It has been pointed out countless times on The First Street Journal that The Philadelphia Inquirer only cares about individual homicides when the victim is an ‘innocent,’ a person already of some note, or a cute little white girl.
And so it has been with the killing of Josh Kruger. Continue reading
Would anyone have expected anything different from Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong? She knows that she has to condemn the riots, but she tries to understand the rioters and looters, and wants to say that she can’t really blame them. Continue reading
We have said, many times, that black lives don’t matter, at least not to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which only reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love in which the victim is an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl is the victim. However, as we have also noted, the newspaper sometimes tries to make ‘innocents’ out of some younger homicide victims, as reporter Anna Orso did with 13-year-old Marcus Stokes, shot while allegedly on his way to school, even though he was sitting in a possibly disabled car which had been sitting on a corner for weeks, not on his way to school, and in the car several minutes after he would have been late for school.
Well, this time it’s reporter Ellie Rushing’s turn! Continue reading
We previously reported on the identification of 15-year-old Rasheed Banks, Jr, as the alleged killer of Michael Salerno during a carjacking attempt, and pointed out that The Philadelphia Inquirer had not covered that story. A check of the newspaper’s website shows that they never did catch up to reporting on that.
However, now that young Mr Banks has been captured, the Inky has covered it:
15-year-old suspect arrested in fatal attempted carjacking in South Philadelphia
On July 12, Michael Salerno, 50, attempted to prevent a carjacking of his vehicle on the 1100 block of Porter Street when he was shot in the head.
by Robert Moran | Monday, August 7, 2023
Authorities on Monday arrested the 15-year-old boy wanted in the fatal shooting of a 50-year-old man during an attempted carjacking last month in South Philadelphia.
Rasheed Banks Jr. was apprehended in Camden by Philadelphia agents of the U.S. Marshals and members of a regional New York and New Jersey fugitive task force, the U.S. Marshals Service Philadelphia announced.
Naturally, the Inquirer did not publish the photo that Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News used in his tweet, nor young Mr Banks’ mugshot, which the Philly television media had and published.
Why not? Remember: publisher Elizabeth Hughes has mandated that the newspaper will be an “anti-racist news organization,” and would censor the news if the news happened to be too politically incorrect.
But what, exactly, is the Inky trying to hide? Yes, they did not publish young Mr Banks’ photo, but let’s tell the truth here: simply publishing his first name, Rasheed, tells every reader that the suspect is black. The newspaper isn’t fooling anyone!
The real question now is: will the George Soros-sponsored, police-hating ‘progressive’ Philadelphia District Attorney, Larry Krasner, charge Mr Banks as an adult? I have heard that Mr Krasner has never offered up a juvenile for an adult charge, though I can’t document that. But if young Mr Banks is indeed the murderer — and he is innocent until proven guilty — and is charged as a juvenile, the longest he could be held in juvenile confinement is until he reaches age 21; then he would have to be released, and his juvenile record sealed.
That’s six years, six years for wanton, willful murder.
We have previously noted some articles in The Philadelphia Inquirer marked as exclusive for paid subscribers. The newspaper has a digital paywall which allows non-subscribers a limited number of articles a month before it descends and blocks access to all articles, but even if you haven’t tried to open an Inky article for months, the subscribers only block will stop you from accessing those stories. Nevertheless, the story below is one that should have been available to more Philadelphia readers!
Yes, the Inquirer does have to make money to stay in business, and the economic condition has been serious enough that the Leftist Lenfest Institute for Journalism has sent out begging letters to subscribers at least thrice that I have documented, so perhaps the $285.48 that I’ve been paying still isn’t enough.
Jim Kenney raised money to boost progressive candidates but spent it on consultants and restaurant tabs
Of the more than $780,000 that Kenney PAC has spent over the last three years, only about $60,000 went to other campaigns. The money has also gone to political operatives and miscellaneous expenses.
by Sean Collins Walsh | Monday, August 7, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT
In early 2020, things were looking good for Mayor Jim Kenney, who had just coasted to reelection after a productive first term and was eyeing statewide office.
In June of that year, he launched Kenney PAC, a political action committee that he said would “help progressive candidates in the forthcoming legislative races in Pennsylvania defeat extremist pro-Trump Republicans.”
Giving money to Democrats across the state would have built goodwill for a mayor little known outside Southeastern Pennsylvania, and news of the PAC helped fuel speculation that Kenney might run for U.S. Senate or governor in 2022.
