Tag Archives: #PhiladelphiaInquirer

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Killadelphia The killers are playing catch up; The Philadelphia Inquirer is not

It was just yesterday that we noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t seem to pay much notice to the murders of young black males in the City of Brotherly Love. I pointed out, in the footnote, that with 287 homicides in 188 days (as of 11:59 PM on July 7th) equaled 1.5266 homicides per day, projecting a total of 557 for the year.

Well, it looks like the city’s thugs realized that they weren’t quite meeting their quota, because after two straight days of the Philadelphia Police Department reporting only one homicide, the gang bangers caught up: the Current Crime Statistics page shows 291 killings as of 11:59 PM on July 8th. 291 ÷ 189 days in the year, = 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year.

The Inquirer? Digging into several pages of their website at 8:30 AM — now at 4:42 PM, current update — this morning, I couldn’t find a single story, not so much as what Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas called a “handful of lines in a media alert,” although it’s possible I just didn’t dig into the right place.

Nevertheless, the editors and journolists[1]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 … Continue reading at the Inquirer didn’t think that four homicides yesterday was worth noting on the website’s main page, where readers had a chance of spotting such.

Why? Because black lives don’t matter to the editors and staff of The Philadelphia Inquirer! Oh, they matter if taken by a white police officer, matter a very great deal, but when one black thug kills another black thug, which is what the vast majority of the city’s homicides are, it just doesn’t fit Teh Narrative that the “anti-racist news organization” wants to tell. Maybe it’s time for me to break out that Philadelphia Enquirer[2]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. logo once more.

References

References
↑1 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.
↑2 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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The “anti-racist” Philadelphia Inquirer shows how much it values white lives over black ones

We have previously noted that 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?

Well, now it’s story number five: Continue reading →

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More journolism from The Philadelphia Inquirer The Inquirer writes its headline to stir up resentment toward the Philadelphia Police Department

Screenshot from Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, July 7, 2021, 4:42 PM EDT. Click to enlarge.

Sometimes you just know what you have to do: take a screenshot as documentary evidence, before someone tries to make history vanish.[1]I pointed out the tremendous bias in a tweet to Gabriel Escobar, the editor of the Inquirer, so it’s at least possible that the headline will be changed, not that I expect it. The screen capture to the right was taken by me, at 4:42 PM EDT on Wednesday, July 7, 2021.

References

References
↑1 I pointed out the tremendous bias in a tweet to Gabriel Escobar, the editor of the Inquirer, so it’s at least possible that the headline will be changed, not that I expect it.
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With just half the year gone, Philadelphia has already topped yearly homicide totals for 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 In promising to become "anti-racist," The Philadelphia Inquirer has become racist

We noted, just three weeks ago, that the City of Brotherly Love’s terrible homicide rate had topped the entire year’s total for 2013 and 2014:

    According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, as of the end of Tuesday, June 15th, the city hit what could wryly be called a milestone, it’s 250th murder. The math is pretty bad: 250 homicides ÷ 166 days = 1.506 per day, × 365 = 549.70 murders for the year. The evil, reich-wing Donald Trump has been out of office for just five days short of five months now, the very liberal, opposed to mass incarceration District Attorney Larry Krasner has been renominated, the pandemic restrictions have (mostly) been lifted, and Philly’s murder rate is increasing.

Well, as Mickey East, formerly a political science professor at the University of Kentucky used to say, to encourage students to get their work done, tempus is fugiting, and now, three weeks later, the Philadelphia Police Department is reporting 285 homicides as of 11:59 PM on Monday, July 5th. 285 homicides ÷ 186 days = 1.532 per day, putting the city on schedule for 559.27 for the year. Those 285 homicides now top the year’s totals for 2015 and 2016, 280 and 277 homicides, respectively. At least as of 5:15 PM, The Philadelphia Inquirer had taken no notice of that fact, at least on its website’s main page.

In just 20 days, the murder rate has increased enough to add 9 or 10 more dead bodies on Philly’s mean streets, but, as already noted, The Philadelphia Inquirer, “an anti-racist news organization” according to publisher Elizabeth Hughes, doesn’t care unless one of those killed was an ‘innocent,’ or a ‘somebody,‘ or a cute little white girl.

What did Miss Hughes say the Inquirer would do to make itself into that “anti-racist news organization” she wanted it to be?

