Tag Archives: #MediaBias

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The Philadelphia Inquirer tells us all about Barbie and gluten-free meals at the shore. Criminals on the streets? Not so much.

Rasheed Banks, Jr, via WVPI-TV.

The Philadelphia Inquirer was more than willing to tell readers about how heroic Michael Salerno intervened to try to stop a carjacking, and was killed for his efforts:

Police identify man killed in South Philly trying to stop a carjacking

Michael Salerno was trying to prevent three young men from stealing his car while a woman was still inside, police said.

by Rob Tornoe | Thursday, July 13, 2023 | 2:22 PM EDT

A Philadelphia man is dead after police say he tried to stop three young men from stealing his car Wednesday night.

Police said the victim, identified as Michael Salerno, 50, was attempting to prevent his car from being carjacked around 10:45 p.m. in South Philadelphia. A woman was in the car, but officials declined to identify her, citing the ongoing investigation.

“Preliminary information appears that the motive for this homicide began with a carjacking of a female, and when the owner intervened, he was shot and killed,” Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small told reporters Wednesday night.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Death in Killadelphia

The episode occurred on Porter Street near South 12th Street. Salerno had just arrived at the location but wasn’t in the car when the attempted carjacking occurred, according to police, who declined to say whether it was near his home.

There’s more at the original, but at the time, all that we were told was that the suspects were to be three “young men, appearing to be between the ages of 15 and early 20s, dressed in dark clothing.”

WPVI-TV, known locally as Channel 6, the ABC owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia, had more on Friday, as the Philadelphia Police Department identified one of the suspects, 15-year-old Rasheed Banks, Jr., and published his photograph. Young Mr Banks is still on the loose as I write this, but if WPVI is trying to help, showing Philadelphians for whom to be on the lookout, as of 9:12 PM, The Philadelphia Inquirer has nothing about this.

Then there was this from Fox 29 News. The Philadelphia Police Department released surveillance photos of the suspects in the shootings on which we have previously reported. The editors of the Inquirer were naturally horrified at the fact an 11-year-old girl, almost certainly simply an innocent struck by a stray bullet — out of around 30 fired in what may have been a gunfight between gangs — but, when the Police released photos of the suspects, in the hopes that someone would recognize them and give information to the police, the Inquirer has chosen not to publish either the story or the photos of the suspects.

Given that two of the suspects are shown wearing hooded sweatshirts, with the hoods pulled up, on a Philadelphia evening where it was above 70º F, it would seem obvious that this wasn’t a snap decision, but gang members, oops, sorry, ‘street group’ members out with intentions that were less than kindly.

That the Inquirer chose not to inform its readers, readers who are paying for the privilege[1]My unlimited digital subscription: $5.49/week, billed every 4 weeks; that’s $285.48 a year. of reading our nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper, because publisher Elizabeth Hughes forthrightly told us that the newspaper would censor the news if it was too politically incorrect.

Not that the Inquirer didn’t give us important news!

But warning readers about killers and gang bangers still on the city’s streets, and perhaps, just perhaps, getting them picked up a bit earlier? Nope, not the Inky!

References

References
↑1 My unlimited digital subscription: $5.49/week, billed every 4 weeks; that’s $285.48 a year.
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CNN correspondent in trouble for telling the truth Sometimes CNN makes about as much sense as a tampon dispenser in the men's room.

My good blogging friend Robert Stacy McCain likes to note how the once-renowned Cable News Network, CNN, has fallen in the ratings, not just third behind Fox News Channel and MSNBC, but gets fewer viewers than Nickelodeon’s kiddie cartoon Paw Patrol.

Fox News is unapologetically conservative, and MSNBC makes no bones about being leftist. CNN is leftist as well, though the network tries to deny it, and recently fired CEO Chris Licht, who was at least trying to get the network to report less bias and more news.

Well, in today’s more amusing news, a CNN correspondent, Ryan Young, is being criticized for doing something really radical, telling the truth!

CNN under fire for misgendering Dylan Mulvaney: ‘Unbelievably bad’

By Lee Brown | Wednesday, July 12, 2023 | 9:21 AM EDT | Updated: 4:14 PM EDT

CNN is under fire for misgendering Dylan Mulvaney as “he” and “him” in a segment about the “culture war” being waged over the transgender influencer’s partnership with Bud Light.

Correspondent Ryan Young failed to use the 26-year-old influencer’s preferred pronouns in a short segment about the backlash against the beer giant that has led to plummeting sales.

Young also mispronounced Mulvaney’s first name as “Dylvan” while describing the social media star to “CNN News Central” viewers Tuesday.

“He, of course, is the transgender person they were going to sponsor and go along with, with Bud Light,” Young said, using “he” instead of Mulvaney’s preferred “she.”

“But [trans activists] didn’t like how Bud Light didn’t stand by him after all this,” Young said, again failing to use the influencer’s preferred “they.”

Well, that’s a mistake: is Mr Mulvaney’s preferred pronoun “she,” the feminine singular, of “they,” the genderless plural?

Media Matters critic Ari Drennen shared footage of the less-than-2-minute clip, ripping it as an “unbelievably bad CNN segment.”

