Tag Archives: #PhiladelphiaInquirer

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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 →

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I’ve said it before: when it comes to murder, The Philadelphia Inquirer is much more concerned about cute little white girls

I have previously noted what I called the racism of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and have noted, many times, that unless a murder victim is someone already of note, or a cute little white girl,[1]When accessed in September 21, 2021, at 2:05 PM EDT, the search returned 4,548 results. the editors of the Inquirer don’t care, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the murder of a young black man in Philadelphia is not news.

My point about the “cute little white girl” was in reference to Rian Thal, “a party promoter well-known in the city’s nightclub scene” and drug dealer, who was murdered on June 27, 2009. The city was captured by Miss Thal’s killing, and the local media were full of stories about it. The Inquirer and its sister publication, the Philadelphia Daily News, just loved splashing Miss Thal’s killing across their pages. After all, cute white girls sell newspapers!

But, as many times as I’ve used that, it was still twelve years ago, and since then, this year in fact, Inquirer publisher Elizabeth Hughes stated that her goal was to make the newspaper and its associated website “an anti-racist news organization.” So, wouldn’t the obvious result of that to be not concentrating on cute white girls as the victims of crimes?

Gabby Petito.

A site search for “Gabby Petito” returned 16 articles, the latest at 2:10 PM EDT today, just ten minutes before I made the search. Miss Petito is yet another cute little white girl, one whose disappearance has attracted a lot of social media, and credentialed media, interest.

Sixteen articles, though, to be fair, most were written by other than Inquirer reporters.

A photo taken during a block party last year of Dunkin’ Donuts manager Christine Lugo.

What about Christine Lugo? Miss Lugo was a 40-year-old Hispanic woman, the manager of a Dunkin’ Donuts on Lehigh Avenue in the city’s Fairhill neighborhood. The senseless murder was actually well covered by the city’s media, including the Inquirer, but a site search for “Christine Lugo” at 2:30 PM yielded only four returns, and two of them weren’t about her at all.

A cute little white girl, with no connection to Philadelphia, had sixteen mentions, while Philadelphia’s own Miss Lugo resulted in two.

Boy, it’s a good thing that Miss Hughes was determined to make the Inquirer “an anti-racist news organization,” or Miss Petito would have a hundred mentions, and Miss Lugo still two.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Joy Reid is . . . right?

So, while my previous links to the Inquirer’s coverage of Miss Thal, as evidence of the newspaper’s racism, remain, her death twelve years ago, which I remembered from reading the print edition that I used to pick up before work, can be characterized as old news. But the disappearance, and probable death, of Miss Petito is today’s news, and it remains as evidence of what I have said all along: when it comes to their priorities and integrity, cute little white girls are still much, much more important to the very #woke[2]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[3]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.

References

References
↑1 When accessed in September 21, 2021, at 2:05 PM EDT, the search returned 4,548 results.
↑2 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. than anyone else.

↑3 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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Journolism: The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to make a political argument for the city getting a WNBA team I might believe that the editors are concerned about women's sports if they actually covered women's sports

Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement, 2011 Knight Arts Challenge Winners - Flickr - Knight Foundation (cropped)Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer held a ‘debate’ over the question, “Should Philly get a WNBA team?” Denice Frohman, a former professional, but not WNBA, player, and a “Philly-based award-winning poet, performer, and educator who has featured on national stages from The White House to The Apollo,” wrote in support of the idea.

    With the WNBA celebrating its 25th season and playoffs on the horizon, I’m reminded why Philly needs our own team in the most progressive league in major sports.

That isn’t a great start; she is already telling you that her interest is primarily in ‘progressive’ politics more than sports. Miss Frohman’s Wikipedia biography, from which her picture has been taken, doesn’t mention her basketball career at all, but says this about her:

    Denice Frohman is a poet, writer, performer and educator, whose work explores the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Frohman uses her experience as a queer woman from a multi-cultural (Puerto Rican and Jewish) background in her writing. By addressing identity, her work encourages communities to challenge the dominant social constructs and oppressive narratives in place that are currently working against concepts of unity and equity. Her message is about claiming the power to be who you are. She was born and raised in New York City, and earned her master’s degree in education from Drexel University.

