Tag Archives: #MediaBias

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The Patricians are just different from us! CNN's disgraced and fired President to get $10 million payoff to keep his mouth shut

The Patricians just aren’t like you and me. If you get canned for some reason — I’m retired now, so I’m beyond the ability of anyone to fire — you might, might! be able able to get a few hundred bucks a week in unemployment benefits. If you are terminated for cause, such as an inappropriate sexual relationship with a subordinate, something which could expose your company to a sexual harassment claim, you might not be able to get even unemployment compensation.

But life is different for the elites. From Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion:

Former CNN Chief Jeff Zucker to Get $10 Million Settlement, Agrees Not to Sue

“if WarnerMedia keeps their side of the deal, in the next week to 10 days, Zucker will receive a one-time payment of around $10 million”

Posted by Mike LaChance | Thursday, March 10, 2022 | 1:00 PM EST

CNN’s former president Jeff Zucker is getting a major golden parachute from his former employer, with the agreement not to sue them.

It’s a pretty good deal for a man who basically destroyed the network’s ratings and brand.

FOX News reports:

Ex-CNN chief Jeff Zucker to receive roughly $10 million from WarnerMedia, won’t sue: report

Former CNN boss Jeff Zucker has reportedly agreed to a deal with CNN parent company WarnerMedia over his swift exit from the network that will award him roughly $10 million in exchange for not suing after being forced to resign last month.

“Details of the confidential package are obviously being kept close to the vest, but sources tell us Zucker made the decision several weeks ago to accept what had been put on the table by his old bosses at the time of his cable news exit. What we do know is that, if WarnerMedia keeps their side of the deal, in the next week to 10 days, Zucker will receive a one-time payment of around $10 million,” Deadline’s Dominic Patten and Ted Johnson wrote, citing “sources.”

It seems that Mr Zucker’s girlfriend, who was not initially fired forced to resign, but quit a couple of weeks later, is also getting a golden parachute of a cool million.

As we have noted previously, Mr Zucker had a net worth of $60 million, plus an annual base salary of $6.3 million, before any bonuses — and how he could ever qualify for a bonus the way CNN’s ratings tanked is beyond me, but he certainly did get them — and Miss Gollust wasn’t exactly living paycheck-to-paycheck herself, with an estimated net worth of $5 million.

It seems that CNN has some dirty laundry the network wants desperately to keep out of the public’s sight. Given that the relationship between the two has been reported, by multiple sources, as an “open secret,” it has to be asked why CNN forced them out over that, rather than the ratings disaster the network had become.

Remember: the excuse for the resignation given was that Mr Zucker and Miss Gollust, both of whom are divorced, failed to report the relationship. But the head of human resources for CNN, Lisa Greene, is also an Executive Vice President, as was Miss Gollust, and the idea that someone who hobnobs with the network’s top brass didn’t know the “open secret” everyone else did is pretty difficult to swallow.

So, what does Mr Zucker know that CNN is so desperate to keep quiet?

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The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to get a police officer killed! If the officer is injured or killed, his blood will be on the hands of Gabriel Escobar and Elizabeth Hughes

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, who has presided over an ever-increasing homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love, had promised an impartial investigation into the shooting death of 12-year-old Thomas “TJ” Siderio, who shot at police officers, then turned and fled, with a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol in his hand, when he was shot and killed. About the only thing not clear was whether young Mr Siderio had tried to ditch his weapon “moments before a fatal bullet struck him in the back”.

The Commissioner has now announced that the officer will be fired.

The Philly police officer who fatally shot a 12-year-old boy will be fired, Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said

Outlaw declined to identify the officer, citing potential threats to the officer’s safety.

by Chris Palmer, Max Marin, and Rodrigo Torrejón | Tuesday, March 8, 2022

The Philadelphia police officer who fatally shot a 12-year-old boy in the back last week will be fired, Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said Tuesday.

Outlaw said the officer will be suspended for 30 days with intent to dismiss, the process by which officers are typically removed from the force.

So much for that fair and impartial investigation! Of course, the appropriately-named Commissioner Outlaw is really just Mayor Jim Kenney’s stooge, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that she was just following orders. If the police officers union decided on a job action over this, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

But here’s where The Philadelphia Inquirer really messes up!