That Media Matters would see using the correct pronouns to refer to Mr Mulvaney as “unbelievably bad” is unsurprising. Naturally, CNN apologized for having a correspondent tell the truth:

CNN eventually apologized at the end of Wednesday’s episode of “News Central.”

Referring to Mulvaney, Bolduan said: “She was mistakenly referred to by the wrong pronoun, and CNN aims to honor individuals’ ways of identifying themselves and we apologize for that error.”

When Mr McCain noted that CNN was coming in behind Nickelodeon’s Paw Patrol, he neglected to mention that Paw Patrol, and really all of the children’s network’s programming, is more accurate and truthful than CNN. Mr McCain has said that he watches CNN so that his readers don’t have to, which is a fair amount of self-sacrifice. Sometimes CNN makes about as much sense as a tampon dispenser in the men’s room.

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Killadelphia: What the Philly media won’t tell us

With the Kingsessing mass shooting being a Philadelphia story, it’s unsurprising that The Philadelphia Inquirer would have several follow-up stories on it.

As soon as the name of Kimbrady Carriker was released, his social media were investigated, and photos of Mr Carriker in female dress led to immediate speculation that he was, like Audrey Hale in Nashville, yet another transgender killer. Well, that led to Philly officials quickly denying it:

While he acknowledged the social media images that appear to show Carriker wearing women’s clothing and jewelry, Asa Khalif, a member of the LGBTQ advisory committee for the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, condemned the “violent” language coming from the “conservative press” about Carriker’s gender identity and shared what the district attorney’s office knows firsthand about Carriker’s gender identity.

“Appear to show”? No, there’s no “appear to show” here, but actually show. Why would Mr Khalif, who supports the homosexual and transgender community, and must surely not be offended by, or see anything wrong, with cross-dressing, want to mealy-mouth things?

“The suspect has not identified themselves as trans. They have only identified themselves as male,” Khalif said at Wednesday’s news conference. “But the language spewed out by the conservative press is violent and is dangerous, and it’s targeting trans women of color. It’s rallying the community to be violent, and we’re better than that.”

I saw a video of Mr Khalif’s statement, and while he stated that Mr Carriker had not identified as transgender or anything other than male, I also noticed that he went out of his way to use “they/them” pronouns to refer to the suspect. Did Mr Carriker express a preference for such to be used? If so, it hasn’t made the credentialed press, but speaking with the District Attorney at his side, he might have been clued in to something the DA’s office knew but hasn’t been made public.

Khalif condemned those who label trans people as “killers.”

“They are the most vulnerable to violence,” he said. “They want to live their lives, and they have every right to do so, and we will not allow conservative bigots to use that type of language to attack trans people.”

District Attorney Larry Krasner expressed similar sentiments.

“There are some people for whom hate is a full-time job,” Krasner said. “And if they can stay away from the facts and talk about nonsense, that’s what they’re going to do.”

Mr Khalif, who tweeted on the Fourth of July, “So when i say Fuck The Police..don’t tell me that’s disrespectful..the violence against black people is beyond disrespectful!”, keeps telling us, through multiple tweets, and retweets that the alleged shooter isn’t transgender. The Philadelphia Inquirer also jumped on that bandwagon:

Conservative media outlets claimed Carriker was transgender based on Facebook photos of him dressed in feminine clothing. However, Carriker is identified as male on public records and district attorney officials said Wednesday that he identifies as male.

I actually avoided making such a claim, writing on Independence Day:

Everybody who pays any attention to Philadelphia news had heard, hours before the Post’s article was time-stamped, that the (alleged) shooter has been identified as Kimbrady Carriker, a 40-year-old black male, and he has a history of posting photos of himself on Facebook in women’s clothing, including earrings, tank tops, and at least one in which the outlines of a bra are showing. It has not been reported that he somehow thinks he’s really a woman, whether he’s just a cross-dresser, or whether he’s just clowning around, but that’s part of what we do know, and have known since well before the Post updated this article, yet the newspaper has kept this information from readers, readers who are paying good money for their subscriptions, because, Heaven forfend!, it isn’t politically correct.

But, you know what I also haven’t seen in the Philly media? You know what Mr Khalif, a member of the LGBTQ advisory committee for District Attorney Larry Krasner, hasn’t yet told us? Mr Carriker’s grandmother said that he was homosexual:

Ms Carriker said her grandson was gay and would sometimes dress in women’s clothing, but had not undergone gender transition surgery or treatment.

She said she made it clear to Carriker that she disapproved of him wearing women’s clothes due to her Christian beliefs.

“I saw him one time in female clothes, and from the expression on my face, from that point on, he never came in female clothes around me because he knew how I felt about it,” she told The Independent.

“He was trying to find himself. He didn’t know where he belonged. I used to talk to him about it, but he didn’t like to converse with me about things like that.”

The Philadelphia media, so quick to tell us some of Mr Carriker’s political views, his support for the Second Amendment, admiration of Tucker Carlson, and hating of President Biden, but soft-peddling his support of #BlackLivesMatter and the riots in many cities in the wake of the unfortunate death during the arrest of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled convicted felon George Floyd, and telling us that he wasn’t transgendered, never mentioned, at least as far as I could find, that he is homosexual. It took a report from a newspaper in London, England, for us to get that news.