    A month after the (Buildings Matter, Too) headline was published, the newsroom began a comprehensive process to examine nearly every facet of what our journalists do. Almost 80 staffers, more than a third of the newsroom, have convened every week since. In working groups, they discuss complex issues and make recommendations that are then considered by a steering committee made up of managers and frontline staffers. To date, all have been adopted.

    Here’s a sampling of what has been done or is close to being launched:

    • 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.

And the result of all of that? Other than to criticize “gun violence,” a term which makes it sound as though inanimate firearms somehow levitate and shoot people all by themselves, the Inquirer almost never personalizes the actual shooters, never blames the people who pick up the guns and start firing.[1]A notable exception to that would be Keith Gibbson, but he is accused of killing an ‘innocent,’ Christine Lugo. Even saying that, the stories stopped after just two articles. In their great desire not to be racist, the Inquirer has become the racists they decry, examining everything through the prism of race, and deciding what to print, and not to print, based on its effects on race. That is, quite literally, discriminating on the basis of race! In “examin(ing) nearly every facet of what (their) journalists do,” they have become not journalists, but journolists![2]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 … Continue reading

As I previously noted, I ran across a photo of the masthead of The Philadelphia Inquirer from February 25, 1953, and noticed the ‘taglines’ that it used: “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. By Public ledger, the Inquirer was setting itself up as Philadelphia’s newspaper of record, which Wikipedia defines as “a major newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative.” That Wikipedia article named four newspapers of record for the United States: The New York Times (Founded 1851), The Washington Post (1877), The Los Angeles Times (1881) and The Wall Street Journal (1889). First printed on Monday, June 1, 1829, the then Pennsylvania Inquirer is older than any of them. “An editorial in the first issue of The Pennsylvania Inquirer promised that the paper would be devoted to the right of a minority to voice their opinion and ‘the maintenance of the rights and liberties of the people, equally against the abuses as the usurpation of power.’”

The newspaper, by its publisher’s own admission, no longer cares about anything as radical as the ‘public’s right to know,’ because knowing the truth, the unvarnished truth, might perpetuate stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.[3]That quote is specifically from the Sacramento Bee, and forms the basis of the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, but it is clearly a reflection of what the Inquirer does as well. But, at least the publisher has admitted what she wants to do; I, for one, will continue to point that out.

References

References
↑1 A notable exception to that would be Keith Gibbson, but he is accused of killing an ‘innocent,’ Christine Lugo. Even saying that, the stories stopped after just two articles.
↑2 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.
↑3 That quote is specifically from the Sacramento Bee, and forms the basis of the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, but it is clearly a reflection of what the Inquirer does as well.
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For some in Philadelphia, “an anti-racist media system” means a propaganda system.

We noted, near the end of May, the opinion piece by Elizabeth Hughes, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer. In it, Miss Hughes began:

    June 2 will mark a year since The Philadelphia Inquirer published this racist headline: “Buildings Matter, Too.”

    If printing those words in 72-point type had occurred in a vacuum, it would have been a grievous and unpardonable offense. That it was published at a moment of national reckoning over social justice — prompted by the vicious murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police a year ago yesterday — amplified the outrage and brought us well-deserved scorn and scrutiny.

    There is somewhat of a playbook whenever a self-inflicted crisis like this threatens to define any institution and the people who work for it. And so it played out here. Apologies were issued, a change in newsroom leadership was announced, earnest promises of reform and redress were made.

By “a change in newsroom leadership was announced,” the publisher was saying that Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Stan Wischnowski was fired forced to resign.

I will admit it: I do not see how the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” is racist, especially in a city founded in 1682, 99 years before we won our independence at the Battle of Yorktown, a city in which our Declaration of Independence was signed, and a city with surviving 18th century residences.

What did the Buildings Matter, Too article actually say?

    Does the destruction of buildings matter when black Americans are being brazenly murdered in cold blood by police and vigilantes?

    That’s the question that has been raging on the streets of Philadelphia, and across my architecture-centric social media feeds, over the last two days as a dark cloud of smoke spiraled up from Center City. What started as a poignant and peaceful protest in Dilworth Park on Saturday morning ended up in a frenzy of destruction by evening. Hardly any building on Walnut and Chestnut Streets was left unscathed, and two mid-19th century structures just east of Rittenhouse Square were gutted by fire.

