-Leader reporters and editors do not follow the data, do not investigate something that an elderly man, namely me, was able to find sitting in his home three counties away, and so far out in the boondocks that I can’t get a dead-trees copy of the paper delivered.

Jymie S. Salahuddin, 53, from Lexington station WTVQ.

The McClatchy Mugshot Policy, which the Herald-Leader follows, claims that publishing mugshots of people charged with crimes is harmful, if they are not actually convicted of the crimes for which they have been arrested. Yet, in an article by Karla Ward, Lexington man sentenced to 21 years in prison for cocaine trafficking, the newspaper declined to print the publicly available photo of a convicted felon. Since federal law requires that Jymie S. Salahuddin, 53, serve at least 85% of his 262 month sentence, he will not be eligible for release for 18½ years, when he would be 71 years old. I’m not certain how an 18-year-old mugshot would harm an elderly convict on his release.

Not that it would matter: he’s not a charged but not convicted person, but one who pleaded guilty. It’s not like the paper needed to save bandwidth; they included a stock photo of jail cell bars.

Jacob Heil; photo by WLEX-TV press pool footage.

And the newspaper has assigned reporter Jeremy Chisenhall to sit in and cover the trial of Jacob Heil, 21, who is on trial for reckless homicide and DUI after he was involved in a crash which killed a 4-year-old pedestrian. The Herald-Leader has published at least two stories about the ongoing trial, including Mr Heil’s photograph. Though that phot shows him wearing a face mask, the paper published a full-face photo of him on February 22, 2019.

The paper is willing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, when it comes Mr Heil’s trial, on charges of which he could be acquitted, yet when the statistics point to a significant racial disparity in crime and victimhood in the city, all of these well-educated and experienced reporters and editors keep their keyboards closely in check.

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 stunning lack of perspective

Well, perhaps not that stunning after all.

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

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

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

    by Jenice Armstrong | Monday, October 11, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now there’s this:

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

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

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

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

There’s more at the original, but one thing is absolutely true: with each day that passes, the good people of the City of Brotherly Love, and the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading journolists[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading of The Philadelphia Inquirer prove that black lives don’t matter, don’t matter much at all. If the shooting on Friday was a targeted attack, then the one at the vigil on Sunday was as well. “At least ten shots” rang out at a vigil for the murder victim, and if the shooter displayed the gang bangers’ notoriously poor accuracy with bullets, it was very accurate in sending the intended message: whatever beef the gang had with the victim, or perhaps someone else sitting in that parked, and possibly disabled,[3]Police Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it. vehicle, thinking anything good or nice about the victim was not allowed thinking.

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

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

——————————

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

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

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

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

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑3 Police Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it.
↑4 Only government employees get Columbus Day Indigenous People’s Day off.
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They can’t handle the truth! Philly Inquirer won't tell you that city's murder rate is higher than Chicago's!

This site has been hard on The Philadelphia Inquirer and how that august newspaper pretty much ignores the homicides in its hometown unless the victim is an innocent, someone already of note, or a cute little white girl. In a city in which the vast majority of murder victims are black, you wouldn’t expect that “anti-racist news organization” to have that kind of skewed coverage, would you?

Screen capture of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, at 8:15 AM EDT on Tuesday, October 5, 2021. Click to enlarge.

Well, another innocent person was killed, and the Inquirer is all over it, as we noted on Monday.

    Nursing assistant gunned down by coworker at Jefferson Hospital left behind three children

    The Elkins Park homeowner was also a part-time barber whose “legacy was his kids.”

    by Marina Affo and Juliana Feliciano Reyes | Monday, October 4, 2021

    Anrae James used to tell his younger brother Armond, “If you treat people nice, you’ll always be blessed.” Armond looked up to his brother always and knew he could count on him being present, no matter the endeavor, he said.

    Now the phrase will serve as part of James’ legacy and a bittersweet reminder for all who loved him.

    The 43-year-old nursing assistant and part-time barber, whom many called Rae, was identified by his family on Monday as the victim in an early morning shooting at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. Those who knew him described him as a “family man” who worked two jobs to support his three kids and a jokester with a talent for bringing people together around his barber’s chair.

