Tag Archives: #MediaBias

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In Philadelphia, Black Lives Don’t Matter!

The mission of journalism is to report the news, the truth, to the public, even if it means digging deeply into things that some people, particularly people in positions of power, do not want disclosed. Journalists must have an open mind, to see the truth, even if the truth is not what they wanted or expected, and report it accurately. 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, on the other hand, only see what they want to see.

Philly’s gun violence epidemic reaches a perilous new low as a 7-year-old is shot while playing video games | Editorial

The only thing more disturbing than the relentless pace of shootings in the city is the lack of action and outrage from those sworn to protect residents.

by the Editorial Board | Tuesday, August 23, 2022

In case city leaders have yet to realize that gun violence has reached epidemic proportions, consider the following: A 7-year-old boy was sitting in his bedroom playing video games Saturday night when he was shot in the thigh by a stray bullet from outside his home.

The shooting of a boy innocently playing in his bedroom should shake city leaders to their core and spark a full-throated call to action. So should the latest tally of weekend gun violence in Philadelphia: 21 people were shot between Saturday and Sunday.

At one point, the shootings were occurring minutes apart. An unidentified male was shot in the head at 12:21 a.m. on Sunday. Five minutes later, a 23-year-old man was shot in the back. Just 24 minutes later, a 59-year-old man was shot in the buttocks and left thigh.

The only thing more disturbing than the relentless pace of shootings that continues unabated across the city is the lack of action and outrage from those sworn to protect residents. What will it take for Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, and City Council to do something — anything — to try to stem the flow of blood?

On May 9, 2021, the same Editorial Board which expressed such outrage, endorsed Larry Krasner for re-election. It wasn’t that the Editorial Board did not know what the city had in Mr Krasner; on that same May 9, 2021, the City of Brotherly Love suffered its 183rd murder of the year, an average of 1.4186 per day, a whopping 46 more than on the same date in 2020.

In 2020, the city saw 499 murders, just one short of the record set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990.

On May 9, 2021, the Editorial Board knew that it was Mr Krasner and his office which let Hasan Elliot out on the streets, when they could have locked him up for a parole violation, and that Mr Elliot then killed Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor. The Editorial Board know that under Mr Krasner prosecution of arrests for illegal firearms possession have dropped dramatically. Yet now that are asking, “What will it take,” for Mr Krasner “to do something — anything — to try to stem the flow of blood?”

“Something” and “anything” apparently does not include something really radical like locking up criminals. In their endorsement of Mr Krasner, the Board wrote:

A complex, relatively recent spike in gun violence isn’t a reason to return to the mass incarceration regime of yesteryear, but a challenge to do better.

Oddly enough, the “mass incarceration regime of yesteryear” was coincident with a significant reduction in murders in Philly. As we noted on August 9th, under Philadelphia under Mayor Jim Kenney and District Attorney Larry Krasner have led the city into more homicides so far in 2022 than any entire year under previous Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey.

Are the Editorial Board now willing to try “mass incarceration” again? That would certainly fall under trying “anything” “to try to stem the flow of blood,” wouldn’t it?

How about “stop and frisk”? With the ever-mounting toll of shootings and death, City Council President Darrell Clarke floated the idea of a return to the “stop and frisk” policies. The Editorial Board didn’t like that idea, either:

The rise in gun violence has prompted some City Council members to call for the Police Department to reexamine its stop-and-frisk policy. While the idea is well intended, it should be a nonstarter.

The Philadelphia Police Department has a long history of racial discrimination and brutality aimed at the Black and Latino communities.

In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the city, alleging police used racial profiling to illegally stop, search, and detain thousands of people. To settle the lawsuit, the Police Department agreed to collect data on all stop-and-frisks and train officers in the use of the tactic.

In the years since, the practice has continued with significant modifications — chief among them: Officers must have sound legal suspicions to make stops. As a result, the number of stops has fallen precipitously: In 2015, police made nearly 400,000 pedestrian stops; this year, officers are on track for about 10,000 stops.

