Tag Archives: #PhiladelphiaInquirer

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Killadelphia A trauma nurse laments over all of the bodies which are brought into her emergency room

As I do every weekday morning, I checked the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, and I saw that three more people had been sent untimely to their eternal rewards yesterday. 486 homicides ÷ 320 days elapsed = 1.51875 per day x 365 days = 554.34375 projected homicides for the year. With only 14 more killings needed to tie the record of 500, at the current rate that should happen in just 9 days, or on November 25th, which is Thanksgiving Day.

Philadelphia Inquirer writer Robert Moran reported, briefly, on one of the killings:

A 67-year-old woman was fatally shot during an attempted robbery inside a check-cashing store Tuesday afternoon in the city’s Ogontz section, police said.

About 1:10 p.m., the woman, who was believed to be the owner, was shot in the chest inside Any Checks Cashed at 5812 Old York Rd., which is next door to a day-care center. She was pronounced dead at the scene by medics.

That’s it, that’s all, a 67-year-old woman’s life, and death, reduced to two paragraphs. There were a couple more which told readers that the police had very little information thus far. The story had been superseded by others, and was not visible on the Inquirer’s website main page.

But it was this article, blurbed on that main page as “I wake up every day knowing that I will have to watch another Black man take his last breath. And over what?” that caught my attention, though the title, when I opened it, was different:

A trauma nurse’s letter to a Philly shooter | Opinion

I wish you would wait before you pick up that weapon. I wish you could come talk to me. I would’ve begged you not to do this.

by Ruqiyya Greer, For The Inquirer | Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Dear Gunman,

When the alarm goes off, I know that first responders are on the way with your target.

We stand outside, dressed in plastic gowns, gloves, and bonnets. We are sweating profusely as we wait for your target’s arrival. We hear the sirens from a distance. They get louder as they get closer. They race down the hill and come to an abrupt stop. We can smell the burning rubber of the tires. The door swings open and there lays your target, bloody and unconscious.

We struggle to pull his lifeless body, covered with bullet holes and blood, out of the car. It becomes a struggle to get him out as the moisture from the blood makes it difficult to get a tight grasp.

We get your target to the trauma bay as we empty several code carts full of medical supplies, injecting several lifesaving medications into his still body. Techs stand in line taking turns performing chest compressions. The trauma team cracks his chest open to manually compress his heart to keep what little blood he has left circulating.

After we have exhausted all measures, the attending doctor announces, “time of death.” The techs bag his cut-up clothes as well as his body. Two tags are applied, one to his big toe and the other to the outside of the body bag.

There’s more at the original, describing what Ruqiyya Greer, the author and a trauma nurse in the emergency room at Temple University Hospital, sees and feels, practically every day, on the job. And she points out what Mr Moran’s brief stories, the Inquirer in general,[1]We have noted previously Elizabeth Hughes, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and her determination to make her newspaper “an anti-racist news organization,” has turned it into exactly … Continue reading and the Police Department figures, obscure, because it’s inconvenient reporting: the vast majority of the homicide victims in the City of Brotherly Love are young black males, sometimes men, and sometimes still boys.[2]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 … Continue reading

She concluded:

There’s so many times I want to walk away, but if I do, I will be deserting my community and my culture. I can’t do that. But these days it feels like I am a nurse in the middle of a war. I wake up every day knowing that I will have to watch another Black man take his last breath. And over what?

Our ancestors fought for our freedom; they were murdered for our freedom. I don’t think they risked it all for us to murder each other.

Please, before you pick up that gun again, placing your life at risk, risking your freedom and ending another life, talk to whoever plays a significant role in your life. A parent, uncle, pastor. You are about to make the worst mistake of your life.

I really don’t like quoting so many paragraphs from an Inquirer article, but Miss Greer’s concluding point is important: she is asking the potential shooters out there — people who will almost certainly never read her ‘letter’ anyway — to think before they act.

But they don’t think, at least they don’t think about the act itself. Oh, they may well think, and plot, and plan about how they are going to get away with it, but seem to give little thought or care about what will happen if they do get caught, very possibly spending the rest of their miserable lives locked up.

Miss Greer has been far more honest than most. While so many Philadelphia politicians want to blame the guns, she noted the people who “pick(ed) up that gun,” the people who shot, and frequently killed, other people, most often members of their own communities.