She declined to identify the officer, citing potential threats to his safety. But police sources with direct knowledge of the investigation said the officer was Edsaul Mendoza, a five-year veteran assigned to a task force in South Philadelphia. Attempts to reach him for comment Tuesday were unsuccessful, and the police officers’ union representing him declined to comment.

So, the Commissioner at least attempted to keep the officer’s name private, due to threats to his safety, threats on his life, but the Inquirer investigates, determines who the officer is, and then publishes his name!

If Gabriel Escobar, Senior Vice President and Executive Editor of the Inquirer, and Elizabeth Hughes, the Publisher and Chief Executive Officer, wanted to get the officer targeted and killed, what would they have done differently? And does anybody believe that the article authors, Chris Palmer, Max Marin, and Rodrigo Torrejón, would have included his name if Mr Escobar had not approved?

Steve Keeley of Fox29 news reported on a triple murder in the West Oak Lane neighborhood, and included the press release from the Philadelphia Police Department. The press release identified the victims as three “black males.”

Yet, when the Inquirer reported on it, writer Jenn Ladd, though she took the descriptions of the victims’ injuries almost verbatim from the police report, eliminated the fact that the victims were black. The “anti-racist” Inquirer once again censored the news Miss Hughes and Mr Escobar don’t want the public to know!

The Inquirer enjoys absolute freedom of the press, as it should. Perhaps Miss Hughes and Mr Escobar believe that revealing the accused officer’s name falls under the notion of the public’s “right to know.” But given the newspaper’s nearly everyday censorship of crime stories — Miss Hughes stated, directly, that the paper was “Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime,” — it would seem that the Inquirer is not nearly so concerned with the public’s “right to know” if it’s not information the publisher and executive editor want people to know.

Of course, a triple, clearly targeted fatal shooting in West Oak Lane? Everybody who knows anything about the city knew that the victims were black! By self-censoring that detail, the newspaper was inviting readers to guess, to speculate, and we all know what their guesses and speculations would be.

When it came to the officer’s name, however, most of the public couldn’t guess . . . and the Inquirer made sure that it wasn’t necessary to guess.

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.

If the officer named is assaulted, if he is shot and wounded or even killed, his blood will be on the hands of Gabriel Escobar and Elizabeth Hughes.

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For The New York Times, some news is just not fit to print!

From the Encyclopedia Britannica:

    On August 18, 1896, (Adolph Simon) Ochs acquired control of the financially faltering New York Times, again with borrowed money ($75,000). To set his paper apart from its more sensational competitors, Ochs adopted the slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print” (first used October 25, 1896) and insisted on reportage that lived up to that promise. Despite an early shortage of capital, he refused advertisements that he considered dishonest or in poor taste. In 1898, when sales were low and expenses unusually high, he probably saved The New York Times by cutting its price from three cents to one cent. He thereby attracted many readers who previously had bought the more sensational penny papers, especially the New York World and the Journal. By 1900 Ochs was able to purchase a controlling interest in The New York Times.

In its long and august history, the Times, through many editors and publishers, was our newspaper of record, printing many things that the government opposed, and winning its right to publish the so-called Pentagon Papers, despite the attempt by the Nixon Administration to prohibit such.

But now? The Times reported on the stabbing murder of Columbia University graduate student Davide Giri, but left out a lot of detail.

    Columbia University Student Dies in Stabbing Near Campus

    The graduate student, Davide Giri, was fatally stabbed near the Manhattan campus on Thursday night. A man has been arrested and charged with murder, the police said.

    By Troy Closson and Lola Fadulu | Friday, December 3, 2021

    A graduate student at Columbia University died and another man was wounded after the two were stabbed in Upper Manhattan on Thursday night, the police and college officials said.

    The student, Davide Giri, was traveling home from soccer practice just before 11 p.m. when he was stabbed in the abdomen about two blocks from his apartment building, the police and friends said. He was taken to an area hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

    The police arrested Vincent Pinkney, 25, of Manhattan, in the attacks and charged him on Friday with murder, attempted murder, assault, attempted assault and three counts of criminal possession of a weapon. He had been found in Central Park, and the police said that he had been menacing a third man with a knife.

    In a campuswide letter sent on Friday morning, Lee C. Bollinger, the university’s president, identified Mr. Giri, 30, as a student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and expressed sadness over his death.