Well, those “extremist pro-Trump Republicans” haven’t had much success in the Keystone State, but the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania sure hasn’t benefitted under those ‘progressive’ Democrats! Under Mayor Kenney, the City of Brotherly Love, the town he was (supposedly) running, in 2020, the year he launched Kenney PAC, went from 356 homicides — which the Philadelphia Police have now revised down to 353 — to 499, and there are serious reasons to believe that the number was actually 502, as initially reported.
We have noted, several times, the change in the Philadelphia Police Department’s statistics, down from the 502 homicides initially reported for 2020, down to 499, one short of the then-all-time record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, under the ‘leadership’ of then-Mayor Wilson Goode, he of MOVE bombing fame. I made a totally rookie mistake, and failed to get a screen capture of that, but a Twitter fellow styling himself NDJinPhilly was apparently smarter than me that particular time, took the screen shot, and then tweeted it to me.
2020 was the year of the unfortunate death while resisting arrest of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled convicted felon George Floyd in Minneapolis, and riots broke out in many cities, including Philly, but the change in attitudes continued far beyond 2020; Philly saw a whopping 562 homicides in 2021, a number which blew the old record completely apart, along with 190 deaths marked ‘suspicious’. 2022 saw an improvement of sorts, with the official number of homicides down to 516, which was still second all time.
Why, it’s almost as though Philly could have used those “extremist pro-Trump Republicans” running the city!
Back to the Inky:
But of the more than $780,000 that Kenney PAC has spent over the last three years, only about $60,000 went to other campaigns, according to an analysis of campaign finance reports. Instead, the PAC’s money has primarily gone to benefit operatives close to Kenney — who abandoned his hopes of higher office after his popularity tanked starting in 2020 — and to pay for miscellaneous expenses, such as events, hotel rooms, and restaurant bills.
You know what that is? That’s actually good, investigative reporting, which makes me wonder why the newspaper’s Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Gabriel Escobar decided to restrict the article to subscribers only. If there’s anything in the Inquirer’s reporting which should draw in new subscribers, it’s the “high-impact journalism“, “speaking truth to power“, and “high-impact election reporting” the Leftist Lenfest Institute told us the newspaper delivered, yet that’s just what Mr Escobar, or possibly one of his minions, restricted.
I’ve quoted a lot of the article, and cited my sources, as always, but unless you are a subscriber, you can’t even check to see if I’ve lied to you; that bothers me.
I can’t simply quote the whole thing, and I really wish that more people could read it for themselves, but I’ll note briefly here that reporter Sean Collins Walsh pointed out that the top ten donors to Kenney PAC, roughly $399,000 out of $850,000, were all building trade unions; the unions had also been the primary contributors to the Mayor’s two campaigns. Mayor Jim Kenney has just plain checked out, marking time until he’s no longer in the job. The members of those very same unions are the working men of the city who are at risk from the bullets flying around town, especially in the working-class neighborhoods.
What the unions bought with their support of Mr Kenney is greater danger for their members and their families! Perhaps some of those “extremist pro-Trump Republicans” could have done a better job? After all, it hardly seems that they could have done worse!
Yes, I’m paying good money to subscribe to The Philadelphia Inquirer, $5.49 per week, or $285.48 a year, so you’d think that that august journal, our nation’s third-oldest surviving daily newspaper, the winner of 20 Pulitzer Prizes, would do something really, really radical like report the news!
Well, I didn’t find this story in the Inquirer, but due to a tweet from Fox 29 News
Man charged in deadly ambush shooting of mother near crowded Philadelphia park, police say
Published July 27, 2023 11:00AM |Updated 12:04PM | Crime & Public Safety | FOX 29 Philadelphia
PHILADELPHIA – Homicide detectives have made an arrest in the deadly shooting of a local mother gunned down in a parked car in Philadelphia earlier this week, police say.Alexander Grady, photo via Fox 29 News.
Note the date of the Fox 29 News article: it was initially reported at 11:00 AM on Thursday. That means that the Inquirer has had plenty of time to write its own story. But, as of 9:29 AM EDT on Friday, July 28th, there is absolutely nothing on this on either the Inky’s website main page or specific crime page.
Tina Arroyo, 32, was gunned down on Monday evening while sitting in the driver’s seat of a Honda Civic parked on the 500 block of East Louden Street, according to police.
“She pulled up on this scene and within moments another vehicle pulls up and shoots her,” Sgt. Eric Gripp said. “How quickly it happened and the callousness of all of it is deeply troubling.”
The shooting took place across the street from a crowded park, officials say.
On Thursday, police announced the arrest of 26-year-old Alexander Grady.
