Tag Archives: #MediaBias

Posted on by

Journolism: media bias at its finest The credentialed media didn't publish anything untrue, but they deliberately chose to omit the most important fact

No, there isn’t a typographical error in the article headline. 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.

Sometimes that bias is deeply buried, and at first, I wondered if this was a hoax, because I wasn’t finding any credentialed media verification of the story. But finally, I found it from an ABC News station:

After player injury, Cherokee Co. schools forfeit all volleyball games against 1 school

by Jordan Karnbach | Tuesday, October 4, 2022

CHEROKEEE COUNTY, N.C. — All girls’ volleyball teams in the Cherokee County school district will forfeit upcoming regular season games against one competitor due to a recent player injury, according to Cherokee County School Board member Arnold Mathews.

Mathews told us in an email on Tuesday that the board determined the varsity and junior varsity teams in the district won’t play the Highlands School volleyball team “due to safety concerns,” Mathews said.

That decision came after a Hiwassee Dam High School volleyball player got neck and head injuries when a Highlands athlete spiked a ball, which “forcefully struck” the athlete in the head, says Mathews.

Mathews says this decision does not affect any other sports or teams in the district.

You know what isn’t in any of the credentialed media reports? What isn’t there is that the ball which was forcefully spiked was spiked by a ‘transgender girl’, meaning: a male who identifies as a girl and is playing on the girls’ volleyball team.

Several non-credentialed sites picked up that part, and it took some digging through them to find the confirmation. There was considerable debate among the Cherokee County Board of Education meeting, but if you read through the meeting minutes, you’ll see what the credentialed media tried to hide: yes, the player in question is a “biological male”.

Dr. Lisa Fletcher, Principal Murphy High, informed the Board that at the athletic association meeting she had just attended the issue of student’s playing based on their birth certificate gender is going to be addressed in the future. She advised the Board to communicate with the Athletic Association regarding this issue.

Mr. Steve Colemen addressed the safety concern for the female players facing a biological male player. He added that the Board should make a stand because if it isn’t addressed now, it’s possible in the future that a Cherokee County team could face a team with all biological males playing; and if this isn’t addressed there is a risk for biological male students taking over women’s sports.

The Board of Education clearly took its decision based on the fact that the Highlands girls’ volleyball team had a male team member; that ought to be news, ought to be an important part of the story, and is the “why” for the entire decision, but the credentialed media have censored that part. The credentialed media didn’t publish anything untrue, but they skewed the entire story by deliberately omitting the most important, most relevant fact. How is that not lying?

Posted on by

Bad causes attract bad people

In The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, we note:

Those who claim to be transgender will be referred to with the honorific and pronouns appropriate to the sex of their birth; the site owner does not agree with the cockamamie notion that anyone can simply ‘identify’ with a sex which is not his own, nor that any medical ‘treatment’ or surgery can change a person’s natural sex; all that it can do is physically mutilate a person.

Sadly, the credentialed media do not follow the same rule. Rather, they almost uniformly refer to the ‘transgendered’ by the names and sex they claim to be, rather than doing something really radical like telling the truth.

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain had the story of Steven Joaquin Perez, a man male who believes he is a woman and who calls himself “Zhoie”. Mr McCain concentrated on Mr Perez’s actions in trying to provoke law enforcement and security personnel to take action against him, as a “first amendment auditor,” comparting such to “sovereign citizens,” people who believe that they are completely independent of what they see as a corrupt government. I encourage you to read Mr McCain’s original on that part.

Me? I’m more interested in the complicity of the credentialed media in perpetuating the lie that girls can be boys and boys can be girls. Mr McCain likes to link an archived version of his sources, to help people get past paywalls, and I saw the archived version of the story here. I went to the original.

Guard won’t be charged in shooting of YouTube activist ‘Furry Potato.’ She’s suing him

by James Quelly | March 13, 2019 | 6:25 PM PDT

Zhoie Perez, second from right, speaks during a news conference in downtown Los Angeles. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times). Caption is a direct quote from The Los Angeles Times. Click to enlarge.

Los Angeles prosecutors Wednesday declined to file criminal charges against a security guard who shot and wounded a YouTube personality during a bizarre clash outside a synagogue last month, an announcement that came just hours after the woman filed a civil lawsuit against the guard and his employers.Edduin Zelayagrunfeld, 44, was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon Feb. 14 after shooting 45-year-old Zhoie Perez while she was filming outside the Etz Jacob Congregation/Ohel Chana High School building in the Fairfax district.