References

References
↑1 We have noted previously Elizabeth Hughes, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and her determination to make her newspaper “an anti-racist news organization,” has turned it into exactly that, a newspaper more concerned with racial identity and sorting out its news coverage that way than it has been about the “public’s right to know.” The vast majority of homicide victims in Philadelphia are black, but when one black gang banger kills another black gang banger, it isn’t really news anymore, not to the Inquirer. Instead, the paper paid more attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s four separate stories; how many do the mostly black victims get?
↑2 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 38.3% of the city’s population. The current statistics for this year I have not been able to find.
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Another two bite the dust!

If I check the website of The Philadelphia Inquirer in the evening, I can sometimes — certainly not always — find brief stories about murder victims in the City of Brotherly Love:

2 women killed in North Philly shooting

The shooting occurred on the 1900 block of Ridge Avenue.

by Robert Moran | Thursday, November 4, 2021 | 8:10 PM EDT

Two unidentified women were fatally shot Thursday night in North Philadelphia, police said.

The shooting was reported shortly after 7:45 p.m. on the 1900 block of Ridge Avenue. Police arriving at the scene found two women inside a building that was first believed to be a church, but later described as a speakeasy.

The women were pronounced dead by medics at 7:52.

Police said the shooting scene appeared to be outside in front of the building, where they found spent shell casings.

That’s the entire story, and I’d bet euros to eclairs that I won’t be able to find it anywhere on the Inquirer’s website main page on Friday morning. But two more homicides brings the city’s total for 2021 up to at least 466.
——————————-
Updated: Friday, November 5, 2021

As I anticipated, the homicide total is 466, and no, there isn’t a single reference to the story concerning the homicide on the main page of the Inquirer’s website, even though the story was updated with more details at 9:39 AM this morning.

Black lives don’t matter in Philadelphia!

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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.
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Anna Orso does not like being questioned! The Philadelphia Inquirer sure isn't happy with its journalism being examined

I can be on the critical side when it comes to the professional journalists, but I believe it only proper to let those journalists know when they have been mentioned, and thus I included Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Anna Orso in a tweet when I examined her article in yesterday’s Inquirer. A screen capture of the tweet is to the right. While I can embed tweets in my articles, screen captures work better, because people can delete tweets.

Miss Orso did not particularly like my tweet, and responded, via Twitter, “get a life”. I responded:

    Oh, I have one. I examined your story, and the flaws were obvious. These were things that should have been asked and examined.

    You are a professional journalist; do some actual journalism.

I don’t know Miss Orso, never having met her, and no longer living in the Keystone State, the chances would seem to be vanishingly small that I ever will; there is no reason for me to have anything personal against her. All that I can see is her written words, and what I saw was a story with some real flaws in it.

The First Amendment to the Constitution protects our freedom of Speech and of the Press. Those freedom include, to be blunt about it, the freedom to lie, and the freedom to shade the truth. Most journalists do not actually lie, but when it comes to The Philadelphia Inquirer, “the third oldest surviving daily newspaper in the United States in its own right,” publisher Elizabeth Hughes has already told us that the Inquirer was taking many steps to become that “anti-racist news organization” she wanted it to be, including:

  • Producing an antiracism workflow guide for the newsroom that provides specific questions that reporters and editors should ask themselves at various stages of producing our journalism.
  • 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.
  • Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.
  • Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
  • Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
  • Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

Translation: Mrs Hughes wants the Inquirer to shade the truth if the unvarnished truth might ‘stigmatize’ certain ‘Philadelphia communities.’

In her story on the impact that the murder of Marcus Stokes had on E Washington Rhodes School, Miss Orso wrote, very specifically, that young Mr Stokes “was fatally shot in North Philadelphia on his way to school“, but the evidence, as printed in the Inquirer, indicates that he was not actually on his way to school. He was sitting, with five other young people, in a parked, and possibly disabled, car, many blocks away, fifteen minutes after he was supposed to be in his homeroom at school.

Miss Orso knew those facts; she is listed as either the sole or one of two authors in each of the articles I have cited. Did no one, including she, ever ask themselves any questions about why these young people, “including other Rhodes students“, were sitting in that car, ask themselves what they were doing there?

Miss Orso isn’t a stupid woman. She was graduated from Pennsylvania State University, a highly selective college, that doesn’t accept dummies. She isn’t inexperienced, having worked in journalism for seven years now, including four with the Inquirer.

Normally, an experienced editor would review a reporter’s story before the story was published. With all of the cutbacks through which the Inquirer has gone, perhaps that wasn’t the case in this instance, but with three major stories[1]At least three that I have seen; it is always possible that I have missed one, though I have been diligent about looking. published now on the killing of young Mr Stokes, it seems very unlikely that no supervising editor at all has read those stories. Yet all of them have made it through the process and been published, and no one there has raised serious enough questions to change things.