Also in 2015: Philadelphia saw 280 homicides. Since then, the city has seen 277, followed by 315, 353, 356, 499 and 562 murders each subsequent year, and 352 so far this year. We can’t know that the reduction from 400,000 to about 10,000 pedestrian stops has contributed the huge rise in murders, but the numbers do seem rather stark.

That’s another “something,” “anything” the Editorial Board don’t want the city to try.

The problem is that the Editorial Board are too blind to see the problem! The police do not stop crimes; the police respond to crimes, clean up the mess left behind by crimes, and try to arrest the perpetrators of crimes. Yes, the very short-staffed Philadelphia Police Department are not solving enough crimes, and yes, the George Soros-sponsored District Attorney is not prosecuting crimes seriously enough, both of which reduce the deterrent to the bad guys when it comes to committing crimes, but the actual prevention of crime is not something the city government can do.

The prevention of crime comes from children being reared right, in stable, two-parent homes, but it’s far, far, far too politically incorrect to say that. And when the city government, and The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Editorial Board, and all of its opinion columnists, and all of the media coverage support the killing of children who are simply too inconvenient to be allowed to live, can it really be a surprise that that message is getting through to the teenagers and twenty-somethings on the street?

The left look for the problem everywhere but where it is. Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong wrote, on July 20th, Philly needs new solutions to prevent gun violence. Not conversations. And not parties. In it, she wrote:

After putting it off for years, I finally got around to participating in the Beer Summit put on by Global Citizen, the nonprofit group that organizes the Martin Luther King Day of Service.

Billed as a “conversation on race, class, and power,” the annual gathering — which began in 2009 when President Barack Obama convened a “beer summit” at the White House with Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley, after Gates’ arrest — was virtual this year, so I could watch the recording at my leisure.

There was lots of good commentary. As Temple University’s David Brown pointed out, “The whole notion of the Beer Summit is to bring different people from different perspectives along and [focus] on a common challenge in a community.”

This year’s theme was gun violence sparked by white supremacy.

She has got to be kidding. Yes, there have been a few mass shootings by supposed “white supremacists,” but the number of their victims pales in comparison to the numbers of black Philadelphians being killed by other black Philadelphians. Unlike Philadelphia, St Louis, our most murderous city, breaks down its homicide cases on race. In a city in which slightly less than half the population are black, 121 out of 130 homicides as of August 24th had black victims, and out of 84 known suspects, 83 are black.

It isn’t “white supremacy” killing all of those black victims in the Gateway City, and it hasn’t been “white supremacy” killing all of those victims in Philly. But Jenice Armstrong, the Editorial Board, and almost everyone else can’t bring themselves to tell the truth: the blood being spilled by the mostly black victims of shootings has been spilled by black assailants.

Me? I can say it, because I’m retired, and I can’t be ‘canceled,’ can’t lose my job for doing something really radical like telling the truth. As horrible as the homicide rates have been in Philly, in St Louis, in Baltimore and Chicago, they really aren’t that bad for white people.

In Philly, black lives don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter as much as the left keeping their mouths shut as far as telling the truth is concerned. The key to reducing the carnage is to stop supporting the social policies and tolerances which have produced it.

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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Killadelphia Black Lives Don't Matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer

When I saw that the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page had shot up to 274 homicides, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Wednesday, July 6th, from 268 the previous day, I had to check the Philadelphia Shootings Victims Database, to see if perhaps some of the six new fatalities were simply data catch-ups. As you can see from the chart on the left, there were six fatal shootings, out of thirteen total, yesterday. The chart is a direct copy from the shootings database, though I hid some of the data cells and made some of the data clearer — such as replacing ones and zeros with “no” and “yes” — and easier for the reader. Feel free to follow the link and confirm my data with the original. You can click on the chart itself to enlarge it for easier reading.

I have said, many times, that black lives don’t matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer, and, as of 12:13 PM EDT on July 7th, there was not a single story about any of the murders, either on the newspaper’s website main page or it’s crime page. There was, however, a photo, of Jailene Holton, the cute white girl murdered on June 28th, and a story about her (alleged) killer being arrested. Of course, we have also often said that The Philadelphia Inquirer does not care about murder victims unless they are an innocent, a ‘somebody,’ or a cute white girl, and this is just more evidence of that.