Prosecutors had asked the LAPD to conduct a deeper investigation into the incident before they made a filing decision, but they formally rejected the charges Wednesday. In a declination memorandum, Deputy Dist. Atty. John Harlan wrote that prosecutors ultimately would not be able to disprove Zelayagrunfeld was acting in self-defense.

There’s more at the original.

I went to the original for the specific purpose of counting how many times the Times referred to Mr Perez as though he was a woman. The word “woman” is used once to refer to him, and the feminine pronouns are used — assuming I counted them correctly — fifteen times. The article does note that he is “transgender” once, but does not tell us Mr Perez’s real name; I only know it because Mr McCain had looked it up and posted it.

Look at the photo that the Times used. Even Stevie Wonder could see that Mr Perez isn’t a woman, but the Times called him one uncritically. A different photo used my Mr McCain doesn’t really indicate Mr Perez’s height in the same manner, but reveals a clearly masculine face. Every bird, every reptile, and every mammal can tell the difference between males and females of their own species, and my observations are that dogs and cats, at the very least, can distinguish between the sexes of human beings, but somehow the left, including our credentialed media, have lost that very fundamental ability.

It has been said that bad causes attract bad people, and Mr Perez is simply another example of it. He went to a synagogue to deliberately provoke a fight, and he succeeded. One would think that someone who is ‘transgendered’ would want to live a relatively quiet life, in the hopes of getting his circle of friends to see him as a real woman, rather than have publicity demonstrating to the entire country that no, he ain’t a real woman, but a complete kook. The “first amendment auditors” are certainly right that they do have rights, but going about proving it by trampling on other people’s rights, and trying to provoke confrontation is not exactly a way to win friends and influence people, or at least not to influence people to support them.

And if bad causes attract bad people, then the reverse is also true: if you see a bad person, look at the causes he supports a bit more closely, and you’re very likely to find those political causes he supports aren’t all that great.

Posted on by

Larry Krasner and The Philadelphia Inquirer sure love them some propaganda!

We have previously mocked told our readers — both of them — that The Philadelphia Inquirer has informed us that:

In Philadelphia, there are no gangs in the traditional, nationally known sense. Instead, they are cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families. The groups have names — Young Bag Chasers, Penntown, Northside — and members carry an allegiance to each other, but they aren’t committing traditional organized crimes, like moving drugs, the way gangs did in the past.

Now, the District Attorney’s Office has told us that these are “street groups”.

Investigators believe that Johnson and Simmons targeted these young men because of their affiliation with a rival street group.

The left sure love them some propaganda!

Apparently, the way to end gangs is to redefine them away.

Posted on by

More ‘journolism’ from the Lexington Herald-Leader

Brandi Whitaker, a former Madison County teacher, pleaded guilty to unlawful use of electronic device to induce a minor in 2017. She was given shock probation that same year. WKYT. Click to enlarge.

No, that’s not a typo in the headline: 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.

The Lexington Herald-Leader doesn’t like to publish photos of people accused of, or even convicted of, serious crimes, but they made an exception in the case of Brandi Whitaker, formerly a biology teacher at Madison Southern High School near Berea who allegedly had sex with a 16-year-old male student; Miss Whitaker pleaded guilty to an electronic communication charge, a Class D felony in Kentucky, and was sentenced to a year behind bars.

Part of a series that the newspaper carried on teachers who’ve had their licenses suspended, primarily for sexual abuse of students, was mentioned because Miss Whitaker received a “shock probation” in less than two months.

Man arrested, charged after shooting in downtown Lexington early Sunday morning

by Taylor Six | Sunday, October 2, 2022 | 2:10 PM EDT

A man is facing multiple charges after he was arrested in downtown Lexington following a shooting that sent a man to the hospital early Sunday morning.

Twenty-eight-year-old Adrian Black was arrested by Lexington Police after he allegedly shot a man near the Fifth-Third Pavilion and Cheapside, according to Sgt. Nate Williams.

Around 1:45 a.m. on Sunday, police working in the downtown entertainment area heard shots fired. The located a adult male victim with non-life threatening injuries.

According to Williams, police were able to locate Black who was leaving the scene in the immediate area.

Williams stated officers on the scene were told by witnesses that there was a physical altercation before the shooting between the suspects.

Adrian Black, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Adrian Marcel Black, born February 7, 1994, was not exactly unfamiliar to the Lexington Police Department, as the public record from the Fayette County Detention Center shows two previous mug shots of him, dated March 22, 2014 and June 11, 2019. He faces charges of:

  • KRS §508.060 Wanton Endangerment, First Degree, two counts, a Class D felony, which, under KRS §532.060 carries a sentence of one (1) to five (5) years in the state penitentiary.
  • KRS §508.010, Assault, First Degree, a Class B felony, which, under KRS §532.060 carries a sentence of no less than ten (10) to twenty (20) years in the state penitentiary.