There’s more at the original, telling us about the victim, and noting that a similar killing had occurred just a few blocks away, when Tessa Majors, a student at Bernard College, was killed during a robbery.

What you won’t find in the original are any details about the (alleged) assailant, Vincent Pinkney. For those, you have to go across the pond, to London’s Daily Mail:

    Gang member, 25, charged in fatal Manhattan stabbing spree that killed Columbia student and wounded Italian tourist has been arrested 11 times since 2012 and was on parole for gang attack

    • Alleged killer Vincent Pinkney, 25, has a lengthy rap sheet and 11 arrests on robbery, assault and other charges
    • He is accused of stabbing a Columbia grad student to death and wounding tourist in mad crime spree
    • Davide Giri, 30, a PhD candidate in computer science at Columbia University, was stabbed to death
    • Italian tourist, Robert Malastina, 27, was wounded in Central Park just 15 minutes after the murder
    • Pinkney was arrested after threatening another man, 29, who was walking in the park with his girlfriend
    • Police said Pinkney, who was out on parole, had 11 prior arrests dating back to 2012
    • The fatal stabbing took place just a block from where Bernard College student Tessa Majors was killed in 2019
    • NYC murders have shot up by 42 per cent since 2019, and overall crime this year is up by more than 3 per cent

    By Keith Griffith and Ronny Reyes | Published: 1:00 EST, 4 December 2021 | Updated: 01:29 EST, 4 December 2021

    The suspect accused of killing a Columbia University grad student and stabbing an Italian tourist in a demented Manhattan crime spree is a career criminal who was out on parole for a gang attack, it has been revealed.

    Vincent Pinkney, 25, was escorted into NPYD Central Booking on Friday night, as hundreds gathered on the South Lawn of Columbia in a vigil for Davide Giri, a PhD candidate in computer science.

    Giri, 30, died around 11pm on Thursday after police say he was stabbed in the stomach by Pinkney, who allegedly went on to wound an Italian tourist, Robert Malastina, 27, outside Central Park before ‘menacing’ another man, 29, with a large kitchen knife as the victim strolled the park with his girlfriend.

    Pinkney is a member of Bloods gang off-shoot, Everybody Killas, who has at least 11 prior arrests dating back to 2012 and was out on parole for a 2015 gang assault, police said.

    He was released from prison in June 2018 after serving a four-year sentence for a brutal attack in which he and three accomplices slashed, punched and kicked a victim in an assault that was caught on camera, according to the New York Post.

    On Friday night, Pinkney was transferred from the 26 Precinct to Central Booking, wearing a white Tyvek jumpsuit.

    The five-foot-five, 140-pound suspect was escorted in handcuffs by two burly NYPD detectives.

    Meanwhile, shocked Columbia students gathered on the school’s central quad for a candlelight vigil honoring Giri a sixth-year doctoral student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

That video of Mr Pinkney’s arrest tells you all that you need to know about why The New York Times found the details about the (alleged) killer not to be news which is fit to print. For the journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading in the Times’ newsroom, the ones who forced out liberal columnist Bari Weiss because she just wasn’t #woke enough, the fact that a young, black gang member (allegedly) stabbed to death a white PhD candidate in computer science at an Ivy League college just does not fit Teh Narrative. The leftists who decry ‘mass incarceration’ just can’t deal with the fact that Mr Pinkney should not have been able to stab Mr Giri, because he should have still been behind bars on Thursday night.

I’ve said it before: the problem isn’t mass incarceration, but that not enough people have been incarcerated, for not enough time.

As far as Mr Pinkney is concerned, a 5’5″, 140 lb pipsqueak punk, who (allegedly) proved what a big man he is, he’s looking at spending the rest of his miserable life in prison. If he had been treated more strictly by the state of New York for his past offenses, if he had been given longer sentences for past crimes and still been behind bars last Thursday night, he would still be looking forward to getting out of prison at some point in the future. Yeah, he was stupid Thursday night, almost surely is congenitally stupid, and it would not surprise me if we found out that he was drunk or stoned, but I come around to the fact that those who treated him so leniently in the past — remember: he has eleven previous arrests on his rap sheet — did him no favors.