It is not a surprise to anyone who pays attention to the Philly media that they would keep such under wraps.

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The journolism of The Washington Post Why won't the professional media tell the whole truth?

No, I did not misspell journolism in the title of this article. 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, and boy, did The Washington Post demonstrate that today!

I normally use the headlines from articles in newspapers, with the hyperlink embedded in the headline, but today I am using a screen capture of the Post’s article, because I want to document for the reader the time it was published, at 12:28 PM EDT on Tuesday, July 4th, but updated at 7:03 PM. If you cannot see the image clearly enough, just click on it, and it will show up enlarged.

What we know about the mass shooting in Philadelphia

By Kim Bellware, Tamia Fowlkes, Kelsey Ables and María Luisa Paúl | Updated July 4, 2023 at 7:03 p.m. EDT | Published July 4, 2023 at 12:28 p.m. EDT

Five people were killed and two children were wounded in a Monday night mass killing in Philadelphia, authorities say. A man suspected of the shooting has been arrested after firing on victims “seemingly at random,” Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said during a Tuesday news conference.

“Let me crystal clear: What happened last night in our Kingsessing neighborhood was unimaginably disgusting and horrifying,” Outlaw said.

Here’s what we know about the shooting in the largely residential area in southwest Philadelphia.

The victims

The five who were killed are all male, Outlaw said Monday.

Police identified them as Daujan Brown, 15; Lashyd Merritt, 20; Dymir Stanton, 29; Joseph Wamah Jr., 31; and Ralph Moralis, 59. Brown’s address was unknown; the other victims all lived close to the scene of the shooting. The two wounded children, ages 2 and 13, were in stable condition late Monday, Outlaw said.

Two people were also injured by broken glass during the shooting, including the twin of the 2-year-old gunshot victim, Philadelphia Police staff inspector Ernest Ransom said Tuesday.

“The suspect fired at a vehicle being operated by a mother who was driving her set of twins home,” Ransom said. “One of the twins suffered a gunshot wound to the leg. Their sibling sustained injuries to the eyes from shattered glass.”

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: National Media Instantly Sends Philly Mass Shooter Down the Memory Hole

That’s all pretty unremarkable, standard journalism. But here’s where the Post veers off into the weeds:

Who’s the shooter?

Two people were in custody in connection with the shooting, authorities said: a 40-year-old man who is suspected in the killings, and one person who may have fired at the shooter.

The gunman was shooting as police pursued him on foot and was found wearing a bulletproof vest and magazines, police said. He had an AR-style rifle and a handgun, as well as a police scanner, according to Outlaw. Police found about 50 spent shell cases, Outlaw said.

Charges are pending for the 40-year-old man suspected in the killings, police said Tuesday afternoon.

“The suspect, while wearing body armor, a ski mask and holding a AR-15-style assault rifle was observed at several locations near 56th Street near Chester Avenue and Springfield Avenue,” Ransom said. He noted that the suspect began shooting “aimlessly at occupied vehicles and individuals on the street as they walked.”

There’s more at the original.

Everybody who pays any attention to Philadelphia news had heard, hours before the Post’s article was time-stamped, that the (alleged) shooter has been identified as Kimbrady Carriker, a 40-year-old black male, and he has a history of posting photos of himself on Facebook in women’s clothing, including earrings, tank tops, and at least one in which the outlines of a bra are showing. It has not been reported that he somehow thinks he’s really a woman, whether he’s just a cross-dresser, or whether he’s just clowning around, but that’s part of what we do know, and have known since well before the Post updated this article, yet the newspaper has kept this information from readers, readers who are paying good money for their subscriptions, because, Heaven forfend!, it isn’t politically correct.

I’m waiting to find out if Mr Carriker left us a ‘manifesto,’ the way the ‘transgender’ Nashville murderer, Audrey Hale, did, a ‘manifesto’ that the authorities have thus far refused to release, and have managed to keep from being leaked.

At least The New York Times managed to include:

In initial reports, police described the suspect as a 40-year-old male, but authorities later clarified that they were unsure of the suspect’s gender identity and in a news conference on Tuesday used the pronouns “they/them.”

It wasn’t just the Post. The Philadelphia Inquirer, in an article time-stamped “an hour ago” when I opened it at 9:29 PM, said absolutely nothing about Mr Carriker being black, or anything about him being ‘transgender,’ a cross-dresser, or whatever.

The New York Post, our nation’s second-oldest newspaper, one which does not shy away from sensationalism, but one which is also unafraid of publishing the truth regardless of political correctness, did tell us about the alleged shooter.

The professional media love to tell us how special they are, because the First Amendment mentions the press specifically. Of course, the First Amendment is protecting the right to publish, and not somehow glorifying individual publishers, but the people at the Post and the Times and the Inquirer sure don’t like to see it that way. To me, the best way for an individual media company to glorify itself would be to simply tell the truth, and tell us the whole truth.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer: using grammar to avoid telling the whole truth

Writers attempt to communicate with the written word, and decent writers should know at least something about grammar, to ply their trade most efficiently. One important concept in grammar is the difference between the comparative and the superlative.