The crimes of which Mr Black has been accused are serious ones, far more serious than that to which Miss Whitaker pleaded guilty, as measured by the fact she was convicted of a single Class D felony, while Mr Black faces a Class B felony charge, yet what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal chose not to print his photo, unlike the case with Miss Whitaker.

I might not have covered this, had the newspaper not published the photo of Miss Whitaker; that would have been consistent with their policy — a policy with which I disagree — of not publishing such photos. But they did publish Miss Whitaker’s photo, then returned to their standard operating procedure by not publishing Mr Black’s. Yet Mr Black, if he makes his $50,000 bail, is far more of a clear and present danger on the city’s streets than Miss Whitaker!

Posted on by

The journolism of The Philadelphia Inquirer the stereotype of criminals being black is so strong in Philly that the newspaper not giving the race of criminal suspects simply reinforces it.

No, that’s not a typo in the headline. 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.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: A Death in ‘Killadelphia’

We have previously noted the murder of Everett Beauregard and mentioned the #WhitePrivilege shown by The Philadelphia Inquirer in reporting the story, how innocent white victims get stories in the Inky, while few black murder victims get anything reported about them.

Publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes vowed to make what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. an “anti-racist news organization,” and how it has led the newspaper to delete racial references to criminals, and, shazamm!, they’ve done it again.

Police say killing of recent Temple grad was ‘completely unprovoked,’ not a robbery

“Mr. Beauregard’s life was cut short by this horrific act of violence and for no apparent reason whatsoever,” said Homicide Capt. Jason Smith.

by Ellie Rushing | Friday, September 23, 2022

Philadelphia police said Friday they now believe the fatal shooting of a 23-year-old in West Philadelphia was “completely unprovoked,” and that the shooter did not interact with the victim before firing at his back.

“This was not a robbery attempt as we initially believed,” said Homicide Capt. Jason Smith.

Everett Beauregard had just exited a train at the 34th and Market SEPTA station around 12:30 a.m. Thursday, and was walking home after spending time with friends in South Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, police say, surveillance video shows a young man, with a gun concealed in his hoodie, had been walking around the area, near the 400 block of North 35th Street, for about an hour.

Video shows Beauregard walking past the suspect, who then suddenly turns around and fires multiple times at Beauregard’s back, striking him once in the back of the neck.

Beauregard fell to the ground, and the suspect ran away, firing one more shot as he fled.

Of course, the Philadelphia Police Department did not describe the killer as a “young man” in the surveillance video, but as “a thin built Black male”. Everyone in the city will automatically suspect that the killer is black, so it would not have hurt the Inquirer to give the actual description, even though it’s part of the video which they did link. Let’s tell the truth here: the stereotype of criminals being black is so strong in the City of Brotherly Love that the newspaper not giving the race of criminal suspects simply reinforces it.

The Inky tweeted, and Editor and Senior Vice President Gabriel Escobar said:

It’s official! We’ve got a new look ✨

But from our first edition on June 1, 1829, to The Philadelphia Inquirer you see today, our mission of providing essential local journalism has remained unchanged.

Apparently “essential local journalism” means censored local journalism! Why is telling the truth so hard?

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
Posted on by

Another dead in the Philadelphia Badlands Will The Philadelphia Inquirer actually tell us who he was, and why he was killed?

I’ve said it dozens of times before:  The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t care about homicides in the City of Brotherly Love unless the victim is an ‘innocent,’ someone already of some note, or a cute little white girl.

Well, an “innocent” was killed on Friday, so yeah, we’re getting a lot more about her from what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer:[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.

Parks and Recreation worker killed by stray bullet in West Philadelphia

Tiffany Fletcher was sweeping outside a recreation center when she was caught in the middle of a gun battle, police said.

by Robert Moran | Friday, September 9, 2022

A 41-year-old woman was killed by a stray bullet Friday afternoon while working for the city at a recreation center in the Mill Creek section of West Philadelphia, police said.

Just before 1:30 p.m., the woman — identifed late Friday night by the city as Tiffany Fletcher — was sweeping outside the Mill Creek Recreation Center on the 4700 block of Brown Street when a gun battle erupted and she was struck in the stomach, police said.

She was rushed by police to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead Friday evening.

Police Capt. John Walker said a 14-year-old boy — who allegedly was seen dropping a gun near the shooting scene — was in custody as part of the investigation. The gun was recovered by police.