Who were the six people murdered in Philly yesterday? All six were black males, and, with one exception, all were in their twenties. The “anti-racist” Inquirer doesn’t want to tell us diddly, even though long-time Inky columnist Helen Ubiñas once lamented that so many victims received barely a few paragraphs.

Now, they’re not getting even that much! It’s just too politically incorrect for the newspaper to do something really radical like actually report the news. As we noted just yesterday, the advent of digital publication, even though the dead trees edition has gotten physically smaller, newspapers in digital format are no longer constrained by word counts or assigned column inches. Newspapers have always had the ability to go more in depth than television news and their quick-fire show-and-tell stories, and now, with space constraints gone, really get into the heart of stories. Four of the six homicides occurred before 3:00 PM, meaning that the newspaper has had plenty of time, plenty of time, to write something, anything, on the killings, two of which occurred in a double homicide in the 5000 block of Germantown Avenue. But 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 the Inquirer have, instead, stopped covering the news that simply does not fit its editorial slant, or publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ dictates.

Black lives simply don’t matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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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Another begging letter from The Philadelphia Inquirer Remember when it used to be "An Independent Newspaper for All the People"?

This is not the first begging letter I have received from the Leftist Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the non-profit owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer, but it is as amusing as all of the others.

I have frequently referred to our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, in our nation’s sixth largest city and seventh largest metropolitan area as The Philadelphia Enquirer ever since RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake. I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I have found it very apt. The Inky, despite Philly’s size, is only our nation’s 17th largest newspaper, by circulation. Why? I have suggested that part of it is because the Inquirer censors the news!

In attempting to meet publisher Elizabeth Hughes stated goal of making the Inquirer an “anti-racist news organization,” the newspaper published its “Black City. White Paper” series, which, in effect, told white readers and potential readers that the Inky was really not for them.

Nor is it even true. Philadelphia isn’t a “black city.” The 2020 census found that just 38.3% of the city’s population were non-Hispanic black, and Hispanics, who can be either black or white, made up 14.9%. Between non-Hispanic whites, 34.3%, Asians, 8.3%, and “other groups,” 4.3%, the city is 46.9% non-black, and it doesn’t take a terribly large percentage of the Hispanic population being white to get the city to majority non-black. The non-Hispanic white population of the city have certainly declined, but they are hardly gone.

More, the Philadelphia metropolitan area is very much majority white. Perhaps, just perhaps, the Inquirer practically marketing itself as a newspaper for a “Black City” isn’t really something that’s going to help it to sell well in West Chester or Bucks County.

The Inquirer used to proclaim itself, on the newspaper’s masthead, that it was a “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. That “Independent Newspaper” blurb was even proudly emblazoned on its old building, but the newspaper under Miss Hughes has been telling us that no, it is no longer a “Public Ledger,” and that it is no longer a “Newspaper for All the People.”

Why did Rebecca Forman, the Director of Advancement for the leftist Lenfest Institute, call me “a supporter of The Philadelphia Inquirer“? It’s simple: it’s because I am a subscriber for the digital newspaper.[1]As much as I really do love actual printed newspapers, I now live well outside the newspaper’s physical delivery area. And I am paying $21.96 every four weeks for my digital subscription, more than I pay for The Washington Post, $99 a year, and more than I pay for The New York Times, $17.00 every four weeks. Given that I used to live in the Keystone State, and Philadelphia is the city about which I am most concerned, and about which I most frequently write, I’ll continue to pay that subscription. I think I have contributed quite enough to the Inky, thank you very much.

But the Inquirer needs to get better; it needs to report all the news, not just what Miss Hughes and Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar consider to be politically correct.

With the advent of digital publication, even though the dead trees edition has gotten physically smaller, newspapers in digital format are no longer constrained by word counts or assigned column inches. Newspapers have always had the ability to go more in depth than television news and their quick-fire show-and-tell stories, and now, with space constraints gone, really get into the heart of stories. The Inky can be better than it ever was.