Comparatives vs. Superlatives

Published October 7, 2019

Not all things are created equal: some are good, others are better, and only the cream of the crop rise to the level of best. These three words—good, better, and best—are examples of the three forms of an adjective or adverb: positive, comparative, and superlative. . . . .

There are a few irregular adjectives and adverbs. For those, you must memorize how these change the spelling of their positive form to show comparative and superlative degrees.

Some common irregular adjectives are good, better, best and bad, worse, worst.

Some have more than one option: little can become littler or less (comparative), and littlest or least (superlative). Many, some, or much become more in the comparative and most in the superlative.

It was this paragraph which caught my attention, in the main editorial in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer. Any decent writer understands that he shouldn’t use the same word twice in a sentence if possible, so when the Editorial Board wrote that “too many residents endure,” the following should be “where most, but not all, the shootings occur.” Continue reading →

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In which Leonard Downie says the quiet part out loud The credentialed media have sacrificed objectivity and internalized bias 

Conservatives have been saying, for a long time now, that the credentialed media were quite biased in their reporting, mostly, though not quite entirely, biased in a leftward direction. Yes, this site has focused much of its attention to The Philadelphia Inquirer, but it’s hardly alone; we reported previously how The New York Times found the details about an (alleged) killer not to be news which is fit to print. For the journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading in the Times’ newsroom, the ones who forced out liberal columnist Bari Weiss because she just wasn’t #woke enough, the fact that a young, black gang member (allegedly) stabbed to death a white PhD candidate in computer science at an Ivy League college just does not fit Teh Narrative. The leftists who decry ‘mass incarceration’ just can’t deal with the fact that Vincent Pinkney should not have been able to stab Davide Giri, because he should have still been behind bars on that Thursday night, and that it took the London Daily Mail to tell people the truth.

Well, now a professional journalist has said the quiet part out loud. From The Washington Post:

Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust

By Leonard Downie Jr. | Monday, January 30, 2023 | 7:15 AM EST

Amid all the profound challenges and changes roiling the American news media today, newsrooms are debating whether traditional objectivity should still be the standard for news reporting. “Objectivity” is defined by most dictionaries as expressing or using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice. Journalistic objectivity has been generally understood to mean much the same thing.

But increasingly, reporters, editors and media critics argue that the concept of journalistic objectivity is a distortion of reality. They point out that the standard was dictated over decades by male editors in predominantly White newsrooms and reinforced their own view of the world. They believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading “bothsidesism” in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change and many other subjects. And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.

There’s just so much in that which is wholly wrong that it’s difficult to wrap my head around it. But the most obvious point is that, if a reporters are applying their “identities, life experiences and cultural contexts” to the stories they are covering, it means that readers who have different “identities, life experiences and cultural contexts” are not getting the news in a context they can fully understand or appreciate.

The notion that there is one truth for white men and another for women or blacks or homosexuals is pretty stupid when it comes to reporting just the facts. That’s what the Times did, by covering up the known facts about a suspected killer, deciding that their readership did not need to know that Mr Pinkney could have still been in jail when he (allegedly) slew Mr Giri. Their reasons for that? Well, I can speculate, but I don’t know.

Leonard Downie Jr., the author, a former executive editor of The Washington Post, is a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, so that means he is teaching this stuff to journalism students, trying to make the upcoming generation of reporters as consumed with their biases as what we are already seeing.

Something like this occurred during my early years in the field in the 1960s and ’70s. Under the leadership of a few editors, including especially The Post’s Ben Bradlee, our generation of young journalists moved away from mostly unquestioning news coverage of institutional power. I was one of the editors on The Post’s Watergate story, which spawned widespread national investigative reporting that continues today. Colleagues at The Post, other newspapers and broadcast networks reported skeptically on the unwinnable Vietnam War.

“Report(ing) skeptically” is a good thing, if reporters are trying to ferret out the truth.

Throughout the time, beginning in 1984, when I worked as Bradlee’s managing editor and then, from 1991 to 2008, succeeded him as executive editor, I never understood what “objectivity” meant. I didn’t consider it a standard for our newsroom. My goals for our journalism were instead accuracy, fairness, nonpartisanship, accountability and the pursuit of truth.

Well, the dictionary definition of objectivity Mr Downie gave above would be a good one, and would certainly fit in the five goals he stated.

To better understand the changes happening now, I and former CBS News president Andrew Heyward, a colleague at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, investigated the values and practices in mainstream newsrooms today, with a grant from the Stanton Foundation. What we found has convinced us that truth-seeking news media must move beyond whatever “objectivity” once meant to produce more trustworthy news. We interviewed more than 75 news leaders, journalists and other experts in mainstream print, broadcast and digital news media, many of whom also advocate such a change. This appears to be the beginning of another generational shift in American journalism.

Among the news leaders who told Heyward and me that they had rejected objectivity as a coverage standard was Kathleen Carroll, former executive editor of the Associated Press. “It’s objective by whose standard?” she asked. “That standard seems to be White, educated, fairly wealthy. … And when people don’t feel like they find themselves in news coverage, it’s because they don’t fit that definition.