How does that happen?

One way it could happen is if no one at the Inquirer was paying anything more than glancing attention, and just wrote and passed on a story without any sense of inquisitiveness. That’s kind of difficult to believe, given that this writer, a 68-year-old retired fellow living three states away, whose last journalistic experience was with his collegiate newspaper, was able to spot the discrepancies from the very first story on the killing.

But another way it could happen is if the Inquirer was trying to engage not in reporting but propaganda. Miss Orso’s story has the effect of making young Mr Stokes out to be a wholly innocent victim, and perhaps that’s exactly what he was. But if he was a completely innocent victim, someone at the Inquirer should have been asking the questions and getting the answers as to why he was sitting in a car which was targeted in a deliberate assassination attempt; no one fires at least twelve rounds — “officers found 12 shell casings at the scene” — by accident. While it is possible that the shooter targeted the wrong vehicle completely, the Inquirer has not reported that, nor would such be consistent with the story that at least ten shots were fired at a vigil for the young victim. Mr Stokes might not have been the individual who was targeted, but the obvious conclusion is that at least some bad guy was involved.

The Inquirer has expended enough bandwidth on the story that someone there needs to start digging more deeply, someone needs to ferret out the whole story. That story might not be one that the Inquirer’s reporters and editors would like, but that is the difference between propaganda and news, between journolism[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 and journalism.

References

References
↑1 At least three that I have seen; it is always possible that I have missed one, though I have been diligent about looking.
↑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.
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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.
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Killadelphia

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated Monday through Friday,[1]With Monday, October 11th being a government holiday, Columbus Day, it is possible that the website will not be updated until Tuesday. during “normal business hours,” so it still states that ‘just’ 427 people have been murdered in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year, but The Philadelphia Inquirer has the story of the killing of at least the 428th:

    A 13-year-old boy was fatally shot on his way to school in North Philly, police say

    The victim, whom police did not immediately identify, was shot once in the chest on the 3100 block of Judson Street just after 9 a.m., police said.

    by Chris Palmer and Anna Orso | Friday, October 8, 2021

    A 13-year-old boy was fatally shot on his way to school Friday morning in North Philadelphia, according to police and School District officials — another bleak example of how the city’s ongoing gun violence crisis is leaving a record number of young people dead or wounded.

    The victim, whom authorities declined to identify, was shot once in the chest on the 3100 block of Judson Street just after 9 a.m., police said. He was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead about 20 minutes later.

    Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said detectives believe the boy and several other young people had been sitting in a car parked on the block when at least one gunman walked up and fired shots into it.

    Lunette Ray, 86, heard the shots — at least 10 — right outside her house. She peered out the window and saw several boys jump out of a vehicle and run away. One was severely bleeding and fell in the street. She called 911.

There’s more at the Inquirer’s original. A photo in the article shows a maroon PT Cruiser sitting parked on North Judson Street at the intersection with West Clearfield Street, with bullet holes in the windshield. However, the Inquirer’s headline, that the victim was “on his way to school” appears to be misleading:

    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.

If the victim was shot “just after” 9:00 AM, it would seem that he wasn’t actually on his way to school. The Rhodes Elementary School website states that “All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.”

This was a targeted killing, though it is entirely possible, and perhaps probable, that the murdered boy wasn’t the intended target, that someone else in the vehicle was.

We have frequently noted that the inquirer only covers homicides when the victim is an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl. At least someone in that vehicle wasn’t exactly an innocent, but I have to ask: just what were “several” young people doing sitting in a parked car, at 9:00 AM on a school day? Many things could be speculated, which I will leave up to the reader.

Chris Palmer and Anna Orso, the article authors, perhaps accidentally, stepped away from the Inquirer’s position that it’s all about guns:

    Carl Day, an antiviolence advocate and pastor whose church is two blocks from where the shooting took place, said, “We should be stirred up right now, all of us.” The killing is a mandate for adults in the community, he said, to reach out to more children and teenagers and provide alternatives to violence.

    “We in this community and in this zip code need to put all hands on deck,” he said. “We have to let our youth know this doesn’t have to be life. This world is so much bigger than what they think they see in front of them.”