Instead, it has gotten worse. Instead, the newspaper has gotten so thoroughly eaten up with ‘progressive’ ideology that the editors refuse to cover the news which might be politically incorrect, refuse to publish the news which might be outside Miss Hughes ideology. With Lenfest’s ownership, the Inquirer actually can call itself “An Independent Newspaper,” but they are failing in the “for All the People” part.

I’ve said it before: if I had Jeff Bezos’ money, I’d do what he did with The Washington Post: I’d buy the newspaper and rescue it from its financial problems. But I would also clean house, I would make sure that the Inquirer really did cover all the news, and publish all of the news, letting the chips fall where they may, regardless of whose feelings might get hurt.

That is what journalists, real journalists, are supposed to do.

References

References
↑1 As much as I really do love actual printed newspapers, I now live well outside the newspaper’s physical delivery area.
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I owe Seth Williams an apology

At 11:17 AM EDT on Monday, June 20th, Seth Williams, a former District Attorney for Philadelphia, tweeted, “I am now being told that from midnight Friday until midnight Sunday, Philadelphia tragically suffered 41 shootings, 14 homicides, and 6 victims remain in critical condition. What we are doing now is not working!” Not having seen numbers like that anywhere in the media, I responded:

Well, I suppose that I owe Mr Williams an apology, because the numbers from the Philadelphia Police Department — the report was not updated on Monday, I suppose because whoever does the updating was off for the Juneteenth holiday — finally came in, and they are ugly.

The previous report was that 230 people had been murdered as of Friday, June 17th, so yup, Mr Williams’ report was right on target.

I responded to Mr Williams that I had seen nothing in The Philadelphia Inquirer supporting numbers anywhere close to that, and, checking the newspaper’s website main page again this morning, I still don’t. There is a story about teenagers concerns about the proposed 10:00 PM curfew, which is being considered in the wake of the South Street shootings during a rowdy street celebration full of teenagers, a five day old story about serious problems at Prevention Point Philadelphia, and, Heaven forfend!, the hugely critical Local strike could impact availability of beer ahead of Fourth of July weekend! Moving on to the newspaper’s crime page, there was a story about the killing of John Albert Laylo, a visitor from the Philippines, who was shot dead in what is now being called a targeted hit, but one which hit the wrong car. There was a story from Friday about two fatal shootings, plus another which left a victim, shot in the head, in extremely critical condition, and another about a murder in February, allegedly committed by a closeted bisexual male who wanted to keep his boyfriend from revealing their relationship.

There was a story, dated Thursday, June 16th, about three homicides Wednesday evening into Thursday morning.

But that’s it; there’s nothing in the Inky, at least as of 9:14 AM EDT, to tell readers that 14 people were murdered over the Juneteenth weekend.

There was, however, a significantly sized advertising blurb, telling people that they could subscribe for unlimited digital access for just 99¢ per week for 12 weeks, followed by $3.99 per week, billed every 4 weeks, no commitment, cancel anytime.

But I have to ask: why should people subscribe to the Inquirer if the newspaper is not going to do something really radical like report the news?

We noted, in January, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas and her complaint, For two mothers touched by gun violence: ‘Pray, pray, and pray some more.’: Numbers tend to attract attention around here; the people behind them, not always so much.

On Thursday, she typed a similar lament:

Everyday gun violence goes unchecked, even as high-profile massacres capture the nation’s attention

We can’t accept the asymmetrical way people look at shooting victims based on race.

by Helen Ubiñas | Thursday, June 16, 2022

Within a few days of the mass shooting on South Street, two people were already in custody.

Two days later, two more.

And almost immediately came a familiar appeal from the loved ones of murder victims whose killings remain unsolved:

Where was the full-court press to identify suspects and make arrests in the deaths of their family members?

There’s more at the original. But perhaps Miss Ubiñas ought to look a bit more closely at her own newspaper in asking that question.

She had, in December of 2020, written an opinion column saying that we should at least know the names of the people slaughtered in the City of Brotherly Love, yet the newspaper at which she has worked for many years appears to have gotten even worse at reporting the news about homicides.