    Their chances of survival are slim, which means there could soon be a gaping hole in the heart of Philadelphia, in one of its most iconic and historic neighborhoods. And protesters moved on to West Philadelphia’s fragile 52nd Street shopping corridor, an important center of black life, where yet more property has been battered.

It seems as though Inga Saffron, the article author and architecture writer for the Inquirer, was concerned about buildings, historic buildings, in some heavily black neighborhoods.

So now we come to Malav Kanuga, a researcher with the Media, Inequality, and Change Center and a cooperative member of Making Worlds Bookstore and Social Center in West Philadelphia. He was granted OpEd space by the editors of the Inquirer:

    Philadelphia deserves anti-racist media

    It is time for a deep reckoning of our existing media system and the role it often plays in reflecting classist and racist interests that threaten safety for all.

    by Malav Kanuga | July 5, 2021

    In the last year, organizers and activists, youth and elders in Philadelphia and across the country came together to sustain perhaps the largest mobilization against police violence in U.S. history. Between May 26, 2020, and the end of that June, the country averaged 140 demonstrations a day.

    This movement also compelled deeper reflection inside local and national newsrooms about their role in upholding police narratives and their responsibility to challenge systemic racism in their reporting.

    A year since the uprisings in response to the police murder of George Floyd, we don’t just need diversity and inclusion initiatives and sensitivity trainings on white privilege in newsrooms. We need an anti-racist media system.

Wait, what? Mr Kanuga is saying that “we need an anti-racist media system,” but isn’t that exactly what the Inquirer’s publisher already promised?

    If our call then was to become an anti-racist news organization, what has been done?

Apparently, Mr Kanuga thinks Miss Hughes has yet to accomplish, or even come close to her goals:

    An anti-racist media system means addressing the real dangers that our media system puts on Black, Indigenous, migrants, and communities of color in our city, and no longer shirking the responsibility to answer calls for redress and reparations to historical and ongoing harms.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain in 72 Shot in Chicago This Weekend

Well, one thing is certainly true about that: the Inquirer only rarely reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. I’ve told the truth previously: unless the murder victim is someone already of note, or a cute little white girl, 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.  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?

On Friday, December 11, 2020, columnist Helen Ubiñas published an article in The Philadelphia 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 followed the Inquirer’s stylebook in claiming that these Philadelphians were “killed by guns.” No, they were killed by bad people, people who used guns as their tools. But the Inquirer doesn’t want to ever say that part. Nevertheless, she confirmed what I said about the paper’s coverage of homicides in Philadelphia.

But more coverage of homicides is not what Mr Kanuga wants:

    This requires abolishing harmful narratives that criminalize people experiencing the trauma of poverty stemming from the systemic withholding of resources. It means journalism ending the reinforcement of police-centered solutions to social welfare issues, instead promoting, for example, mental health alternatives to the typical police responses that led to their murder of Walter Wallace Jr. last October.

Of course, Mr Wallace wasn’t murdered; the police acted within their training, in dealing with an armed man advancing on them, a man on whom the police had been called four times that day. A “mental health alternative” to Mr Wallace? Yeah, that would have gotten a social worker or two stabbed, possibly to death, by Mr Wallace.

Channel 10, the NBC station in Philadelphia, reported:

    A review of the 1,316 homicides in Philadelphia between January 1, 2018 and March 22, 2021 shows:

    • 6% of Philadelphia murder victims are White. Police made an arrest in 63% of those cases.
    • 82% of Philadelphia murder victims are Black. Police made an arrest in 33% of those cases.
    • 11% of Philadelphia murder victims are Hispanic. Police made an arrest in 38% of those cases.
    • Less than 1% of Philadelphia murder victims are Asian. Police made an arrest in 55% of those cases.

    When asked why arrests rates lag when a murder victim is a person of color, the head of the Philadelphia Police homicide unit cited witness cooperation.

    “We need the cooperation of the community,” Capt. Jason Smith said. “Without the cooperation of the community, we are not going to be able to effectively do our jobs.”

What does Mr Kanuga want? “abolishing harmful narratives that criminalize people” means concealing what everybody already knows: that black Philadelphians are being murdered at a prodigious rate in Philadelphia, and that the vast majority of their killers, when known, are also black. More, as Captain Smith noted, people within the city’s black community would rather the killing of one of their own go unsolved than see another member of their community go to jail for it.