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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#MaskMandates and fewer fans in the stands Maybe if the Lexington Herald-Leader told the unshaded truth, the newspaper would have more subscribers

If there is one thing that keeps the Lexington Herald-Leader in business, it is the newspaper’s reporting on University of Kentucky sports. In our poor state, UK’s men’s basketball team has been a source of pride for decades, winning eight NCAA championships, the first in 1948. Rupp Arena, where the Wildcats play, was once the nation’s largest basketball venue.

Crowds were extremely limited last season, due to COVID-19 restrictions, and the team had an unexpectedly poor season. This year, with some veteran players returning, along with some experienced transfers and top freshmen, much is expected of the Wildcats.

The Herald-Leader has now noted that attendance has been unexpectedly low:

    Empty seats in Rupp Arena are sending UK a message. Is anyone listening?

    by Mark Story | November 15, 2021 | 4:14 PM EST

    One of the pressing questions this year as America’s mass-spectator sports moved out of 2020’s pandemic-inspired attendance restrictions is whether the crowds were going to come back en masse to the ballgames?

    Locally, University of Kentucky football fans have answered with an emphatic yes.

    In the 61,000-seat Kroger Field, UK sold out three of its four home Southeastern Conference games this fall — Florida (announced attendance of 61,632), LSU (61,690), Tennessee (61,690) — and just missed on its fourth vs. Missouri (58,537).

Skipping further down was the impetus for the story:

    While the sample size is small, attendance has so far this season been soft for UK basketball games in Rupp Arena at Central Bank Center.

    For the Wildcats’ 2021-22 exhibition opener against Kentucky Wesleyan, the announced attendance in Rupp — the number of tickets distributed to the event — was 17,133 in the 20,545-seat venue.

    The figure for the second exhibition, against Miles College, was 17,814.

You can follow the link to read the rest for yourself.

Mark Story, one of the newspaper’s sportswriters, suggested that part of the reason was worry over the COVID-19 panicdemic. But, in the end, he said that it was his guess that paying customers were disappointed in the cupcakes UK was playing in the early part of the season, and that we’d see something different when the hated University of Louisville Cardinals come to town on December 22nd.

But it was this photo, accompanying the article, which caught my attention. If I counted correctly, there are 38 fans depicted whose faces can be seen clearly, and only 17 cam be seen wearing face masks correctly. Several others can be seen with masks below noses, below chins, at least one with a mask hanging down from one ear, and others with no masks visible at all. Yet UK mandates the wearing of facemasks at all indoor sporting events:

    Among the policies, fans will be required to wear a face mask as they watch the game and move around Rupp Arena, regardless of vaccination status. The policy also applies to staff and vendors.

We have reported, more than once, that despite individual venues requiring the wearing of face masks, those ‘requirements’ are being honored in the breach. Just yesterday, at the Kroger on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky, despite this sign being posted by the interior door of the vestibule, requiring masks of all customers, around half, and possible more, of the customers were not wearing masks. Another sign, outside the exterior doors, said “Masks strongly encouraged for fully vaccinated individuals,” meaning that the signs were inconsistent with each other, but there was, of course, no attempt made that I saw, or have ever seen, to enforce either sign.

Kentuckians just don’t like those masks!

Mr Story’s story? While he mentioned the COVID-19 panicdemic possibly having something to do with lowered attendance, he never wrote the first word about the mask mandate potentially contributing to fewer fans in the stands.

This is just poor journalism, or typical journolism,[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 from the Herald-Leader. To have mentioned that the mask mandate might have possibly caused lower attendance would have wholly violated the paper’s editorial stand in favor of masks. Whether Mr Story actually mentioned it, and an editor removed it, or he simply ignored it due to what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal’s editorial stand, I do not know, but the newspaper is not telling the whole truth to its readers.

Media bias does not normally come in the form of outright lies to readers. Rather, it is far more likely to come from the choices of what facts to report, and what facts to conceal. In this case, the Herald-Leader omitted a major potential cause in reduced attendance, when that major potential cause contradicted its editorial stance. Perhaps Mr Story sneaked that in, with the photo chosen to illustrate the article, but no mention of the mask mandate was made in the story; the source I used to note the mandate came from WLEX-TV.