Fourteen people murdered? That’s almost five South Streets! 41 shootings, at least according to Mr Williams?[1]The city’s shooting database has not been updated to confirm this. That’s one shy of three South Streets, about which the Inquirer wrote story after story.

But last weekend, which ended two days ago? Barely more than crickets from our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, nothing, no one looked at the numbers, no one figured it out.

The thing is, I’ve figured it out. The Inky spends a lot of time when innocent people are killed. We saw that the paper paid attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s five separate stories, a whole lot more than the two or three paragraphs most victims get.

Then there was the murder of Samuel Sean Collington, a Temple University student approaching graduation. Mr Collington was a white victim, allegedly murdered by a black juvenile in a botched robbery. The Inquirer then published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him. Five separate stories about the case of a murdered white guy.

To which shootings, to which killings, does the newspaper not pay attention? It doesn’t pay attention to the murders of young black boys and men by other young black boys and men, which happens to be the majority, the vast majority, of the homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. It’s easy to have sympathy for people like Mr Collington, or Mr Laylo. The Inquirer has even tried to drum up sympathy for kids like Marcus Stokes or Thomas Siderio.

But when one gang banger shoots and kills another gang banger? The editors and publisher of the Inquirer not only don’t care, but actively don’t want to publish stories about them, because it does not fit within the worldview they want to project.

References

References
↑1 The city’s shooting database has not been updated to confirm this.
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The journolism of The Philadelphia Inquirer

No, that’s not a typo in the title: 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.

As we have mentioned, The Philadelphia Inquirer is the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and has won 20 Pulitzer Prizes for its reporting. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are all significantly younger than the Inky. With 6,245,051 people according to the 2020 census, Philadelphia and its surrounding metropolitan area is the seventh largest in the United States. With a population of 1,603,797, the city of Philadelphia itself is the sixth largest in the United States. So why, then, does the Inquirer rank only 17th in circulation? Could it be because they censor the news?

Another pro-life clinic attacked, this one in Philadelphia

by Joe Bukaras | Wednesday, June 15, 2022 | 3:41 AM EDT

A pro-life pregnancy center in Philadelphia was vandalized last weekend with smashed windows and graffiti.

Latrice Booker, director of Hope Pregnancy Center in Philadelphia, told CNA that when she drove by her clinic Saturday, June 11, she found four windows smashed, with one written on with graffiti. It is unclear what the graffiti says.

Three glass doors were smashed as well, she said. She estimated the damages to be around $15,000. As of Tuesday afternoon, the windows were boarded up and the clinic is in the process of repairs. They are still open for business, she said.

Booker said that the clinic offers all its services to help women and families in need at no cost. She said that the clinic is not dissuaded in its mission by the vandalism and called on people of faith to “stand tall” despite the vitriol against pro-lifers.

There’s more at the original. Naturally, I searched the Inky’s website, to see if I could find this story, and to my very much not surprised self, I found nothing, nada, zilch, zippo, ничего. You can see the top of the search results if you click on the image to the right.

I did, however, find hundreds of articles on abortion, in a site search for pro life clinic, virtually all of them supporting the pro-abortion position in one way or another. The ‘pro-choice’ crowd do not like the term ‘pro-abortion,’ but it is economically accurate: to support having the choice to have an abortion, you must concomitantly want enough abortions to occur to keep the abortuaries open. President Clinton’s formulation that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” falls on its own weight, because if abortion is rare, abortion providers can’t stay in business.

From Politico:

Garland returns to Oklahoma City to warn that domestic terrorism is ‘still with us’

The attorney general has vowed to crackdown on a resurgence of violence linked to white supremacist and right-wing militia groups.

by Josh Gerstein | April 19, 2021 | 12:14 PM EDT

Attorney General Merrick Garland returned Monday to Oklahoma City — the site of the nation’s most deadly act of domestic terrorism and of his formative experiences as a young prosecutor — to deliver a warning that the threat of domestic extremism is again on the rise.

Delivering his first major speech as attorney general, Garland told a memorial service that the nation must remain vigilant against such dangers.