If objectivity is defined as “as expressing or using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice,” I have to ask: if the media are moving toward reporting filtered through concerns about:

upheaval over discrimination against and abuse of women; persistent racism and white nationalism; police brutality and killings; the treatment of LGBTQ+ people; income inequality and social problems; immigration and the treatment of immigrants; the causes and effects of climate change; voting rights and election inequality; and even the very survival of our democracy

isn’t that the very definition of “distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice”? Two plus two will always equal four, regardless of the race, color, ethnicity or sexual orientation of the observer.

We have noted many times before how the credentialed media have simply accepted the notion that a ‘transgender’ person can change his sex, referring to such people as Richard Levine and Will Thomas as Rachel Levine and Lia Thomas, completely uncritically, and without any reference to their claims that they have ‘transitioned’ to the other gender unless that is a part of the story itself. I get that many people, though I suspect fewer people than the left believe, accept Dr Levine’s and Mr Thomas’ claims that they are really women, but in referring to these people solely by their assumed names and the pronouns appropriate for the opposite sex, have the media not taken one position in the debate over whether the transgendered really have been able to change their sex?

The American left are aghast that Elon Musk’s somewhat delayed purchase of Twitter has meant that conservatives would be able to actually speak freely. As we have previously noted, Twitter added rules banning “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” “Misgendering” means referring to ‘transgendered’ individuals by their biological sex, either directly or through the use of the appropriate pronouns, while “deadnaming” means referring to such people by their birth names rather than the ones they have adopted which are more consistent with their imagined ‘gender.'[2]The First Street Journal’s Stylebook is exactly the opposite: while we do not change the direct quotes of others, in original material we always refer to people by their normal, biological sex … Continue reading The New York Times gave OpEd space to Chad Malloy[3]Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker Malloy.” to claim that such restrictions actually promoted freedom of speech.

To trans people, it represented a recognition that our identity is an accepted fact and that to suggest otherwise is a slur.

That their ‘identity’ might not be “an accepted fact” is not something Mr Malloy wanted to concede, but Twitter’s policy also meant that those who did not accept such claims still had to be careful with their language, or be suspended or permanently banned. The Times, as well as The Philadelphia Inquirer, continued to use language to try to lock in the notion that ‘transgendered’ people have actually changed their gender, and go along with Mr Malloy’s claim that to not accept their “identity . . . is a slur.” Such would certainly not fit with Mr Downie’s standard of “accuracy, fairness, nonpartisanship, accountability and the pursuit of truth.”

“There is some confusion about the value of good reporting versus point of view,” said current Post executive editor Sally Buzbee, who noted that many journalists want to make a difference on such issues as climate change, immigration and education. “We stress the value of reporting,” she said, “what you are able to dig up — so you (the reader) can make up your own mind.”

That is a wildly inconsistent statement. If “many journalists want to make a difference” on some important issues, is that not biased reporting, and trying to influence how readers think rather than giving readers all of the information available so they can make up their own minds?

There’s a lot more in the article, but one paragraph, the last I shall quote, really caught my eye:

Both Heyward and I continue to believe that allowing journalists to express opinions on controversial social and political issues erodes the perception of their news organizations’ fairness and open-mindedness.

A quite reasonable statement, but Mr Downie’s previous quote that “many journalists want to make a difference” allow for the reporters’ opinions when it comes to what are supposed to be straight news stories to slant them, perhaps subtly, toward a particular point of view certainly does erode the perception of a particular news organization’s fairness and open-mindedness.

I will admit to being surprised by Mr Downie’s article, because he said, and The Washington Post admitted through the publication of it, that yes, that credentialed media source, and many others like it, are slanting the news.

Mr Downie said that media organizations can “build trust” as they “move beyond objectivity,” but I have to ask: how does allowing a particular reporter’s presentation of the facts through his ‘lived experience’ or racial, ethnic, or sexual identity and orientation status build trust among those who are not of the same experiences or identity?

Think about the results, because we actually do have them. Newspapers all over the country have been failing; even The Washington Post, one of our country’s newspapers of record, and The Philadelphia Inquirer have been laying off staff, while smaller newspapers have been shut down completely, or bought out by hedge funds with a history of stripping them to the bone. The Post itself might have failed had Jeff Bezos not bought it and saved it, at least for a while.

But it’s more than newspapers: CNN, the first 24-hour news network has been in a steady ratings decline, and has been surpassed in viewership by MSNBC, while both of them have been beaten out by Fox News. All three have obvious biases, and all three are mostly watched by people who agree with their biases. That hasn’t been particularly good for expanding their audiences. CNN can’t blame its general decline on the same forces that have so damaged print newspapers, and whatever it has been doing has not exactly built trust for that network.

Mr Downie said the quiet part out loud, that the credentialed media have sacrificed objectivity and internalized bias. We are not surprised.
_____________________________
Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

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.
↑2 The First Street Journal’s Stylebook is exactly the opposite: while we do not change the direct quotes of others, in original material we always refer to people by their normal, biological sex and their original names. But we do say that explicitly.
↑3 Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker Malloy.”
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Journolism!

The New York Times’ famous logo tells us something other than what the public might think; it tells us that the editors will decide what you should know.

Sam Brinton, from his Department of Energy biography, and is a public record.