    This includes challenging routine newsroom reporting practices that play a part in silencing community voices and eliding their experiences and needs in a city that has overpoliced and economically under-resourced much of its Black and Brown communities. It involves pushing newsrooms to meet with community organizations to have honest conversations about coverage on “criminal justice” issues and question single-source reporting that relies on accounts of community affairs offered by police and their spokespersons, when those accounts are often unreliable.

    It asks journalists to think about how the language they use undermines the dignity of those reported upon, including a commitment to “human-first” language that avoids dehumanizing descriptions like “felon,” and trauma-informed reporting that acknowledges harm to communities in order to not perpetuate it.

“Felon” has a definition; a felon is someone who has been convicted of a felony. In many stories, that is an apt and concise description.

What does Mr Kanuga want when he says that the city needs “an anti-racist media system”? He means a media which will publish or broadcast the heartwarming stories of success of every ‘minority’ community he could list,[1]In one short paragraph he lists “Black, Indigenous, migrant, and communities of color by addressing the intersection of voices, cultures, and textures of our achievements and issues. It … Continue reading but one which will ignore the heavy crime rate in the black community, blaming it all, if it has to be mentioned, on “the trauma of poverty stemming from the systemic withholding of resources.” To him, “anti-racist” means the consideration of race in reporting the news, and hiding news that might some might see as reflecting poorly on some ‘minority’ group.

Basically, Mr Kanuga wants a propaganda media for Philadelphia. Thing is, with the inquirer and its publisher, he’s already half way to his goal.

References

References
↑1 In one short paragraph he lists “Black, Indigenous, migrant, and communities of color by addressing the intersection of voices, cultures, and textures of our achievements and issues. It highlights gender and sexual diversity in these communities.”
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Journolism at its finest: The Philadelphia Inquirer and one-sided reporting

We learned it in high school, if not earlier, how the Bill of Rights protected our rights as the citizens of a free republic. The First Amendment to the Constitution states:

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The hand-written copy of the proposed articles of amendment passed by Congress in 1789, cropped to show just the text in the third article that would later be ratified as the First Amendment.

Over the course of our history, the Supreme Court has ‘incorporated’ most of the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, to include protections for the people from actions by states and local governments, and Americans alive in the 21st century are all used to the concepts of freedom of speech.

We have, sadly, noted how some of our major media sources are no longer so adamant about protecting our First Amendment rights.

Now comes The Philadelphia Inquirer, with a very slanted article about how some people have exercised their freedom of speech, and freedom of peaceable assembly, and how horrible it is! Continue reading →

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What could possibly go wrong?

As we have previously noted, while we might forgive His Majesty King Henry VIII for believing that Catherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn were somehow responsible for his first two children being daughters, the role of the X and Y chromosomes in determining the sex of mammals, including humans, has been known for over a century. Sex is not somehow “assigned” at birth; sex is determined at conception, depending upon whether the sperm which fertilized the egg carries the X or Y chromosome. We recognize the sex of a newborn child by visual examination of the child, but the characteristics which indicate sex developed long before birth, during gestation, as programmed in by the developing child’s DNA.

When you read or hear someone talking about sex being assigned at birth, you know automatically the pure bovine feces is about to follow. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Continue reading →

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A black Philadelphia preacher dares to tell the truth Will the #woke listen?

It’s no surprise that 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 at The Philadelphia Inquirer don’t listen to an evil reich-wing conservative like me, but will they listen to black Philadelphians, to a black Philadelphia Protestant minister?

On Father’s Day Sunday, faith leaders struggle for answers to Philly’s gun violence

“We think we are evolving, but we are going down,” the Rev. Herb Lusk, pastor at Greater Exodus Baptist Church, said following an overnight during which eight people were shot, one fatally.

by Joseph N DiStephano | June 20, 2021

Father’s Day morning, as Philadelphia police searched to identify suspects who shot eight people, one fatally, overnight, Christian leaders struggled to respond to the record-pace city violence that has killed at least 255 people so far this year.

Some felt called to blame fathers, or the absence of them. In too many American families, “people right now are wishing mothers ‘Happy Father’s Day,’” as they try to do double duty, the Rev. Herb Lusk, the former Philadelphia Eagle running back, lamented in his sermon at Greater Exodus Baptist Church on North Broad Street.

He called missing fathers and the lack of their guidance and good example a factor in the way “we are still killing each other. Right now. Black on Black crime. We think we are evolving, but we are going down. We are killing our babies.”