There were plenty of other stories, such as “Top law enforcement officials say the biggest domestic terror threat comes from white supremacists.” in The New York Times, while National Public Radio reported:

At Tuesday’s hearing, Jill Sanborn, the head of the FBI’s National Security Branch, told lawmakers that the threat posed by domestic violent extremists is “persistent and evolving.” The “most lethal threat” from domestic violent extremists, she said, is posed by white supremacists and anti-government militias.

So, I’m wondering: was the vandalism at a pro-life pregnancy center or one at a similar clinic in Washington DC the work of evil reich-wing extremists or white supremacists?

Decades ago, the Inquirer’s masthead declared itself to be a “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. Now it should have a blurb similar to the one that ought to be on The New York Times, “All the News That’s Politically Correct.” The Inky just doesn’t want you to tell its readers the truth, and that’s why the only real newspaper in our nation’s seventh largest metropolitan area is just 17th in circulation.

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Killadelphia Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother's eye.

Philly Police Department press release via Steve Keeley, Fox 29 News. Click to enlarge.

Two more Philadelphians bit the dust yesterday, but if The Philadelphia Inquirer was your only news source, you’d never know it. Nine people bled out their lives’ blood in the city’s mean streets over the last five days, but the “anti-racist news organization” won’t tell you anything. In December of 2020, columnist Heleb Ubiñas wrote, “What do you know about the Philadelphians killed by guns this year? At least know their names.” A year and a half later, the Inquirer, under publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes and Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Gabriel Escobar, don’t want you to know that anyone was killed.

With 6,245,051 people according to the 2020 census, Philadelphia and its surrounding metropolitan area is the seventh largest in the United States. With a population of 1,603,797, the city of Philadelphia itself is the sixth largest in the United States. The Inquirer is the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, older than The New York Times and The Washington Post. So why, then, does The Philadelphia Inquirer rank only 17th in circulation? Could it be because they censor the news?

The numbers are stark. At the end of Thursday, May 12, the city was seeing 1.295 homicides per day. Five days later, that’s up to 1.314 per day. More importantly, the City of Brotherly Love has gone from a projected 503 homicides in 2022 to 514.[1]Methodology: to compensate for the normal increase in homicides as warmer weather approaches, I have taken the number of homicides on a given date, divided it by the number on the same day in 2021, … Continue reading

So, if the newspaper does not report on homicides in its own home city, on what does it report? How about his gem? Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 Methodology: to compensate for the normal increase in homicides as warmer weather approaches, I have taken the number of homicides on a given date, divided it by the number on the same day in 2021, and multiplied that fraction by 562, the number of homicides in 2021. I have also compared the numbers to 2020’s homicide rate, and come up with huge numbers, 623 and 642, but have not really given them much credence. There are several different ways of calculating the numbers, but I will note that I accurately projected 562 homicides for 2021 on July 9, 2021.
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The left worry about ten people killed by a deranged white shooter, but ignore the wholesale slaughter of young black men by other young black men There's just no political value for the left in worrying about street crime

Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

This reminds me of how anti-Semitic and anti-Asian hate crimes were spiking a few months ago, but because the perpetrators were black, liberals didn’t want to talk about the problem.

It is no longer enough to not be racist; you must now be anti-racist!

Anti-racism encompasses a range of ideas and political actions which are meant to counter racial prejudice, systemic racism, and the oppression of specific racial groups. Anti-racism is usually structured around conscious efforts and deliberate actions which are intended to provide equal opportunities for all people on both an individual and a systemic level. As a philosophy, it can be engaged in by the acknowledgment of personal privileges, confronting acts as well as systems of racial discrimination, and/or working to change personal racial biases. Major contemporary anti-racism efforts include Black Lives Matter organizing and workplace antiracism.

Today’s credentialed media have taken that to mean that news which could “perpetuat(e) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community” — quote taken from the Sacramento Bee but could have come from any number of newspapers — must be soft-peddled if not outright suppressed. Maybe that’s why the two murders yesterday in the City of Brotherly Love — both committed fairly early in the evening so there was plenty of time — were not mentioned on either the main page or crime page of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Continue reading →

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The pro-abortionists really, really don’t like it when someone uses plain and concise language If abortion is such a good and noble thing, why must the left mealy-mouth their words about it?