Newspapers are suffering from reduced readership all across the country; maybe if they told readers the unvarnished truth, they’d have more subscribers.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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A few real journalists challenge the #woke journolism of the credentialed media

Bari Weiss is not a conservative; she’s very liberal in her politics, though just plain not #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 enough for the young wokes in The New York Times newsroom. Glenn Greenwald is not a conservative; he’s very much on the political left as far as an American would be defined, though he now lives in Brazil. And Andrew Sullivan is hardly a conservative, either.

But these three journalists have one thing in common: they stand for freedom of speech and accuracy in journalism!

    When All The Media Narratives Collapse

    In case after case, the US MSM just keeps getting it wrong.

    by Andrew Sullivan | Friday, November 12, 2021

    The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.

    But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.

    And these mass deceptions have consequences. We are seeing this now in the Rittenhouse case — a gruesome story of a reckless teen with a rifle in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. The impression many got from much of the media was that a far-right vigilante, in the middle of race riots, had gone looking for trouble far from home and injured one man, and killed two, in a shooting spree.

    Here’s the NYT on August 26, the morning after the killings: “The authorities were investigating whether the white teenager who was arrested … was part of a vigilante group. His social media accounts appeared to show an intense affinity for guns, law enforcement and President Trump.” Rittenhouse’s race is specified; the race of the men he killed and injured were not (they were also white).

    Almost immediately, the complicated facts became unimportant. The far right viewed Rittenhouse as a hero — which he surely wasn’t. He had no business being there with an AR-15. The MSM and far left viewed him as a villain, appalled that he was being elevated, in Jamelle Bouie’s words, “as a symbol of self-defense.”[2]I have my own criticism of Mr Bouie’s work here. (Another NYT article, painting Rittenhouse as a MAGA fanatic, did note at the very bottom of the page: “Supporters of Mr. Rittenhouse said he was being attacked by the mob and acted in legitimate self-defense.” So they did have a caveat.)

    But notice how the narrative — embedded in a deeper one that the Blake shooting was just as clear-cut as the Floyd murder, that thousands of black men were being gunned down by cops every year, and that “white supremacy” was rampant in every cranny of America — effectively excluded the possibility that Rittenhouse was a naive, dangerous fool in the midst of indefensible mayhem, who, in the end, shot assailants in self-defense. And so when, this week, one of Rittenhouse’s pursuers, Gaige Grosskreutz, admitted on the stand that Rittenhouse shot him only after Grosskreutz pointed his pistol directly at Rittenhouse’s head a few feet away, it came as a shock.

There’s much more at the original, and I absolutely encourage reading it. Mr Sullivan goes into many examples of recent journalistic ‘errors,’ and notes what we wicked reich wing conservatives have been saying for years now: the mistakes the credentialed media make all seem to be on one direction, the direction which feeds into the narrative of the American political left, of the American Democratic Party.

Was Kyle Rittenhouse “a naive, dangerous fool in the midst of indefensible mayhem, who, in the end, shot assailants in self-defense”? While I have never called him a “naïve, dangerous fool,” I have said, “Young Mr Rittenhouse helped to create the situation by traveling to Kenosha and appearing on the scene with a firearm. That does not mean it wasn’t self-defense; it seems pretty clear that it was. But he should never have gone there, certainly not armed.”

    We all get things wrong. What makes this more worrying is simply that all these false narratives just happen to favor the interests of the left and the Democratic party. And corrections, when they occur, take up a fraction of the space of the original falsehoods. These are not randos tweeting false rumors. They are the established press.

The trial of Mr Rittenhouse reminds me of that of George Zimmerman. Mr Zimmerman should never have followed Trayvon Martin, and certainly should have backed off when dispatchers told him to do so, but that did not give Mr Martin the right to assault him. Local law enforcement knew that Mr Zimmerman’s actions were legal self-defense, but political pressure pushed the state of Florida to appoint a special counsel and prosecute him anyway. It was really no surprise that Mr Zimmerman was acquitted, because the state had no case. The left waxed wroth, but they’d had their trial, and the jury exonerated Mr Zimmerman. Prosecutors in Kenosha surely knew, unless they are just boneheadedly stupid, that they didn’t have much of a case, but my guess — and it really is a guess — is that they were unwilling to take the political heat for dropping the charges against the defendant; they’re leaving it up to a (supposedly) anonymous jury.

But, as Mr Sullivan noted, the liberals in the credentialed media — even ones who masturbate during Zoom meetings — can’t escape their own narrative that he simply must be guilty!