Miss Frohman is all about the politics, and any basketball she played is simply incidental. After seven paragraphs, including the one quoted above, she gets into this:

    Beyond the metrics, when I think of what it would mean for Philly to have a WNBA team. I think about how players have championed social justice in a league comprised of nearly 70% Black women athletes, and how that would resonate in a city undeniably shaped by Black women’s leadership.

    I think about the night Philly voters helped turn Pennsylvania blue in the last presidential election, coinciding with Atlanta Dream players’ successful campaign to elect Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock—the first Black senator in Georgia’s history—ousting former Dream owner and incumbent Kelly Loeffler. I think about WNBA player Angel McCoughtry spearheading the idea for players to wear social justice messages on their uniforms last year (an idea the NBA borrowed).

    Philly needs no introduction to the national stage, but having a WNBA team can say something powerful about who we are and who we believe in. It can speak to the women and girls from Norris Square to Southwest about what is possible when you dream out loud.

Screen capture, Philadelphia Inquirer website sports section, September 21, 2021, 9:10 AM EDT.

I suppose that this is typical for the oh so #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 Philadelphia Inquirer, the notion that basketball is primarily a political thing. I am reminded of Pavel (Pasha) Pavlovich Antipov’s, Strelnikov’s, statement in Dr Zhivago, “The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it.” Perhaps the editors ought to ask the question of who would actually attend WNBA games?

Miss Frohman wants a WNBA team in Philadelphia for political reasons, in her case, left-wing political reasons. I doubt that many people reading the sports section of the Inquirer, which is where I found it, are going to find those reasons good ones for putting a WNBA team in the City of Brotherly Love.

Kerith Gabriel, “a former Daily News sports writer and currently a digital editor at the Inquirer“, was assigned the task of writing the opposing view, and in his first paragraph, he apologized for being a man writing it:

    I already knew writing as a cisgender man to say that a WNBA franchise won’t work may subject me to cancellation, or at least dismissal that I’m just some guy who doesn’t like women’s sports.

LOL! But, after his initial apology, Mr Gabriel does that most horrid, horrid! of things, he writes about the economics, the capitalist concerns of a Women’s National Basketball Association team.

    Let’s start with the numbers. According to an online survey conducted by national statistics firm Statista, interest in the WNBA is around 28% for men and just 18% for women. Further segmented, only 9% of men surveyed and just 4% of women considered themselves avid fans.

    The WNBA has always focused on appealing to a younger generation, attempting to capture the horde of young hoopers who could look at legendary basketball players like Sue Bird and Tamika Catchings as idols. It’s a smart strategy considering that the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) pipeline, in which young kids are trained for serious basketball (and other sports), is big business. Even in the Philadelphia area, there are well over 100+ AAU teams, many of them girls-only leagues.

    But again, according to 2021 numbers from Statista, the WNBA is the ninth most popular sport among Gen Zers. In terms of live games? The WNBA ranked 13th in a survey of American favorite sports Americans enjoy watching live before the pandemic. That means more young adults would rather watch cars go around an endless circle for two hours (NASCAR, 26%), than watch a women’s professional basketball game.

Heaven forfend! Mr Gabriel isn’t talking about the politics of having a WNBA franchise, but on how such a team would do something really radical like support itself. He concluded with:

If you look at the viewer guides for ESPN and the NBA Network, you’ll see that, even in the summer, even in the off-season for the NBA, those sports networks would rather show reruns of old NBA and other men’s sports games than live WNBA games. Those network executives aren’t doing so because they hate women’s sports, but because they believe they will earn more advertising revenue from those choices.

Me being very politically incorrect, I’ll note the women’s sports the sports networks do show: NCAA volleyball, beach volleyball, gymnastics and ice skating. Why? Because those are the province of pretty white women, while women’s basketball, as Miss Frohman noted concerning the WNBA, is nearly 70% black. Even The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the rest of the city’s media, do the same thing, as I have frequently noted in mentioning that the Inquirer only cares about murder victims when they are cute little white girls like Rian Thal.

You think I’m exaggerating? The Inquirer’s website lists 15 articles about the disappearance of Gabby Petito, a cute little white girl, but one with no connection to the city, yet only two about Christine Lugo, a 40-year-old Hispanic woman who was murdered in a widely-talked-about robbery in Philadelphia.

If the Inquirer editors are so concerned about women’s basketball, maybe they ought to increase their coverage of NCAA women’s basketball, in a city which boasts several collegiate basketball teams.