Pastor Day spoke a truth that the #woke of the Inquirer’s newsroom don’t want to hear, that the problem of homicide in the City of Brotherly Love isn’t about guns, but about bad people, about people who think that killing others is perfectly OK, that killing other people is a reasonable and logical thing to do, for whatever reasons they have. The current generation of kids in Philly have already been lost; it’s going to be up to the next group of parents to start bringing up their children in a manner in which they don’t see killing as a reasonable thing to do, and don’t see drugs as a smart thing to take.

It’s a pretty sad thing to note that murder and death are common risks for 13-year-olds like the victim in this story, but the reality is that they are, and they are due to the aggregate behavior of other teenagers in neighborhoods like North Judson and West Clearfield Streets. The victim in this story may or may not have been doing anything wrong, but enough of his peers have been, and are, that the danger is created for all of them.

References

References
↑1 With Monday, October 11th being a government holiday, Columbus Day, it is possible that the website will not be updated until Tuesday.
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They can’t handle the truth! Philly Inquirer won't tell you that city's murder rate is higher than Chicago's!

This site has been hard on The Philadelphia Inquirer and how that august newspaper pretty much ignores the homicides in its hometown unless the victim is an innocent, someone already of note, or a cute little white girl. In a city in which the vast majority of murder victims are black, you wouldn’t expect that “anti-racist news organization” to have that kind of skewed coverage, would you?

Screen capture of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, at 8:15 AM EDT on Tuesday, October 5, 2021. Click to enlarge.

Well, another innocent person was killed, and the Inquirer is all over it, as we noted on Monday.

    Nursing assistant gunned down by coworker at Jefferson Hospital left behind three children

    The Elkins Park homeowner was also a part-time barber whose “legacy was his kids.”

    by Marina Affo and Juliana Feliciano Reyes | Monday, October 4, 2021

    Anrae James used to tell his younger brother Armond, “If you treat people nice, you’ll always be blessed.” Armond looked up to his brother always and knew he could count on him being present, no matter the endeavor, he said.

    Now the phrase will serve as part of James’ legacy and a bittersweet reminder for all who loved him.

    The 43-year-old nursing assistant and part-time barber, whom many called Rae, was identified by his family on Monday as the victim in an early morning shooting at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. Those who knew him described him as a “family man” who worked two jobs to support his three kids and a jokester with a talent for bringing people together around his barber’s chair.

    “One of the best [barbers] in Uptown,” said his friend Lyndell Mason. “That’s what we called him.”

There’s much more at the original, most of it telling readers what a great guy Mr James was; it was at least as much a human interest story as a crime report. The importance that the Inquirer gave to this story is contained in a footnote to it:

    Staff writers Barbara Laker, Chris Palmer, Anna Orso, and Rob Tornoe contributed to this article.

That’s six reporters covering the story, and two more, Jason Laughlin and Erin McCarthy, wrote and contributed to another article, Jefferson shooting is the latest example of workplace violence in health care: Health-care workers said the threat of violence is a too common part of their professional lives.

But Mr James was not the only person murdered on Monday. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page noted, as of 8:35 AM on Tuesday, October 5th, that 420 souls had been sent early to their eternal rewards, two more than the previous report, but I could find nothing at all in the inquirer about it.

Over the last 28 days, which excludes the Labor Day holiday weekend, 57 people have been murdered in Philly, 57 people in four weeks, or 2.0357 per day, and the Inquirer paid almost no attention to it. The city is up to 1.516 homicides per day for the year, meaning that, if that rate continues, 553 or 554 — the actual calculation is 553.430 — people will spill out their blood in the city’s mean streets.

If the last four weeks’ average was maintained, that would mean 179 more homicides, for a total of 599, but surely, surely! that rate won’t be maintained!

Will it?

On Friday, December 11, 2020, 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.

Of course, Miss Ubiñas got it slightly wrong: the Inquirer no longer specifies the race of victims. I have inferred that this was the result of a deliberate editorial decision, but it could just as easily be that the Philadelphia Police no longer report that information to the paper.

Perhaps I should be kinder to the Inquirer. After all, with 420 homicides so far, tied for the 13th bloodiest year in history, even with 88 days remaining in 2021, if the newspaper covered every murder, it might be my-eyes-glazed-over boring.

But it is also misleading journalism. Yeah, everybody knows that Philadelphia is a bloody town, but if the Inquirer’s coverage is the measure, that carnage seems to be just, well, unimportant. The Inquirer likes to concentrate on “gun violence,” as though those inanimate objects somehow levitate and shoot people completely independently of some bad person pulling the trigger. When publisher Elizabeth Hughes told us that her newspaper 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,” she was telling us, inter alia, that the Inquirer would not report something really radical like, oh, the truth.