This is why I have so often referred to ‘journolists’ as opposed to journalists. 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 have noted, many times, how publisher Elizabeth Hughes has openly admitted that her goal is to filter reporting, filter (supposedly) straight news stories, in The Philadelphia Inquirer through a political sieve, rather than report the unvarnished facts.

Newspapers can, and should, have editorial and OpEd sections; with word count and column inch limits having been mostly replaced by nearly unlimited bandwidth, there should be more, not less, of such sections. The credentialed media ought to be perfectly free to engage in expressions of opinion. But for the credentialed media to regain lost credibility, they need to report the news as straight news, and not report opinion as fact.

That’s the difference between journalism and journolism.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

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

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

↑2 I have my own criticism of Mr Bouie’s work here.
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How does a lie become the truth?

Well, maybe I got it wrong. Maybe when I said that the credentialed media don’t (usually) print out-and-out lies, but show their bias in their editorial decisions about what stories to cover, and what to ignore, I was forgetting The Philadelphia Inquirer.

We had previously noted the shooting death of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes, who was sitting in a parked, and possibly disabled, Chrysler PT Cruiser, with five other people, including other students assigned to E W Rhodes School, just after 9:00 AM on Friday, October 8, 2021, at the intersection of North Judson and West Clearfield Streets in North Philadelphia. The Rhodes Elementary School website notes that “All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.”

I pointed out to the Inquirer, and to reporter Anna Orso specifically, that young Mr Stokes was clearly not on his way to school, not if he was sitting in a parked car many blocks away; Miss Orso didn’t like it, but the fact that she responded means that she saw the notification.

People at the Inquirer know that young Mr Stokes was not on his way to class that day. But the lie was repeated again, on Thursday:

    Philly schools will pay community members to keep kids safe on their way to and from school amid gun violence crisis

    “There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not outraged by the acts of violence going on throughout the city of Philadelphia,” said Superintendent William R. Hite Jr.

    by Kristen A. Graham | Thursday, October 28, 2021

    The Philadelphia School District will spend close to a million dollars over the next three years to station members of the community in targeted communities in an effort to keep children safe on their way to and from schools.

    Based on a Chicago program, Philadelphia’s plan will start at four high schools: Lincoln, Motivation, Sayre and Roxborough, and expand to others. The “Safe Path” program will pay trusted community members and equip them with radios and bright, reflective vests to serve as eyes and ears — not to take physical action against anyone armed with a gun. Kevin Bethel, the district’s chief of school safety, said he wants Safe Path operational before the end of the school year.

    “I can no longer sit back and wait for volunteers while I see in some of our corridors the issues we’re having,” Bethel said. Details on what the groups will be paid and how they can apply will be shared soon, he said.

    The news comes amid a gun violence crisis that has affected schools across the city. This month, a shooting outside Lincoln just after dismissal killed a 66-year-old and gravely wounded a 16-year-old, and a 13-year-old seventh grader was killed on his way to classes at Rhodes Elementary.

There’s more at the original, but there it is, the claim that the “13-year-old seventh grader” was “on his way to classes,” and the embedded link goes to Miss Orso’s very sympathetic story about young Mr Stokes.

That’s not just a lie, but it is a deliberate lie.

Let’s face it: The First Street Journal doesn’t reach many people, far, far, far fewer than the Inquirer, and the continued pushing by that #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, “anti-racist” newspaper is going to keep on and keep on reporting something that they know isn’t true until it becomes the ‘truth.’

But, let me give credit where credit is due, to Miss Orso. She may not have liked what I wrote, but in her next article on the subject, she got it right:

    Philadelphia police are searching for a man wanted in the shooting of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes

    Police say Shafeeq Lewis, 29, of North Philadelphia, fired a dozen shots into a parked car, killing the boy who was just blocks from his school.

    by Anna Orso | October 27, 2021

    Shafeeq Lewis, photo by Philadelphia Police Department.

    Philadelphia police are searching for a 29-year-old man who they say fatally shot a 13-year-old boy just blocks away from his school earlier this month, officials said Wednesday.

    Authorities say Shafeeq Lewis, of North Philadelphia, fired a dozen shots into a car that was parked on the 3100 block of North Judson Street about 9 a.m. on Oct. 8. Six young people were sitting in the vehicle and police said one of the shots struck 13-year-old Marcus Stokes in the chest. He was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he died of his injuries.