The media know their audience.

The Inquirer article was listed in the sports section of the newspaper’s website. As I noted previously, the Inquirer eliminated reader comments on articles, saying:

    Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.

The one place they do still allow comments? In the sports section! But for this “Pro/Con” opinion piece in the sports section, reader comments were not allowed, because the editors knew that this was far more of a political debate than a sports question. This isn’t journalism, but 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 the embedding of a political argument in the sports section. Of course, that means a lot of Inquirer readers will never see it, because a lot don’t bother with the sports section.

Me? I don’t care one way or the other whether the WNBA puts a franchise in Philly. I don’t live there, so the chances I would ever attend a WNBA game in that city are virtually nil. I don’t attend NBA games, either; the only one I ever attended was on October 8, 1971, when the Kentucky Colonels of the old American basketball Association lured — with money — the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played for them, to Louisville’s Freedom Hall for an exhibition game. I am far more likely to watch a college basketball game on television than a professional game. But the Inquirer’s ‘debate’ isn’t about basketball at all; it’s about liberal politics, and basketball was merely their platform.

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.
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A picture worth a thousand words. Why won't the credentialed media report the whole story?

I normally avoid photos that might be under copyright, but this one tells a tale that ought not to be avoided, and thus falls under ‘fair use’ standards. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

    SEPTA bus riders are frustrated by persistent delays. Officials say a shortage of drivers is to blame.

    The regional transit agency was not able to hire at the rate of attrition and has to play catch up.

    by Thomas Fitzgerald | Saturday, September 18, 2021

    SEPTA has a deficit of 105 bus operators, a lingering effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to delays on many of the agency’s bus routes. Alejandro A Alvarez, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer. Click to enlarge. Photographer

    For weeks, SEPTA’s real-time online bus service status page has been speckled with red triangles warning riders of delays on many routes “due to an operator shortage.”

    The transit agency is down 105 bus operators, officials said. Austerity measures during last year’s coronavirus shutdowns, including a four-month hiring freeze, have hampered SEPTA’s ability to keep up with attrition.

    As a result, thousands of frustrated riders wait longer at bus stops.

    And when operators scheduled for duty call in sick or have family emergencies, regular occurrences in a workforce of more than 2,600 people, managers in SEPTA’s nine bus garages have to scramble.

There’s more at the original, but the telling part of the photo is the sign on the front of the bus: “A mask or face covering is required on SEPTA”. You can click on the photo to enlarge it, and see the bus marquee more easily.

We have previously reported on mask mandates for certain jobs, including bus drivers, pushing people away from those jobs. People just don’t want to wear a diaper over their faces. But the only reference to that in the Inquirer article was this:

    The transit agency is down 105 bus operators, officials said. Austerity measures during last year’s coronavirus shutdowns, including a four-month hiring free(Nat Lownes, of the Philly Transit Riders Union) said some of his friends who are bus operators tell him they’re worn out with the demands of the job, which include enforcing federal mask regulations and often dealing with irate riders. “It can be brutal,” he said.

The Inquirer article didn’t have a single word about bus drivers themselves not wanting to wear masks, and while some passengers don’t want to wear the silly things for a thirty-minute ride, the drivers are required to have them on for an eight hour, or longer, shift.

This is why I frequently refer to journolists. The spelling ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias. There’s really no way that Thomas Fitzgerald, the article author, didn’t know about the frustration of bus drivers and others having to wear face masks for hours on end, and the stories of the patricians going maskless while their ‘servants’ had to wear face diapers aren’t going to encourage people to take jobs requiring the wearing of masks.

An actual journalist would have reported on that, but the editorial position of the Inquirer is to support mask and vaccine mandates, and the credentialed media just don’t like reporting on things with which they disagree.

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Will Bunch wants to cut out large swaths of America

I remember when columnists had a 750-word limit, but with the coming of the internet, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, who is so far to the left that he makes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez look, if not sane, at least less wacky, got in 1,345, in which he tells us that he has no flaming idea about his topic. Nevertheless, I’d have expected him to understand something about politics!