We have previously noted how the credentialed media use control of language to try to influence the debate toward their favored positions, which always seem to be toward the left.

Twitter did so by prohibiting “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” Simply put, if someone wanted to tweet something about William Thomas, the male swimmer who claims to be female and is on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team using the name “Lia,” that person would have to concede to Mr Thomas’ claim that he is a woman by using the feminine pronouns and his assumed name, not his real one. The New York Times laughably gave major OpEd space to Chad Malloy, a man male who claims to be a woman going by the name “Parker” to claim that Twitter’s Ban on ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech.

Twitter’s ban on ‘deadnaming’ — the reference to ‘transgender’ people by their birth names — and ‘misgendering’ — the reference to ‘transgender’ people by their natural, biological sex — tramples on the speech of normal people, people who do not believe that girls can be boys and boys can be girls. The argument is that, in effect, we can’t hurt their precious little feelings, and so we must concede their major point to engage in debate. Here’s hoping that Elon Musk changes that!

Now comes Jeffrey Barg, also known as the Angry Grammarian, getting upset that Associate Justice Samuel Alito used plain language, did something radical like tell the truth, in his leaked draft majority opinion on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization: Continue reading →

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Why does a newspaper censor the news? The Philadelphia Inquirer kept from its readers information already available to the public.

With 6,245,051 people according to the 2020 census, Philadelphia and its surrounding metropolitan area is the seventh largest in the United States. With a population of 1,603,797, the city of Philadelphia itself is the sixth largest in the United States. So why, then, does The Philadelphia Inquirer rank only 17th in circulation? Could it be because they censor the news?

Grandson charged with murdering his grandfather and another man stemming from a dispute over bedroom conditions

The circumstances leading to the arrest of Czar McMichael, 22, of North Philly, began on Thursday when Benjamin E. McMichael, 67, conducted “a routine inspection” of his grandson’s bedroom.

by Diane Mastrull | Sunday, May 1, 2022 | 4:27 PM EDT

Czar McMichael, via Fox 29 News

A Philadelphia man has been charged with murder in two shootings over two days that left his grandfather and another man dead in a double homicide that emanated from a complaint over the condition of the grandson’s bedroom, police said Sunday.The circumstances leading to the arrest of Czar McMichael, 22, of the Logan section of North Philly, began on Thursday when, police said, Benjamin E. McMichael, 67, conducted “a routine inspection” of his grandson Czar’s third-floor bedroom in their home on the 4600 block of North Broad Street and was upset with the condition of the room.

Police said the elder McMichael grabbed his grandson’s arm and Czar McMichael spun around and shot his grandfather.

On Saturday Anthony Ham, 45, of Philadelphia, along with an acquaintance stopped by the McMichael home to check on Benjamin because they hadn’t heard from him in a couple days. Ham got into the home by climbing through a window and unlocked the door for the person with him, whom police did not identify.

There’s more at the original.

What did I predict? That the newspaper would decline to print the suspect’s mugshot and would do what it could to conceal the suspect’s race. And in fact the Inquirer did not include the suspect’s mugshot, though it was easily available and had been published on Fox 29 News. Steve Keeley of Fox 29 tweeted his mugshot at 1:47 PM EDT, 2 hours and 40 minutes before the Inquirer’s article was published.

Mr Keeley also published the Philadelphia Police Department’s press release on the matter, which noted that the victims were a (45/B/M) and a (67/B/M), but of course the very “anti-racist” and #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 Inquirer were not about to publish that!

Yet the newspaper published the mugshot of Kathleen Kane, a Scranton woman who has been out of public office for six years, who has been disbarred and thus no longer practices law, and who has, as nearly as I can discover, simply been living on the spousal support from the wealthy businessman she divorced since she got out of jail.

Black murder suspect in the newspaper’s hometown? Conceal that information! Attractive white woman accused, but not convicted of, a DUI? Splash her photo all over the newspaper’s website, and Twitter!

This is what passes for journalism in the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper: conceal the facts which are inconvenient and do not go along with publisher Lisa Hughes’ ideas and goals.

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.