    Detectives obtained surveillance footage capturing the sound of gunshots, then a man dressed in dark clothing running from the scene. Deputy Police Commissioner Ben Naish said investigators believe Lewis was the man fleeing, and they obtained an arrest warrant on murder charges last week.

    Lewis remains at large, and investigators have not determined a motive.

There’s more at the original, but “just blocks from his school” is an accurate statement. I would like to think that my oh-so-mean tweets caused Miss Orso to look at how she was writing things, but I really have no idea.

I placed the mugshot of Shafeeq Lewis in the body of the Miss Orso’s article, but that picture was not on the Inquirer’s website. Rather, it was in this story from Channel 10, the NBC owned-and-operated affiliate in the City of Brotherly Love. Mr Lewis has several distinctive tattoos on his neck and face, and it’s obvious from the fact that the Philadelphia Police already had mugshots of Mr Lewis that he had come to their attention previously.

The Channel 10 story states that all of the people in the vehicle were minors, and were wounded.

So, what were the six kids doing in that car? Smoking pot? Handsy sex? Discussing the prospects for the Eagles or 76ers? None of the stories in the Philadelphia media have told us that, nor have the police released any suspected motive for the shooting, nor does anyone know if Mr Stokes, individually, was the (alleged) gunman’s target.

The Inquirer likes human interest stories, and when someone is murdered in the city, if the victim is an ‘innocent,’ the paper just loves that! But, as brilliant as I am, as careful a reader as I am, I doubt that I’m the only one who noticed that the initial stories on the shooting didn’t quite match up with the facts.

Perhaps I was wrong; perhaps Miss Orso didn’t share with others in the newsroom the issue I raised, and that’s why Kristen Graham, the reporter for the first cited story didn’t think twice about writing that young Mr Stokes was simply on his way to school. But I suspect that if the newspaper is trying to make out Mr Stokes as a completely innocent victim of “gun violence,” it might not work.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

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

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

This is how media bias works! The credentialed media don't have to lie; they can simply not report the truth.

Although anyone can make a mistake, The New York Times doesn’t normally print out-and-out lies; that’s rarely how #FakeNews works. Rather, it’s the editorial decisions taken by the credentialed media which expose media bias.

Trash is piling up in NYC and sanitation workers blame de Blasio’s vaccine mandate

By Larry Celona, Julia Marsh, Kevin Sheehan and Bruce Golding | October 27, 2021 | 7:22 PM EDT

These city employees think Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vaccine mandate is pure garbage — and they should know!

Sanitation workers outraged over the order to get inoculated against COVID-19 are letting trash pile up across Staten Island and in parts of Brooklyn — and the head of their union said Wednesday that he’s on their side.

The protesting workers are engaging in a rule-book slowdown that includes returning to their garages for things like gloves or gas so collections don’t get finished, sources said.

Supervisors have even been warned to guard the garages this weekend to prevent trucks from getting vandalized, sources said.

When asked what was going on, Teamsters Local 831 President Harry Nespoli, whose union represents the sanitation workers, shot back, “The mandate’s going on.”

“Look, you’re going to have some spots in the city that they feel very strongly about this,” he said.

Nespoli added: “I’ll tell you straight out: I disagree with the mandate because of one reason. We have a program in place right now in the department, which is, you get the vaccination or you get tested once a week.”

There’s more at the original, including several photos of trash piled up on city streets. When the story mentioned that the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn was one of the areas afflicted, I think they should have shot a pic in front of 8070 Harbor View Terrace in Bay Ridge, the house exterior used in Blue Bloods as fictional Police Commissioner Frank Reagan’s house, but I digress.

The cited story above is not from the Times, but the New York Post. The Times founded in 1851, has long been considered our nation’s number one newspaper, and, along with The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal, one of the four newspapers of record in the United States. The New York Post is actually older, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton.

So, what’s so special about the Post article cited above? A fairly major New York City story, yet there isn’t a single story about the garbagemen’s slowdown on either in the Times’ New York section or website main page. Hugely important stories, like New York Has a New Band of Buzzy Post-Punk Teens: Geese and 5 Things to Do This Weekend, are there, but a major slowdown by sanitation workers, leaving the garbage piled high in Staten Island and Brooklyn? Nope, not in the Grey Lady!