Grady has been charged with murder, criminal conspiracy, VUFA and related charges.
How can the newspaper be called a newspaper when it doesn’t report the news?
We have previously noted that many of the credentialed media journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading have complained about Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News and his unsoftened coverage of crime in the city. Now, what I have previously referred to as The 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. are combitching again, but they have been lying in their complaints.
In a main editorial supposedly written by the Inquirer’s Editorial Board, but reads like something composed by hard-left columnist Will Bunch, the newspaper complained:
Of course, no place is perfect. The record gun violence in Philadelphia is beyond distressing. But mainly Republican state and federal lawmakers — many of whom represent suburban districts — share responsibility for enabling and glorifying gun culture.
That, of course, is not what “mainly Republican state and federal lawmakers” did. Rather, they recognized that gun control laws do not and have not stopped criminals from obtaining firearms, and removed some impediments on law-abiding citizens from purchasing weapons. As we have previously reported, Philadelphians themselves have been seeking concealed carry permits in unprecedented numbers because of the chaos in the city.
Local TV news shares some blame as well for disproportionately covering gun crimes in the city. That negative narrative shapes the views of many who act as if bullets are flying everywhere in Philadelphia when nearly all of the more than 1.5 million residents manage to go about their routines each day.
Really? Let’s check that! The hyperlink embedded in the newspaper’s own editorial does not say what the Editorial Board claimed!
Kaufman and her fellow researchers drew on police reports and information kept by the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit research group, to monitor media reporting during 2017 in three different cities: Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Rochester, NY. Of the 1,801 victims of intentional shootings (outside of self-inflicted shootings), the researchers saw that almost exactly half, 900, were covered in the news.
Of these victims, roughly 83 percent were Black, but just 49 percent of them made the news. Moreover, if the victim was a man, he was about 40 percent less likely to be covered on the news than a woman.
How many times have we reported that for The Philadelphia Inquirer, unless a shooting or murder victim is an ‘innocent,’ 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 simply not news. We have often noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer, the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, doesn’t like to tell its readers the unvarnished truth, likes to censor what its readers see. The Inquirer only rarely reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. 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?
The Editorial Board are complaining about disproportionate coverage, when that is exactly what their newspaper has given us!
Disparities in news coverage continued when the deadliness of the shootings was examined. Although 16 percent of the victims from the analyzed shootings died, these fatal shootings accounted for 83 percent of the cases covered by the news.
So, both the cited research and the Editorial Board are complaining that non-fatal shootings get less news coverage than fatal ones? Is that somehow a surprise? As Mark Fusetti just pointed out, the City of Brotherly Love passed the 1,000 mark for fatal and non-fatal shootings this year. On how many has the Inky reported?
“A vast majority of the victims of gun violence survive, but I don’t think the public knows much about people whose lives have been disrupted in so many ways by their injuries, and who need all our support to recover,” Kaufman said. “I like to think that more public awareness of the impact of gun violence on survivors would lead to broader support for the services and programs that they need.”
The Inquirer actually has reported on shooting victims who have survived, but I cannot recall such a story on a surviving gang-banger; the newspaper seems to tell us only about the innocent victims of shootings. Then again, as we have previously reported, the newspaper tried to make an innocent victim out of a homicide victim who was clearly not so innocent a victim.
And, of course, we have noted the apparent editorial decision to stop using the word “gang”, and replace it with “street group”
Statistics have shown that one in four Americans perceive mass shootings to be the greatest gun violence threat facing their communities, but the study showed that shootings with multiple victims occurred just 22 percent of the time. However, mass shootings were almost six times as likely to make the news.
Could that be because the Inquirer itself plays up the ‘mass shootings,’ especially when the victims are not black, and downplays the killings of black ‘street group’ members?
But here comes the biggest lie of all:
In fact, rural counties have a higher rate of gun deaths than cities — contrary to country singer Jason Aldean’s recent paean to small town life. Not to mention, most mass shootings occur in small towns, studies show, while a separate report found Center City, at least, remained “remarkably safe.”
We previously reported that in 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.
It got worse in 2021: with 562 homicides in Philly, out of 1027 total for Pennsylvania, 54.72% of all homicides in the Keystone State occurred in Philadelphia. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, was second, with 123 killings, 11.98% of the state’s total, but only 9.52% of Pennsylvania’s population.
The other 65 counties, with 78.11% of the state’s total population, had 33.30% of total murders. It should also be noted that in comparing 2018 with 2021, the homicide rate for the 65 counties which are not Philadelphia and Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is), barely increased, from 3.38 per 100,000 population, to 3.42, a 1.12% rise, in Philadelphia it jumped from 22.31 to 35.53 per 100,000 population, a 59.21% increase.