Remember Sam Brinton? Well, he’s actually someone you’d really not want to remember, because he’s loony tunes, off his rocker, certifiably nuts, cookoo for Cocoa Puffs. Mr Brinton ‘identifies’ as ‘non-binary’ and chooses to use “they/them” pronouns, something along with which the credentialed media go, but The First Street Journal, in accordance with our Stylebook, does not.

Mr Brinton is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Masters in nuclear engineering, technology and policy, which, I suppose, qualified him to be appointed by President Biden to become Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition, despite the fact he is completely nuts, because 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 in the Biden Administration are promoting all sorts of sexual weirdness acceptance.

Now, you would think that The New York Times, one of our newspapers of record, would have a story on it if the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition, someone with a high-level security clearance, was arrested for felony theft, but if you thought that, you’d be wrong. Site searches for both Sam Brinton and the more specific “Sam Brinton” did not return any results related to his arrest. Going through the Grey Lady’s website front page, at 9:28 AM EST, I saw nothing on Mr Brinton’s arrest.

The New York Post had the story, as did Fox News, as did The Telegraph in London, as did the Daily Mail, but not The Washington Post, at least not according to a site search conducted at 9:35 AM EST. Scrolling down through the Post’s website main page also showed no such story.

You remember The Washington Post, one of our other newspapers of record, one which specializes in federal government reporting, and its addition of “Democracy Dies in Darkness” to its logo, during the Trump Administration? It would appear that the editors of the Post want this story to die in darkness!

Of course, the Post’s Editorial Board did have a posted editorial against Elon Musk’s opening Twitter to freedom of speech, so perhaps “Democracy Dies in Darkness” really means that the editors only like light on news and opinions they approve.

Also see: Nine Bookout, The Victory Girls, Gender Fluid DOE Official Charged With Felony, and Robert Stacy McCain, The Other McCain, Crazy People Are Dangerous (and They’re Working for the Biden Administration)

This is not journalism, but journolism. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity, and I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias. It seems that two of our newspapers of record, the most important papers in the United States, don’t want their readers to know that President Biden appointed someone who is just plain nuts to an important security position, and that he’s turned out to be both stupid and (allegedly) a thief. Knowing that Mr Brinton (allegedly) stole a suitcase off thebaggage claim carousel at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport might, just might, lead some people to have poorer opinions about ‘gender-fluid’, ‘non-binary’ people in general, and they just can’t have that!
_______________________________
Update: 8:15 AM EST, Wednesday, November 30, 2022: Site searches of our nation’s four ‘newspapers of record, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times, still show no returns for “Sam Brinton” on this subject.

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.
Posted on by

Those who want to regulate speech aren’t really afraid of lies or misinformation; what they are afraid of is the truth.

The American left are aghast that Elon Musk’s somewhat delayed purchase of Twitter has meant that conservatives would be able to actually speak freely. As we have previously noted, Twitter added rules banning “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” “Misgendering” means referring to ‘transgendered’ individuals by their biological sex, either directly or through the use of the appropriate pronouns, while “deadnaming” means referring to such people by their birth names rather than the ones they have adopted which are more consistent with their imagined ‘gender.'[1]The First Street Journal’s Stylebook is exactly the opposite: while we do not change the direct quotes of others, in original material we always refer to people by their normal, biological sex … Continue reading The New York Times gave OpEd space to Chad Malloy[2]Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker.” to claim that such restrictions actually promoted freedom of speech.

To trans people, it represented a recognition that our identity is an accepted fact and that to suggest otherwise is a slur.

That their ‘identity’ might not be “an accepted fact” is not something Mr Malloy wanted to concede, but Twitter’s policy also meant that those who did not accept such claims still had to be careful with their language, or be suspended or permanently banned.

And yes, I have had to be careful in tweets, especially when it came to my reporting about Will Thomas, a male swimmer who claimed to be a woman named “Lia,” including calling him ‘Lia’ Thomas in a couple of article titles to get past Twitter’s rules.

Now comes Robert Stacy McCain, who had his own @rsmccain Twitter account, with “tens of thousands” of followers, permanently suspended noting that Twitter, under the previous regime also suspended credentialed media sites which did something really radical like tell the truth:

‘Blood On Your Hands’? Is Anyone Really Endangered by Twitter ‘Amnesty’?

by Robert Stacy McCain | Sunday, November 27, 2022

Hopewell Chin’ono is an award-winning journalist who has relentlessly exposed the evils of the lawless and corrupt regime in Zimbabwe:

In 2020, Hopewell reported on alleged Covid-19 procurement fraud within the health ministry, which led to the arrest and sacking of Health Minister Obadiah Moyo. It was President Emmerson Mnangagwa who fired Obadiah in July for “inappropriate conduct” over the $60 million medicines supply scandal. On July 20, 2020, Hopewell was arrested and charged with inciting public violence. The US embassy called Hopewell’s arrest “deeply concerning”, while his lawyer called it “an abduction” and Amnesty accused Zimbabwean authorities of “misusing the criminal justice system to persecute journalists and activists”. He was freed in September on bail, then he was arrested again in November 2020 and was charged with obstructing justice and contempt of court for a tweet about the court outcome of a gold smuggling scandal.