    “One of the best [barbers] in Uptown,” said his friend Lyndell Mason. “That’s what we called him.”

There’s much more at the original, most of it telling readers what a great guy Mr James was; it was at least as much a human interest story as a crime report. The importance that the Inquirer gave to this story is contained in a footnote to it:

    Staff writers Barbara Laker, Chris Palmer, Anna Orso, and Rob Tornoe contributed to this article.

That’s six reporters covering the story, and two more, Jason Laughlin and Erin McCarthy, wrote and contributed to another article, Jefferson shooting is the latest example of workplace violence in health care: Health-care workers said the threat of violence is a too common part of their professional lives.

But Mr James was not the only person murdered on Monday. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page noted, as of 8:35 AM on Tuesday, October 5th, that 420 souls had been sent early to their eternal rewards, two more than the previous report, but I could find nothing at all in the inquirer about it.

Over the last 28 days, which excludes the Labor Day holiday weekend, 57 people have been murdered in Philly, 57 people in four weeks, or 2.0357 per day, and the Inquirer paid almost no attention to it. The city is up to 1.516 homicides per day for the year, meaning that, if that rate continues, 553 or 554 — the actual calculation is 553.430 — people will spill out their blood in the city’s mean streets.

If the last four weeks’ average was maintained, that would mean 179 more homicides, for a total of 599, but surely, surely! that rate won’t be maintained!

Will it?

On Friday, December 11, 2020, Helen Ubiñas published an article in the 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 got it slightly wrong: the Inquirer no longer specifies the race of victims. I have inferred that this was the result of a deliberate editorial decision, but it could just as easily be that the Philadelphia Police no longer report that information to the paper.

Perhaps I should be kinder to the Inquirer. After all, with 420 homicides so far, tied for the 13th bloodiest year in history, even with 88 days remaining in 2021, if the newspaper covered every murder, it might be my-eyes-glazed-over boring.

But it is also misleading journalism. Yeah, everybody knows that Philadelphia is a bloody town, but if the Inquirer’s coverage is the measure, that carnage seems to be just, well, unimportant. The Inquirer likes to concentrate on “gun violence,” as though those inanimate objects somehow levitate and shoot people completely independently of some bad person pulling the trigger. When publisher Elizabeth Hughes told us that her newspaper was “Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime,” she was telling us, inter alia, that the Inquirer would not report something really radical like, oh, the truth.

And the truth needs to be told. Due to news coverage, we often see Chicago as our most murderous city, and in the sheer body count, it’s pretty awful. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, 624 people have been murdered in the Windy City so far this year.

But homicide rates are calculated correcting for population, and Chicago’s population of 2,746,388is more than a million people more than Philly’s 1,603,797. Chicago’s annualized homicide rate[1]The annualized homicide rate was calculated by taking the number of current homicides, dividing by the number of days elapsed in the year, 277, and multiplying by 365, to get the projected number of … Continue reading is 29.930 per 100,000 population, while Philadelphia’s is 34.481 per 100,000! Philadelphia is worse than Chicago, but you won’t find that reported in the nation’s third oldest newspaper!

It was absolutely reasonable for the Inquirer to report on the murder of Anrae James. But the newspaper failing to cover, other than in the briefest of ways, if at all, of the vast majority of the other 419 people who spilled their blood in the city’s streets, is journolism[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading, not journalism, because it obscures the truth, for political reasons.

References

References
↑1 The annualized homicide rate was calculated by taking the number of current homicides, dividing by the number of days elapsed in the year, 277, and multiplying by 365, to get the projected number of murders at the current daily rate, then dividing that number by the population in hundreds of thousands.
↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity.
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The internet is forever . . . and so is stupidity. Journolists attempt to control the language to influence people's thinking

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

    Washington Post adds ‘pregnant individuals’ to style guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s more at the original.