And the truth needs to be told. Due to news coverage, we often see Chicago as our most murderous city, and in the sheer body count, it’s pretty awful. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, 624 people have been murdered in the Windy City so far this year.

But homicide rates are calculated correcting for population, and Chicago’s population of 2,746,388is more than a million people more than Philly’s 1,603,797. Chicago’s annualized homicide rate[1]The annualized homicide rate was calculated by taking the number of current homicides, dividing by the number of days elapsed in the year, 277, and multiplying by 365, to get the projected number of … Continue reading is 29.930 per 100,000 population, while Philadelphia’s is 34.481 per 100,000! Philadelphia is worse than Chicago, but you won’t find that reported in the nation’s third oldest newspaper!

It was absolutely reasonable for the Inquirer to report on the murder of Anrae James. But the newspaper failing to cover, other than in the briefest of ways, if at all, of the vast majority of the other 419 people who spilled their blood in the city’s streets, is journolism[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, not journalism, because it obscures the truth, for political reasons.

References

References
↑1 The annualized homicide rate was calculated by taking the number of current homicides, dividing by the number of days elapsed in the year, 277, and multiplying by 365, to get the projected number of murders at the current daily rate, then dividing that number by the population in hundreds of thousands.
↑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.
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Feminista Jones calls out The Philadelphia Inquirer Somehow, though, I doubt that they'll be able to see it

This site has been hard on The Philadelphia Inquirer and how that august newspaper[1]The Inquirer is the third oldest surviving daily newspaper in the United States in its own right. pretty much ignores the homicides in its hometown unless the victim is an innocent, someone already of note, or a cute little white girl. In a city in which the vast majority of murder victims are black, you wouldn’t expect that “anti-racist news organization” to have that kind of skewed coverage, would you?

So, it was with some surprise that I saw this article from Feminista Jones on the Inquirer’s website:

    When Gabby Petito disappeared, the world watched. Destini Smothers was ignored.

    If a greater percentage of African American and Indigenous women go missing and they experience higher rates of fatal domestic violence, why does the media continue to ignore their plight?

    by Feminista Jones,[2]Feminista Jones is an author and doctoral student at Temple University. She is the cohost of Black Girl Missing podcast and a fierce advocate for Black women and girls. Her website is here. For The Inquirer | September 29, 2021

    After taking a trip with her boyfriend, a beautiful young woman went missing, never to be heard from again. The last person to see her alive is believed to be her boyfriend, though he has denied any involvement in her death and has since gone missing himself. Her family desperately searched for her, traveling far and wide, pleading with local police and the media for help, hoping someone, anyone would have a clue into her disappearance. When her body was discovered, all hopes of finding her safe and alive were dashed — she was gone forever, and her loved ones would never hold her in their arms or see her brilliant smile again. They want answers and there are several questions about her boyfriend’s connection to her death since he was the last person to see her alive, according to all accounts.

    Destini Smothers had been missing since Nov. 3. (Obtained by New York Daily News)

    You may be thinking about Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old woman whose body was recently discovered near the campsite she and her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie, visited in Utah in August 2021.

    But I was writing about Destini Smothers, a 26-year-old woman from New York who, in November 2020, traveled with Kareem Flake, her boyfriend and father of her two children, from their home in Troy, N.Y., to Queens to both attend a funeral and to celebrate her birthday. When her mother didn’t hear from her, she contacted her boyfriend, who only said that she left their car after an argument, upset because she wanted to go spend time with her friends after they attended a bowling party. He said she left without taking her keys, wallet, or phone. Her mother didn’t believe him and became frantic. She contacted local authorities in November, but she didn’t receive much information about the investigation until March when she was notified that her daughter’s body was found.

    In the days after she went missing, Smothers’ disappearance did not appear on national news outlets, every hour or with breaking news segments on 24-hour cable news shows. Smothers was African American and like so many African American girls and women, her disappearance barely made a blip in local media, much less national coverage.

    When Black girls and women go missing, the country doesn’t come to a standstill the way it does when a white girl or woman goes missing.

There’s more at the original, but I would have expected, even if Miss Jones wrote this article for wider publication than just in the Inquirer, she would have tailored this one far more specifically to the Inquirer. After all, Miss Jones lives in the City of Brotherly Love, and someone who writes frequently for newspapers[3]Her biography page states, “Feminista’s passion and talent for writing have led to her being featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Essence, XOJane, Complex, Vox, Salon, and … Continue reading should have paid a bit more attention to her hometown newspaper, and noticed how the Inquirer was just as much of an offender as any other.