Things got slightly better in the City of Brotherly Love in 2022, with 516 homicides officially reported in the Philadelphia, out of 1,015 total homicides for the Commonwealth. That’s still 50.84% of the killings in the Commonwealth!
The Census Bureau’s July 1, 2022 population estimates for Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia specifically, were 12,972,008 and 1,567,258 respectively, meaning that Philly had just 12.08% of the state’s population. The homicide rate for the rest of the Keystone State was 4.38 per 100,000 population, while for Philly it works out to 32.92 per 100,000, 7½ times the rest of the Commonwealth.
Strip out the 138 homicides in Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, and the 65 other counties in the Commonwealth had 361 homicides for 10,171,497 people, for a murder rate of 3.55 per 100,000.
The same source lists 418 murders and non-negligent homicides so far in 2023; the Philadelphia Police Department reported that, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, July 23rd, 239 of those murders occurred in Philadelphia. That’s 57.18% of the total, in a city with 12.08% of the Commonwealth’s population, and that’s in a year in which homicides are down!
How did the Editorial Board’s citation get it so wrong?
The findings are based on an analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The authors attributed the trend to a rise in gun suicides, which outnumbered gun homicides in 2021 by more than 5,300 and are more likely to occur in rural counties.
The Editorial Board conflated suicides with murders. News flash: people haven’t been arming themselves in tremendous numbers to protect themselves from suicides!
I do not claim to be a super-genius like Wile E Coyote, but am pretty good with numbers. Being good with numbers, it’s pretty easy for me to spot bovine feces when people misuse statistics and references as citations, as I did in this article. Who knows? Perhaps the Editorial Board simply assume that they are smarter than their readers, or believe that readers won’t check their source citations. Well, perhaps most won’t, but out of all of the newspaper’s subscribers, surely they ought to guess that a few people will.
References
| ↑1 | The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias. |
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| ↑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. |
Rasheed Banks, Jr, via WVPI-TV.
The Philadelphia Inquirer was more than willing to tell readers about how heroic Michael Salerno intervened to try to stop a carjacking, and was killed for his efforts:
Police identify man killed in South Philly trying to stop a carjacking
Michael Salerno was trying to prevent three young men from stealing his car while a woman was still inside, police said.
by Rob Tornoe | Thursday, July 13, 2023 | 2:22 PM EDT
A Philadelphia man is dead after police say he tried to stop three young men from stealing his car Wednesday night.
Police said the victim, identified as Michael Salerno, 50, was attempting to prevent his car from being carjacked around 10:45 p.m. in South Philadelphia. A woman was in the car, but officials declined to identify her, citing the ongoing investigation.
“Preliminary information appears that the motive for this homicide began with a carjacking of a female, and when the owner intervened, he was shot and killed,” Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small told reporters Wednesday night.
The episode occurred on Porter Street near South 12th Street. Salerno had just arrived at the location but wasn’t in the car when the attempted carjacking occurred, according to police, who declined to say whether it was near his home.Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Death in Killadelphia
There’s more at the original, but at the time, all that we were told was that the suspects were to be three “young men, appearing to be between the ages of 15 and early 20s, dressed in dark clothing.”
WPVI-TV, known locally as Channel 6, the ABC owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia, had more on Friday, as the Philadelphia Police Department identified one of the suspects, 15-year-old Rasheed Banks, Jr., and published his photograph. Young Mr Banks is still on the loose as I write this, but if WPVI is trying to help, showing Philadelphians for whom to be on the lookout, as of 9:12 PM, The Philadelphia Inquirer has nothing about this.
Then there was this from Fox 29 News. The Philadelphia Police Department released surveillance photos of the suspects in the shootings on which we have previously reported. The editors of the Inquirer were naturally horrified at the fact an 11-year-old girl, almost certainly simply an innocent struck by a stray bullet — out of around 30 fired in what may have been a gunfight between gangs — but, when the Police released photos of the suspects, in the hopes that someone would recognize them and give information to the police, the Inquirer has chosen not to publish either the story or the photos of the suspects.
Given that two of the suspects are shown wearing hooded sweatshirts, with the hoods pulled up, on a Philadelphia evening where it was above 70º F, it would seem obvious that this wasn’t a snap decision, but gang members, oops, sorry, ‘street group’ members out with intentions that were less than kindly.