Hopewell Chin’ono was released on bail on January 27, 2021 after spending three weeks in prison. Chin’ono expressed concern about the COVID-19 pandemic in the overcrowded Chikurubi Prison and accuses the government of harassment for arresting him three times in five months.

Given such credentials, Chin’ono must be taken seriously when he warns of the risks of a general “amnesty” for banned accounts on Twitter. And certainly we should hope that Elon Musk will have his staff exercise caution when it comes to such cases as these, where repressive regimes are using “ghost accounts” to harass their critics. But the problem in the United States is almost the diametrical opposite situation, i.e., critics of the regime have been banned, because Twitter staff were working with the Democratic Party to effectively prohibit dissent.

The New York Post, America’s oldest continuously published newspaper,[3]There’s some dispute, but I believe that the Hartford Courant, founded in 1764, is the oldest, followed by the Post, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, as second, and The Philadelphia … Continue reading had its Twitter account suspended at the behest of intelligence officials who falsely declared the Hunter Biden laptop story to be “Russian disinformation.” (For the record, I do not think the Biden family is less corrupt than the rulers of Zimbabwe.) Comparing the problems in America to the problems in Zimbabwe is apples and oranges, of course, but that’s the point: If we don’t want to descend into a Third World nightmare, the voices of opponents of the Democratic Party must be heard. Maybe you think Zimbabwe can’t happen here, but you’re wrong. I mean, look what Democrats have done to Chicago and Philadelphia . . .

Of course, as it turned out, the Hunter Biden laptop story turned out to be true, but it was far, far, far more important to the #woke[4]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 nerds who ran Twitter previously that the story be stifled on October 14, 2020, three weeks before the presidential election, because Joe Biden just had to be protected so that he could win the election.

Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey was able to say that yeah, it had been a ‘total mistake’ to block the Post’s story . . . on March 25, 2021, after the election.

I’m old enough to remember when the left were free speech absolutists .  .  . when they weren’t really in control of much, when they were trying to get their messages out to the public in general. Now that they have power, not only in government but largely in the professional media, they really aren’t so enamored of freedom of speech, not for those with whom they disagree. To them, Twitter was great, when Twitter was suspending Mr McCain, when the platform was censoring the Post, when views contrary to theirs were stifled.

In one episode of Blue Bloods, fictitious New York City Police Commissioner Frank Reagan said that freedom of the press applies only to those who own a press, but that time has elapsed: with internet service (sort of) inexpensive, and the cost to have your own website cheap — heck, even I can afford it, and some platforms are free — almost anyone can own a ‘press.’

Well, social media like Facebook and Twitter and less popular sites like Parler are, in effect, publishers, and publishers do get to choose what they will and will not publish. But once Elon Musk bought Twitter leftists like The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch, whose newspaper rarely publishes any opinions which aren’t #woke, decided that Twitter “should exist more as a semi-public utility than as an entity that a man with a spare $44 billion can just light on fire,”[5]As we have previously noted, Mr Bunch’s newspaper has been begging for donations to help keep it afloat. while Salon’s Amanda Marcotte wants Twitter to be ‘socialized’:

Of course, there is one way Twitter could be saved: By actually making it the “digital town square” Musk says he wants it to be. Which is to say the government should buy and run Twitter, just as government owns and operates actual town squares. Yes, I’m talking about a “socialist” takeover of Twitter, just like we have “socialist” libraries, schools and museums.

I don’t think that they understand what they’ve advocated, because a public utility cannot deny service to anyone who will pay the bill! It doesn’t matter how odious someone might think my opinions to be: Jackson Energy Cooperative cannot deny me the electricity service I use to power my too-old computer as long as I pay my sparktricity bill. Verizon cannot deny me the cell phone service for which I’ve contracted as long as the bill is paid, even if they’re worried that I might say something unsavory over the phone. Mr Bunch and Miss Marcotte somehow seem to think that if Twitter were a public utility, the utility’s directors could ban people they don’t like. Perhaps they just don’t understand what a public utility actually is?

Well, I actually (kind of) agree: Twitter should be considered a public utility, not only because of the size of its reach, but because governments at all levels use Twitter and Facebook — but not Parler or Truth Social — to communicate with the public. Virtually every government in the United States, federal, state, and local, have a Twitter account that they use. Being a public utility does not mean that it cannot be privately owned, as most of our electric, water, telephone , and natural gas companies are.

As a private publisher, Twitter was able to censor information it didn’t want disseminated, information which turned out to be the truth, and the left liked that. Now that Twitter is owned by someone who actually favors freedom of speech, the left don’t like it, don’t like it at all. It wasn’t just the Hunter Biden laptop story; Twitter routinely throttled down messages that exposed the fact that the COVID-19 vaccines did not actually keep a person from contracting the SARS-CoV-2, something we now also know to be true, because the left just can’t handle the truth.

References

References
↑1 The First Street Journal’s Stylebook is exactly the opposite: while we do not change the direct quotes of others, in original material we always refer to people by their normal, biological sex and their original names.
↑2 Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker.”
↑3 There’s some dispute, but I believe that the Hartford Courant, founded in 1764, is the oldest, followed by the Post, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, as second, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, founded in 1829, third.
↑4 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.