Sunday’s shootings followed three on Saturday, including a triple in Overbrook in which two men were killed and a 3-year-old boy was shot three times in the right leg, which Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw denounced as “sickening”.

There’s much more at the original.

The Philadelphia Police Department only updates its Current Crime Statistics page on weekdays, so the 255 homicides shown are accurate only through the end of Thursday, June 17th. The Inquirer article above sited one murder on Sunday and three on Saturday, with who knows how many on Friday. If the total is ‘only’ those four, for a total of 259 through 171 days, that’s still 1.515 per day, a number which has been slowly creeping up, and leaves the City of Brotherly Love on pace for 553 homicides for the year.

The Rev Lusk, himself a black man, dared to say what only conservatives have been saying, that this is “black on black” crime, that it is primarily young black men killing other young black men. The Rev Lusk dared to say what conservatives have long been saying, that absent sperm donors — I will not dignify a man male who abandons his children with the title of ‘father’ — are a significant cause of this.

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; black Americans make up only about 44% of the city’s population.

If the Rev Lusk can say this, why can’t the editors and staffers of the Inquirer, tell the truth? We have noted previously Elizabeth Hughes, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and her determination to make her newspaper “an anti-racist news organization,” but 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?

For the woke, for the left, mentioning that so much of the violent crime is black criminals preying on black victims simply does not fit Teh Narrative, in which black Americans are being victimized by ‘systemic racism’, it does not fit within the worldview that, Heaven forfend! we blame the actual criminals for their crimes.

A truly “anti racist news organization” would not report the news through the filters of race and political correctness; a truly “anti racist news organization” would report the unvarnished facts, because it is only with a solid consideration of the facts that solutions can be formulated. So far, the staff and editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer have not been willing to do that.

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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Killadelphia The not-so-subtle racism of an "anti-racist news organization"

As of 11:59 PM on Sunday, May 16th, there had been 196 homicides in Philadelphia. That having been the 136th day of the year, that worked out to 1.441 murders per day in the City of Brotherly Love, putting Philly on pace for 526 killings for 2021, if the average held.

That was a month ago. According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, as of the end of Tuesday, June 15th, the city hit what could wryly be called a milestone, it’s 250th murder. The math is pretty bad: 250 homicides ÷ 166 days = 1.506 per day, × 365 = 549.70 murders for the year. The evil, reich-wing Donald Trump has been out of office for just five days short of five months now, the very liberal, opposed to mass incarceration District Attorney Larry Krasner has been renominated, the pandemic restrictions have (mostly) been lifted, and Philly’s murder rate is increasing.

The city’s homicide record was 500, set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990; 2020 saw Philly win the silver medal, with 499. But if the current rate continues, and there’s no sign that it won’t, 550 bodies in the city’s mean streets will break the record by a solid ten percent. Yet, at least as of 3:15 PM, there wasn’t a single story on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page about the three killings overnight, or the ‘milestone’ having been reached, though there was an important story on how the strategic use of wallpaper remains popular in area homes.

Another statistic: 250 homicides thus far in 2021 have eclipsed the entire year’s totals of 246 in 2013 and 248 in 2014, when Michael Nutter was Mayor, Charles Ramsey Police Commissioner and Seth Williams was District Attorney.[1]Seth Williams was convicted on one count of receiving bribes, so he isn’t exactly spotless, but his record as District Attorney was sound. Last year’s 499 homicides exceeded those two years’ total killings. Whatever Jim Kenney, Danielle Outlaw and Larry Krasner, whom the Inquirer actually endorsed for renomination, have been doing has not worked.

#BlackLivesMatter, we are told, and Elizabeth Hughes, the publisher of the Inquirer, has said that her goal is to make the newspaper “an anti-racist news organization,” but, as far as I can tell, black lives don’t matter to the Inquirer. It seems that the only stories the paper publishes are small police blotter reports, usually not on the website main page, unless the victim is an innocent, like Christine Lupo, a “somebody,” like a local high school basketball player, or a cute little white girl, like the 2,782 site search results for Rian Thal.

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?

It does not matter what Miss Hughes says about her goals, and it does not matter that the newspaper has its first Hispanic Executive Editor in Gabriel Escobar; the paper’s coverage shows us what they consider newsworthy. And black lives wasted are simply not newsworthy.

References

References
↑1 Seth Williams was convicted on one count of receiving bribes, so he isn’t exactly spotless, but his record as District Attorney was sound.