That the Inquirer chose not to inform its readers, readers who are paying for the privilege[1]My unlimited digital subscription: $5.49/week, billed every 4 weeks; that’s $285.48 a year. of reading our nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper, because publisher Elizabeth Hughes forthrightly told us that the newspaper would censor the news if it was too politically incorrect.
Not that the Inquirer didn’t give us important news!
But warning readers about killers and gang bangers still on the city’s streets, and perhaps, just perhaps, getting them picked up a bit earlier? Nope, not the Inky!
References
| ↑1 | My unlimited digital subscription: $5.49/week, billed every 4 weeks; that’s $285.48 a year. |
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The main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website had, at 7:07 PM EDT on Sunday, June 25th, an interesting juxtaposition. The site seems to automatically search for and note related stories, and had two listed below the main story headline.
A South Philly neighborhood was awash in retaliatory gunfire. A recent trial showed the human cost.
“We don’t like each other,” Nyseem Smith said while telling police about shootings he and his friends committed against rival groups.
by Chris Palmer | Sunday, June 25, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT
To hear Nyseem Smith tell it, shooting people was something of a pastime for him and his friends in South Philadelphia.
Week after week, sometimes day after day, Smith said, he and his crew from 31st Street would fall into a familiar routine: They’d steal a car, hop in with guns they all shared, then go looking for rivals to shoot.
Sometimes, he said, they’d seek out young men associated with 27th Street, another neighborhood group. Other times, they’d look for people who lived around the nearby Wilson Park apartments.
The cycle of violence — sometimes chronicled on Instagram — became virtually impossible to extinguish. And by the time investigators caught up with Smith in 2019, he confessed to a staggering array of crimes.
I guess that Mr Smith knew they had him! But, as you’d probably have guessed, he was singing because the prosecutors had cut him a deal.
Regular readers of The First Street Journal — both of them! — have probably realized by now that I read with a careful eye, and notice things that some might miss. In the first four paragraphs of reporter Chris Palmer’s story, we see Mr Smith’s, and other people’s, gangs referred to as “his friends,” “neighborhood group,” “crew”, and “people”. We have previously noted that the newspaper really, really, really doesn’t like to refer to gangs as gangs, and in the 42 paragraphs beyond the four that I quoted, unless I just plain missed it — and unless you’re an Inquirer subscriber, you can’t check my work on this! 🙂 — the words “gang” or “gangs” appear exactly zero times.
Mr Palmer is one of the four Inquirer reporters credited with the article in which the newspaper told us that there were no real gangs in the city!
In Philadelphia, there are no gangs in the traditional, nationally known sense. Instead, they are cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families. The groups have names — Young Bag Chasers, Penntown, Northside — and members carry an allegiance to each other, but they aren’t committing traditional organized crimes, like moving drugs, the way gangs did in the past.
Ahhh, but that search function led the Inky to post a link to this story:
Krasner, state officials announce nine arrests in long-running South Philly gang feud
District Attorney Larry Krasner said Thursday that an additional six suspects are being sought.
by Vinny Vella and Mike Newall | Thursday, April 15, 2021
Jackee Nichols had come to believe the city had forgotten about her 15-year-old grandson, Rasul Benson. In October 2018, Rasul was gunned down at a South Philadelphia Gulf station while pumping gas with his friends for tip money to buy a cheesesteak.
On Thursday morning, Nichols finally received the answer she had been waiting for when an investigator working with the Philadelphia Gun Violence Task Force called to tell her a man had been arrested and another was being sought for Benson’s slaying as part of a sweep of nine suspects involved in a gang-fueled turf war between 2016 and 2020.
There’s more at the original, but it seems that the Inky wasn’t shying away from the truth on income tax day two years ago. I assume that this somehow all stems from publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ edict that the newspaper would be an “anti-racist news organization.”
We are, we have been told, supposed to respect journalists. Columnist Jenice Armstrong recently told us that “the press is the only profession mentioned in the U.S. Constitution,” though it actually refers to the right ot people to publish, not the journalists’ profession. The newspaper’s Senior Vice President and Executive Editor, Gabriel Escobar, said, “When people say ‘fake news’ and it is aimed at staining the work that journalists do, there’s great danger in that.”
Yet here is The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, older than The New York Times and The Washington Post, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, mealy-mouthing their words, seemingly having amended their stylebook to soften the truth rather than simply printing it.
Our professional media don’t normally lie outright, though, like any other human beings, reporters and editors can occasionally make mistakes. But the bias in the media comes through, if you take care to notice, by what they choose to print, and not to print, by the words that they choose, normally regulated by a stylebook, to use in their stories.
If it’s a gang, say it’s a gang!