Mayor Jim Kenney and Parks and Recreation Kathryn Ott Lovell issued statements praising Fletcher and decrying the gun violence.

Perhaps Mr Kenney shouldn’t have linked the city’s Parks and Recreation Twitter site, because, at least as of 8:30 AM EDT on Saturday, all it has are nice, positive tweets showing, and nothing on Miss Fletcher.

For Inquirer reporter Robert Moran, the 482 words in his story constitutes a long one. A reporter who covers “breaking news at night,” his stories are very frequently of the three or four paragraph variety, noting that the Philadelphia Police Department have reported an unknown male was shot and killed in one of the neighborhoods in the city’s combat zones. This time, he had more to work with, because the victim was an innocent, not just another gang-banger or wannabe.

There were nine total paragraphs about Miss Fletcher in Mr Moran’s story, and I would not be surprised if there’s another about her later today in the newspaper. Much further down, I saw this:

Later Friday night in the city’s Fairhill section, an unidentified man was fatally wounded in a shooting on the 3100 block of North Front Street. He was transported by private vehicle to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 9:34 p.m. Police reported no arrests in that case.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Since Miss Ubiñas published her column, the Inky has changed its editorial policies, and now readers will no longer be told that the victim was “a 21-year-old black male,” but just a 21-year-old male.” And in Mr Moran’s story, this victim was reduced to even less than Miss Ubiñas wrote, to “an unidentified man”, though Mr Moran normally adds more information if he’d has it.

The Fairhill neighborhood is one of those listed prominently as part of the “Philadelphia Badlands.” Of course, once the Google Maps designation of “Philadelphia Badlands” was spotted, the Inky waxed wroth:

‘Philadelphia Badlands’ label on Google Maps latest controversy over neighborhood names

A Twitter user who spotted the name called it problematic: “to see Google kind of endorse that really did not strike me the right way.”

Philadelphia Badlands. Photo via Philadelphia Inquirer Click to enlarge.

by Patricia Madej | Updated: May 2, 2019A label for the “Philadelphia Badlands” on Google Maps drew ire online this week, adding another layer to the long-standing conversation over neighborhood names and boundaries, and their uses in technology.

A Twitter account, @RITTSQU, shared an image Tuesday that showed the name labeled near the Fairhill neighborhood in North Philadelphia, calling it “a racist new twist.” The post quickly garnered attention, and by Thursday, the name did not appear to be on the map, though a search for “Philadelphia Badlands” still brought results.

Using “Philadelphia Badlands” in Google Maps’ directions feature will take users to Sixth Street and Allegheny Avenue, while also suggesting Fairhill, North Philadelphia, and Kensington. It’s unclear how long the name had existed on Google Maps, when or why it was removed, or how it was added. Google did not respond to requests for comment.

Note that North Front Street is shown on that Google Maps photo of the Badlands. The 3100 block extends for three blocks south of East Allegheny Avenue, also shown on the map. You don’t get any more Badlands than that!

I’m not sure why calling a murderous neighborhood the Badlands is racist; it’s a designation spawned by the numbers, not color.

West Philly, where Miss Fletcher was killed, is not in the Badlands, but, if we do something really radical like tell the truth, West Philly has its own serious crime problem.

There’s a question not often asked these days: was Miss Fletcher’s life somehow more important than the unknown man killed on North Front Street? Being where the shooting happened, there’s a decent chance he was another gang banger, killed by a banger from a rival gang, but we don’t know that; he could easily have been a completely innocent man, perhaps an intended robbery victim, or could he have been someone’s boyfriend shot by a jealous, spurned suitor? Perhaps he was a buyer in a drug deal gone bad.

This is the problem with the journolists[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading of the Inquirer: they don’t do very much actual journalism when it comes to city homicides. We get to read the stories about the innocents and the cute white girls killed, but most of the homicide stories are simply not pursued.

This is really the job of the Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, because the other important news medium in Philly, the television news stations, are in the business of presenting stories which happen right away, stories which have a strong visual component. Only newspapers have the capacity to dig more deeply, to present more information than people can get from a thirty-second story on WPVI-TV; that’s just the nature of the different media forms. And with the switch to a mostly digital format, newspapers are no longer stuck with assigned story length, save in the actual print editions.

Who was the unidentified 21-year-old man killed in Fairhill? Why was he killed? What family were left to mourn his passing? The Inky may, may! delve into the story of the 14-year-old (alleged) shooter in the Mill Creek Rec Center gun battle, perhaps telling us about the other (alleged) members of the gangs which fought it out, though that story might just be too politically incorrect for publication.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
Posted on by

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.
Posted on by

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.
Posted on by

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.