Site queries for sanitation, garbage and trash all failed to find a single Times story on the slowdown.[1]Research for this was done between 2:20 and 2:24 PM EDT on Thursday, October 28, 2021, and the statements were accurate as of that time. There was one story about the potential disruptions due to the vaccine mandate:

    New York plans for shortages of police officers and firefighters as its vaccination deadline nears.

    By Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Troy Closson and Dana Rubinstein | October 28, 2021 | Updated 1:59 PM EDT

    Officials in New York City are bracing for staffing shortages, overhauling schedules and making contingency plans amid fears that thousands of police officers and firefighters could stay home when the vaccine mandate for city workers takes effect on Monday.

    The mandate, set by Mayor Bill de Blasio, requires city workers to get at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccine or go on unpaid leave. But workers at some city agencies have resisted getting vaccinated.

    About 65 percent of Fire Department workers and 75 percent of Police Department employees had reported receiving at least one dose of a vaccine by Wednesday, city officials said.

    Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat in his second term, predicted on Thursday that many city workers would get a shot at the last minute. He said New Yorkers would be safe and city agencies would weather the storm if some employees do not show up for work because of the mandate. . . . .

    Hundreds of protesters appeared outside Gracie Mansion on Thursday morning to oppose the vaccine mandate. Many wore sweatshirts and shirts bearing Fire Department engine and ladder company numbers from across the city. Union leaders at the demonstration led chants of “Hold the line!” and warned that New Yorkers would be endangered if unvaccinated firefighters and paramedics were sent home.

    The city’s largest police union warned on Wednesday — after a state judge denied their request for an injunction against the mandate — that the city was facing a “real crisis” and that New Yorkers should blame Mr. de Blasio for “any shortfall in city services.”

    The mandate, the union said, “not only violates police officers’ rights — it will inevitably result in fewer cops available to protect our city.”

There’s more at the original, including the Fire Department planning for a 20% shortage in ambulances and closure of about a fifth of the city’s fire stations.

The ‘slowdown’ by sanitation workers was not mentioned in the story.

The possible loss of police and firemen by the city still lays in the future; the sanitation slowdown over the Mayor’s vaccine mandate is already happening. And while police and firemen are certainly important, piles of garbage already laying on the sidewalks impacts far more New Yorkers than most other city services. 389 murders in the city, through October 24th — 15.68% fewer than Philadelphia’s 450 on the same date, even though NYC has 5¼ times Philly’s population — are certainly serious, but still relatively few people in the city have serious dealings with the police or firemen, while not getting the garbage picked up affects everyone.

And it wasn’t just one day; the Post noted that, at least in the Dongan Hills neighborhood of Staten Island, garbage collection was missed on both Saturday the 23rd and Wednesday the 27th.

But, for The New York Times, it just wasn’t news that was fit to print.

That is how media bias works! The Times wasn’t lying to anybody, but simply not saying anything about a major problem in the Big Apple. Sanitation workers in parts of the city, almost certainly including the vaccinated as well as the unvaccinated, are putting pressure on the city in a way that, if it spreads, every New Yorker will feel, and that’s the kind of pressure which can really force Bill de Blasio to back down.

References

References
↑1 Research for this was done between 2:20 and 2:24 PM EDT on Thursday, October 28, 2021, and the statements were accurate as of that time.
Posted on by

The whole truth doesn’t interest newspapers these days

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

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

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

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

Naturally, the journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading at a politically correct newspaper like the Lexington Herald-Leader won’t tell its readers this!

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

    Publishing these photographs and videos disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

Further down:

    And the San Francisco Police Department earlier this month announced it will no longer release mugshots, unless the public is in imminent danger.

    “This policy emerges from compelling research suggesting that the widespread publication of police booking photos in the news and on social media creates an illusory correlation for viewers that fosters racial bias and vastly overstates the propensity of Black and brown men to engage in criminal behavior,” Police Chief William Scott said in a statement.

Perhaps that correlation is not so illusory!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
Posted on by

A stunning lack of perspective

Well, perhaps not that stunning after all.

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

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

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

    by Jenice Armstrong | Monday, October 11, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now there’s this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——————————

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

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

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

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

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

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

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

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