Miss Jones goes on, further down, to blame racism:

    There is also a lack of empathy for marginalized people living in a society where whiteness is universal and to be anything other than white is to be generally regarded as inferior. Part of the issue is in the media’s commitment to upholding white supremacy by shaping narratives that place white people at the top of a racial hierarchy, thereby prioritizing their wants, needs, and experiences above others. There is no push to regard nonwhite people as equally deserving of empathy, care, and consideration, so when they are victims of violent crimes, their stories are minimized or completely erased to keep white innocence and fragility centered. And due to journalism’s gatekeeping, people of color remain severely underrepresented in the newsrooms to even raise awareness about what’s happening in marginalized communities and amplify their stories.

Upon reading that paragraph, a couple of things struck me. First, Miss Jones was simply whining about “whiteness” and lamenting that non-whites are seen more negatively. Yes, there will be people who will claim that I’m just an [insert slang term for the rectum here], a claim I do not dispute, but let’s tell the very blatant truth here: by American cultural standards, Gabby Petito was a lot better looking than Destini Smothers, and pretty girls sell newspapers.

But when Miss Jones stated that the credentialed media have a “commitment to upholding white supremacy”, perhaps she doesn’t realize that Gabriel Escobar, the Editor and Senior Vice President of the Inquirer, is “one of the highest-ranking Latinos at a U.S. news organization.” Publisher Elizabeth Hughes wrote, four months ago, that the Inquirer was taking many steps to become that “anti-racist news organization” she wanted it to be, including:

  • Producing an antiracism workflow guide for the newsroom that provides specific questions that reporters and editors should ask themselves at various stages of producing our journalism.
  • 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.
  • Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.
  • Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
  • Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
  • Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

The last thing the Inquirer is consciously trying to do is “(uphold) white supremacy by shaping narratives that place white people at the top of a racial hierarchy.” Either Miss Jones was criticizing her hometown newspaper specifically, or she doesn’t really know much about it. But if Miss Jones was trying to say that the Inquirer is unconsciously “upholding white supremacy by shaping narratives that place white people at the top of a racial hierarchy,” then she has a better case.

“When Black girls and women go missing, the country doesn’t come to a standstill the way it does when a white girl or woman goes missing,” Miss Jones wrote, but let’s be honest here: the credentialed media exist to make money[4]The Inquirer is owned by a non-profit company, but it still has to make enough money to stay in business., and money is made by people paying attention to them, leading to more advertising revenue. Which is the chicken, and which is the egg:

  1. A public which respond more intensely to pretty white women; or
  2. A media which recognizes that to which the public respond?

If Miss Hughes’ goals are to be met, the Inquirer has to lead the coverage. Yet the newspaper deliberately shies away from crime reporting, something Miss Hughes specifically said she wanted, for ‘racial justice’ reasons. These two things are mutually exclusive. I was never a professional reporter, just a Kentucky Kernel staffer while in grad school, but it seems to me that maybe, just maybe, the Inquirer would be better served to simply cover the news, and leave the mission and biases outside 801 8th Street.

Will Editor Escobar, will Publisher Hughes, pay attention to Miss Jones’ OpEd piece? It might have been more effective, at least in the Inquirer, had she called them out more specifically, but both are intelligent and educated people; they ought to be able to see that they really have been called out. Somehow, though, I doubt that they will.

References

References
↑1 The Inquirer is the third oldest surviving daily newspaper in the United States in its own right.
↑2 Feminista Jones is an author and doctoral student at Temple University. She is the cohost of Black Girl Missing podcast and a fierce advocate for Black women and girls. Her website is here.
↑3 Her biography page states, “Feminista’s passion and talent for writing have led to her being featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Essence, XOJane, Complex, Vox, Salon, and EBONY magazine to name a few publications.”
↑4 The Inquirer is owned by a non-profit company, but it still has to make enough money to stay in business.
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Killadelphia Black lives don't matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

As we noted Monday, the homicide rate in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia had picked up a bit. At the end of the weekend, 384 homicides had plagued the City of Brotherly Love, moving the death rate to 1.466 per day, for a projected 535 for the year.

Then the city recorded two more homicides on Monday, on one of which The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. I pointed out that the next ‘milestone’ will be 391 homicides, which is the full year’s total for 2007. The city will probably pass that next weekend. Continue reading →