A broken America should build a monument to Joe Manchin’s massive ego

The self-centered, greedy West Virginia senator is a poster child for everything wrong with U.S. politics. So what is the Joe Manchin workaround?

by Will Bunch | Columnist | Thursday, September 16, 2021

As the summer of 2021 comes to an ignominious end this week, millions of Americans will remember these blazing hot months as a time of dashed hopes on ending our life-altering pandemic and growing alarm about the floods and fires fueled by climate change. But in Washington, D.C. — the place where solving these problems needs to start in the U.S. — both the hellish season and what it might mean for future generations will be recalled as “Almost Heaven,” the well-equipped houseboat owned by West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin where the nation’s leaders spent a moonshine-soaked summer lazily floating past the crises. .  .  .  .

Will Bunch, from his Philadelphia Inquirer author photo.

So, who is Will Bunch? His first-person Inquirer biography states, “I’m the national columnist — with some strong opinions about what’s happening in America around social injustice, income inequality and the government.” I’ll admit it: whenever I see #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 phrases like “social justice” and “income inequality”, I know I’m dealing with someone who has no flaming idea about real life. People are different, and different people means different outcomes for people. Sadly, the Inquirer staff are eaten up by wokeness.

Mr Bunch also supports the Palestinians and their terrorist groups, which also tells us a lot.

Mr Bunch’s Twitter header photo shows him walking away from a dilapidated Appalachian (?) home, but it seems that he has little understanding of the people who live in Appalachia.

But with autumn closing in, Washington seems hopelessly adrift on Biden’s ambitious plans for working families and fighting climate change, and any forward progress will likely depend on what comes out of Manchin’s bandaged brain in the coming weeks. In a slew of TV appearances, the West Virginian has made it clear he will use his deciding vote in the 50-50 Senate to shrink Biden’s plan from $350 billion a year to only $100 billion to $150 billion — he’s failed to truly articulate why — and he’s also managed to downsize the ambitions of a do-or-die-for-democracy voting-rights bill, even as he insists (for now) he won’t end the filibuster to pass even that. Whatever happened on that houseboat, the brief chance to end American kleptocracy may be sinking.

Indeed, analyzing Manchin and his motives — both politically and psychologically — has become something of a cottage industry in the nation’s capital. I’ve already written about how Manchin’s pro-billionaire austerity politics are wildly out of step with the real-world needs of voters in poverty-plagued West Virginia, suffering from pothole-laced highways, climate-worsened floods, and opioid abuse. Instead, the senator and former governor sees promoting his personal brand as his path to winning elections and wielding power.

And here we have exactly what I would have expected from a big-city liberal, the self-assured knowledge that he knows what’s best for rural dwellers in a different state.

In the 2020 election, President Trump carried West Virginia, beating Joe Biden 545,382 (68.62%) to 235,984 (29.69%), Mr Trump’s second strongest state, percentagewise. In only one county, Monongalia, did President Trump get less than 50% of the vote, 49.45%, which still beat Mr Biden’s 48.21% there. Mr Trump got over 80% of the vote in nine separate counties.

This is the part Mr Bunch just doesn’t get: Senator Manchin, the only statewide elected Democrat in office, is doing what his constituents in the Mountain State want him to do. He is acting like the moderate Democrat he campaigned as being.

Mr Bunch has a long section, which I have not quoted, in which he tells us what a self-centered, greedy political hack Mr Manchin is, before telling us what he thinks is needed.

After 2022, the only way for the United States to get where it wants to go is not through Joe Manchin and his tired political hackery, but around him. West Virginia may be a very Trumped-up place right now, but voters here in Pennsylvania, as well as Ohio, Wisconsin, and other key states, will get a shot next fall to build a Senate majority that is actually controlled by Democrats and not the Chamber of Commerce. Metaphorically speaking, we need an infrastructure bill with a 10-lane superhighway of American progress, that bypasses West Virginia altogether.

It doesn’t seem to occur to Mr Bunch that perhaps, just perhaps, not all Americans agree with him as to where the United States “wants to go”. You’d think that he ought to have a clue, given that, while Mr Biden carried Pennsylvania by 81,660 votes, it was because he carried Philadelphia by 471,050; President Trump carried the rest of the Commonwealth by 390,445 votes. Perhaps, just perhaps, with 378 homicides in just 259 days of the year, for an average of 1.46 per day, on track for 532 for the year, Philly isn’t exactly the model of modern life that the rest of the country would see as great.

Ahhh, but, then again, perhaps he does realize that, given that he wants to “(bypass) West Virginia altogether.” He’d probably throw Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky in that same category as well.

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.