↑5 As we have previously noted, Mr Bunch’s newspaper has been begging for donations to help keep it afloat.
Posted on by

They thought we wouldn’t notice, but we did.

Ever since Powerline and Little Green Footballs spotted the use of forged documents by CBS News 60 Minutes, in their attempt to swing the 2004 election away from President Bush and toward Senator John Kerry (D-MA), the credentialed media were, or at least should have been, put on alert that there were eyes on them, looking for the kind of bovine feces they had long been peddling. And so you’d think that the editors of The Washington Post would have learned that lesson by now, 18 years later.

So, when James Woods tweeted a screen capture from the Post, it was going to live forever, regardless of how the editors tried to soften the headline. It didn’t work.

Covid is no longer mainly a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Here’s why.

Analysis by McKenzie Beard | Wednesday, November 23, 2022 | 7:46 AM EST

For the first time, a majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus received at least the primary series of the vaccine.

Fifty-eight percent of coronavirus deaths in August were people who were vaccinated or boosted, according to an analysis conducted for The Health 202 by Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

It’s a continuation of a troubling trend that has emerged over the past year. As vaccination rates have increased and new variants appeared, the share of deaths of people who were vaccinated has been steadily rising. In September 2021, vaccinated people made up just 23 percent of coronavirus fatalities. In January and February this year, it was up to 42 percent, per our colleagues Fenit Nirappil and Dan Keating.

If you hover your cursor on the Post’s article title, you’ll see the hyperlink for it, and see that it was originally https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/vaccinated-people-now-make-up-majority-covid-deaths/, “Vaccinated people now make up majority (of) covid deaths”. I am reminded of Tony Stark’s line in the first Avengers movie, “That man is playing Galaga. He thought we wouldn’t notice, but we did.”

You can read the rest at the link, and if the Post’s paywall stymies you, another site has copied it.

Also see: William Teach: Vaccinated Account For Majority Of Wuhan Flu Deaths

Let’s be clear about this: the original headline would grab far more attention than the revised one, and part of a headline writer’s job — articles in newspapers traditionally have an editor rather than the author compose it — is to write a headline which is accurate but will still grab the reader’s attention and make it more probable that he will read the article.

But the original title very much undercuts what William Teach noted yesterday, “World Leaders Sign Declaration to Introduce COVID Vaccine Passports“:

At this year’s G20 Summit in Indonesia, the twenty participating world leaders signed a declaration to introduce vaccine passports for their respective jurisdictions, with the stated intention of creating a global verification system to facilitate safe international travel. (snip)

In a statement, the leaders affirmed their respective countries’ support of the World Health Organization mRNA Vaccine Technology Transfer hub, which aims to build capacity in low- and middle-income countries to produce mRNA vaccines.

The leaders said they welcome joint production and research of vaccines and acknowledge the importance of shared technical standards and verification methods.

They also agreed to a globalised ‘vaccination passport’.

While the details are scant at this stage, the statement says this will be done under the framework of the International Health Regulations to “facilitate seamless international travel, interoperability, and recognizing digital solutions and non-digital solutions, including proof of vaccinations.”

Indonesia’s Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said that a Digital Health Certificate using World Health Organization standards would be introduced during the next World Health Assembly in Geneva, in May next year.

“If you have been vaccinated or tested properly, you can move around. So for the next pandemic, instead of stopping the movement of people 100%, you can still provide some movement of the people,” Mr Sadikin said.

So, it’s somewhat alarming that governments – and of those belonging to the G20, the majority represent democracies – would consider introducing a passport that, since it was first mooted by individual countries, been widely condemned as medical discrimination as well as a violation of privacy with serious ethical implications.

Of more concern are reports that the vaccine won’t just apply to Covid vaccinations, but also to any vaccination that WHO recommends is required for international travel.

But if the SARS-CoV-2 virus is simply bypassing the vaccinations, something we have known for a year now, there is really no purpose in requiring vaccine passports, at least no real medical purpose. There is, as always, a Control Of People purpose. The editors of the Post have no real objections to more government control over the public, at least not if that control is exercised in the direction they like.

Between my wife and I, we’ve been in the Netherlands, Scotland, Canada, Israel and Switzerland — three of them just airport layovers, but there was nothing stopping us from leaving the airport in those countries — in the past two months, and neither of us has ever been asked for our vaccination records. We did carry them with us, in case they were required, but I, for one, was very happy that the busybodies and Karens didn’t ask. We were not asked for such when we returned to the United States.

While we have the stupid COVID-19 vaccination records, being relatively recent, how many people have their childhood vaccination records? Sure, I had all of the childhood vaccinations when I was a child, but that stuff was sixty years ago. The physicians who administered them are all probably dead, their offices gone. The school I attended from third grade through high school closed after the 1976 school year; where would those vaccination records be?

The vaccines are available for free, and anybody who wants to take them can do so. What the government does not like is the fact that those who do not want to take them have the right not to take them, so our government, and other governments, want to add more coercive pressure on those who decline.

I am not opposed to the vaccines, and am vaccinated myself. But I am very much opposed to the government trying to coerce people, trying to use force to get people to comply. A nation which has individual liberty as its standard should never, ever do that, and should always be resisted.