Tag Archives: #MediaBias

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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.
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Isn’t this interesting?

Screen capture from The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 30, 2022. Click to enlarge.

The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t print mugshots of people accused or rape and murder, but they made an exception for a cute white girl.

Kathleen Kane was Pennsylvania’s Attorney General from 2013 to 2016, when she was forced to resign. She won election after a campaign in which she accused Governor Tom Corbett (R-PA), a former state Attorney General, of dragging his feet in building up the child sexual abuse case against former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, stating that more boys could have been raped due to Mr Corbett’s slow process; Mrs Kane was never able to find such a victim.

The case Mr Corbett and his successors built was almost air-tight, and Mr Sandusky was convicted, and sentenced to 30 to 60 years behind bars, which is tantamount to a life sentence for someone of his age.

Former State Attorney General Kathleen Kane was jailed again to await a hearing on a DUI arrest

Kane previously served eight months behind bars for her attacks on a rival.

by Craig R McCoy | Friday, April 29, 2022 | 4:36 PM EDT

Former Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane was jailed Friday for violating her probation on a perjury conviction with her arrest last month on a DUI charge.

Kane, 55, turned herself in Friday morning after Montgomery County Judge Wendy Demchick-Alloy issued a warrant for her arrest for violating her probation. The judge had previously sentenced Kane to prison after presiding over the 2016 perjury case that cut short Kane’s meteoric political career.

Kane will stay behind bars until a hearing on the probation violation, unless her lawyer can win an earlier release. No date has been set for the hearing, at which the judge could which revoke Kane’s probation and keep her in jail, order her to get alcohol treatment, or impose no further penalty.

The state’s former top prosecutor was released on five years’ probation in the summer of 2019 after serving eight months for the perjury conviction at the Montgomery County jail in Eagleville, where she is now being held again.

There’s more at the original.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Back where she belongs

The story isn’t really that interesting, and I would probably not have mentioned it, other than the Inquirer’s hypocrisy. The newspaper declined to print the publicly available mugshot of previously convicted felon Quintez Adams, accused of raping a woman on a SEPTA train, something most people would thing a far more serious crime than a DUI, but was perfectly willing to splash Mrs Kane’s mugshot across the internet, not only in the digital version of the story, but on Twitter as well.

Yes, Mrs Kane used to be a public figure, but she’s now just a convicted felon, with no public role, and hasn’t had a public role since she resigned as Attorney General six years ago. She does not live in Philly, but well up the Northeast Extension in Scranton. Following her conviction, the state Supreme Court disbarred Mrs Kane, so she’s no longer an attorney.

So, why publish Mrs Kane’s mugshot, but not the mugshots of the criminals apprehended and charged in the City of Brotherly Love? It couldn’t possibly be because most of the criminals in Philly are black, while Mrs Kane is a pretty white woman, could it?

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Freedom of Speech and the Special Snowflakes™

Donald Trump used to call the credentialed media #FakeNews, but even he never set up a ‘Disinformation Governance Board‘, nor picked someone like Nina Jankowicz, who for months told us that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation, to head it.

On April 25th, she told us how she feels about #FreedomOfSpeech:

Not to worry, she got the word out to the leftists and Special Snowflakes™ in the credentialed media: Continue reading →

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The ‘journolism’ of The Philadelphia Inquirer The newspaper, which hates guns, tries to undermine the Philadelphia Police units trying to catch people illegally possessing weapons

No, that isn’t a typo in the headline: the spelling ‘journolism’ or sometimes ‘journolist’, comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

Thomas J Siderio, Jr, in a photograph dated 2018, from The Philadelphia Inquirer Click to enlarge.

We have previously noted the killing of 12-year-old Thomas J Siderio, Jr, after he took a shot at the police, and The Philadelphia Inquirer’s attempts to drum up sympathy for a wannabe gang-banger with parents who are criminals. We have pointed out that while the Philadelphia Police Department wanted to keep the name of the officer who shot young Mr Siderio confidential, for the officer’s safety, the Inquirer dug in, found out the officer’s name, and published it, in what I can only believe is an attempt to get the officer killed. The Inquirer’s Editorial Board had already opined that the killing of a young, gun-toting punk who opened fire on police young Mr Siderio should “should make every Philadelphian outraged.” I guess that outrage means that the Inquirer ought to put a target on the officer, to try to get him killed, because that’s exactly what they have done. What apparently didn’t outrage the Editorial Board was the fact that a wannabe gang banger was carrying a weapon and took a shot at the police. Continue reading →