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is something the credentialed media don’t seem to like

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

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

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

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

In yet another example of what I have frequently referred to as The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. shows just how great their journolism[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

      I see someone quit every day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑3 Maureen May, R.N., is a longtime Temple University Hospital nurse and president of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, which represents 9,500 nurses and health-care professionals across the commonwealth. She has worked at the bedside for more than 35 years.
↑4 Peg Lawson, R.N., has worked as an ER nurse at Einstein Hospital for 30 years. She is co-president of Einstein Nurses United.
↑5 Hat tip to William Teach for the story.
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I’ve said it before: when it comes to murder, The Philadelphia Inquirer is much more concerned about cute little white girls

I have previously noted what I called the racism of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and have noted, many times, that unless a murder victim is someone already of note, or a cute little white girl,[1]When accessed in September 21, 2021, at 2:05 PM EDT, the search returned 4,548 results. the editors of the Inquirer don’t care, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the murder of a young black man in Philadelphia is not news.

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

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

Gabby Petito.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid. than anyone else.

↑3 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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A picture worth a thousand words. Why won't the credentialed media report the whole story?

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

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

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

    by Thomas Fitzgerald | Saturday, September 18, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is why I frequently refer to journolists. The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias. There’s really no way that Thomas Fitzgerald, the article author, didn’t know about the frustration of bus drivers and others having to wear face masks for hours on end, and the stories of the patricians going maskless while their ‘servants’ had to wear face diapers aren’t going to encourage people to take jobs requiring the wearing of masks.

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

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When The Philadelphia Inquirer censors the news

We have previously noted information which can be found, if you look, but which the credentialed media journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term … Continue reading mostly choose not to report, that COVID-19 restrictions and mask mandates are contributing to a shortage of school bus drivers.

And this morning we hear from a newspaper I frequently call The Philadelphia Enquirer:[2]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.

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

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

    By Kristen A Graham | Saturday, September 11, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑2 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑3 In the only place I will wear a mask, at Mass, because our Bishop has mandated it, I have to pull it down to read, because it fogs up my reading glasses in seconds. Being partially deaf, I read the readings from the missal before Mass, to help me understand what the lector is going to read, and to get a heads up on the responsorial psalm, because I don’t always hear it well enough to catch the individual words.
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No #FakeNews here, huh?

The Washington Post tweeted:

And here’s the story:

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has sought to ban mask mandates in schools, tests positive for the coronavirus

    by Felicia Sonmez | August 17, 2021 | 5:48 PM EDT

    Abbott is among the Republican governors who have resisted public-health mandates aimed at stemming the tide of the virus’s delta variant, which has caused a new spike in cases as the country attempts to reopen schools, restaurants and other businesses.

    A spokesman for Abbott said the governor is “fully vaccinated against COVID-19, in good health, and currently experiencing no symptoms.” Texas first lady Cecilia Abbott has tested negative, and everyone with whom the governor was in close contact Tuesday has been notified, the spokesman, Mark Miner, said in a statement.

    However, videos and photos posted online by Abbott’s gubernatorial campaign show him delivering remarks and mingling with a large, maskless crowd of more than 100 people indoors at an event in Texas on Monday night.

    Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it had contacted those who were present at the event in the wake of his positive diagnosis.

    “The Governor has been testing daily, and today was the first positive test result,” Miner said Tuesday. “Governor Abbott is in constant communication with his staff, agency heads, and government officials to ensure that state government continues to operate smoothly and efficiently. The Governor will isolate in the Governor’s Mansion and continue to test daily.”

This is a screen cap of the Post’s tweet, in case the paper deletes it. Click to enlarge.

There’s more at the original. But here’s the important part: though the Post was trying to slam the Governor for resisting mask mandates, today was his first positive test, and he has been “fully vaccinated” against the virus.

The other important part? The Post’s tweet was only 106 characters and spaces, meaning that there were 174 more characters and spaces available, yet the Post tweet couldn’t take the effort to note that the Governor is fully vaccinated. While it’s in the third paragraph of the story, and before the first ad, it can’t be considered ‘burying the lede,’ Washington Post stories are hidden behind a paywall,[1]Yes, I’m spending good money to subscribe to the Post, because both of my readers deserve good content. and some people who saw the tweet couldn’t access the story. How many thousands and thousands of others read, and perhaps retweeted, the tweet without ever checking?

So, the Governor is fully vaccinated, and being tested daily, but the Post wants to slam him because he opposes mask mandates, something which puts him within what the people of the Lone Star State want.

References

References
↑1 Yes, I’m spending good money to subscribe to the Post, because both of my readers deserve good content.