Tag Archives: #PoliticalCorrectness

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Political correctness in the Lexington Herald-Leader? (Part3) I wonder if journalists have been replaced by journolists?

We noted, in two different stories, that while all of the other Lexington media sources published the picture of Juanyah Clay, who was being sought in the murder of 26-year-old Bryan D. Greene, whose body police found at the Eastridge Apartments on Alumni Drive on January 30th. The first linked story concerned the police looking for Mr Clay, so the publication of his photo could only have helped the police find him.

We also noted that in both of the earlier stories in the Lexington Herald-Leader included stock photos of the police stringing crime scene tape around an unspecified area, so the failure to use Mr Clay’s photo, which was freely available at the Lexington city government’s page as well as the Police Department’s Facebook page. Thus, it was not a matter of the newspaper having to pay someone for the photo.

And today, we have this:

Detectives detail multiple cases against Lexington man charged in Alumni Drive murder

By Morgan Eads | April 15, 2021 | 12:31 PM

At a court hearing Thursday morning, two detectives and a jail employee discussed the various charges against a man accused of shooting and killing a 26-year-old after he was already wanted for cutting off an ankle monitor while on conditional release in a different criminal case.

Juanyah J. Clay, 19, was arrested in March and charged with murder in the death of 26-year-old Bryan Greene, according to police.

Greene’s body was found on the night of Jan. 30 after someone spotted a large amount of blood outside an apartment at 2800 Alumni Drive, Lexington police detective Jeremy Atkins testified at the preliminary hearing Thursday. When police went inside the apartment they found Greene dead of what appeared to be multiple gunshot wounds.

Further down we find:

Clay was arrested on March 30 at a hotel on E. Lowery Lane, Lexington police detective Keith McKinney testified. He was found to have $1,020 in small bills, three concealed loaded firearms and unknown pills on his person, and a digital scale and marijuana was found in the room he was exiting, McKinney said. In addition to the charge of murder, Clay is facing two charges of drug trafficking and one charge of concealing a deadly weapon.

After his arrest, Clay admitted to Atkins that he shot Greene, Atkins testified. Clay also stated that another person was present at the time of Greene’s death, and that that person has since died. While Atkins did not testify to how that person died, he said that the person’s name was Markel Allen, which is the name of a 17-year-old who was shot and killed in Lexington on Feb. 17. That case is still under investigation.

At the time of Greene’s death, Clay had an arrest warrant out for violating the conditions of his release as he awaited trial on a separate burglary charge, according to court records. An employee of the Fayette County Detention Center testified Thursday that Clay was placed on an ankle monitor in May of 2020. He’s accused of cutting that ankle monitor off in June 2020 and throwing it out the window of a vehicle in Lexington, the jail employee testified.

Sounds like a bad dude! He was in possession of illegal drugs and the paraphernalia for selling it, and three concealed, loaded weapons, all while he was on the lam for a burglary trial.

But here’s the part that gets me. The Herald-Leader included this video in today’s story:

Underneath was the caption:

Lexington Police Chief Lawrence Weathers urged people with information regarding homicide investigations to speak with police. He said some witnesses don’t cooperate with police investigations, making it more difficult to identify suspects. By Jeremy Chisenhall

Jeremy Chisenhall was the writer of the first two stories, the ones referenced in my previous articles.

Now, if the Herald-Leader is going to post the video of Police Chief Lawrence Weathers urging people to come forward, why wouldn’t the paper publish the suspect’s photo, particularly when the suspect was at large, and information from the public could have proven helpful in finding him?

I do not know the newspaper’s policy on this, and when I tried to contact both Morgan Eads, who wrote today’s story, and Mr Chisenhall, who wrote the previous two, neither was available by telephone.

So, I will go back to my previous speculation of March 30th: if the newspaper’s website had enough bandwidth available for a generic crime story photo, why didn’t the Herald-Leader include Mr Clay’s photo instead? Wouldn’t Mr Clay’s photograph be much more useful to people who might just happen to see him on the streets than a picture of crime scene tape?

That’s the big question, why? And being the very politically incorrect observer of media bias that I am, one answer springs immediately to mind. Having written about the horrible damage the #woke and #BlackLivesMatter activists have done in the newsrooms of The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer, I instantly thought: to have published the photo of a murder suspect who happens to be black might be seen as racist by the reporter or his editors.

Is there another explanation for this egregious failure of journalism? If there is, it hasn’t occurred to me. Perhaps someone else can give me a better answer, but right now, I’m calling it the way I see it: the newspaper cares more about political correctness than it does journalism. Journolism over journalism, perhaps?

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I am wryly amused

As my too-few regular readers know, I have not been exactly charitable in my writings concerning The Philadelphia Enquirer Inquirer.[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, which brings to my mind the National Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but I thought it very apt.

Thus, I was somewhat amused when I received this in my e-mail:

<

Dear Dana,

We wrote to you earlier this week to share the news of our $20,000 match to raise support for The Inquirer’s high-impact journalism. Your generosity ensures that The Philadelphia Inquirer can continue to tell important stories like the recent Under Fire series on the tragedy and impacts of gun violence in Philadelphia.

We invite you to support this kind of public service journalism by making a gift to support The Philadelphia Inquirer’s High-Impact Journalism Fund.
Yes, double my gift!

Best,
Rebecca

Rebecca Forman
The Lenfest Institute for Journalism

Of course, being the [insert slang term for the rectum here] that I am, I had to respond:

Dear Miss Forman:

 
I might consider making such a gift when the Inquirer stops referring to “gun violence” and starts calling it what it is: criminality on the part of a criminal population.
 
I know, I know: it isn’t politically correct, but you can never solve a problem if you are not honest about what the problem is, and the Inquirer is not honest. Guns do not have some sort of malevolent intelligence all their own, like the One Ring of Sauron, but are inanimate objects which are picked up and misused by criminals.  
 
I live out in the country, where almost every home has a firearm or three, yet people out here, despite a too-large illegal drug problem, simply aren’t killing each other at anywhere near the rate that Philadelphians are. 
 
When I lived in Jim Thorpe, from 2002 through 2017 just seventy miles up the Northeast Extension of the Turnpike, the county went eight entire years without a homicide, and when that streak ended, the murder was committed not with a gun, but by strangulation. The next murder, a few years later, was committed with a knife. All of this, in a county with thousands of hunters, a county in which firearm ownership was widespread. And Carbon County was under the same gun control laws as Philadelphia, as the rest of Pennsylvania. Perhaps the Inquirer ought to ask why this disparity exists, but I’m certain that such a question cannot ever be asked, because the answers that might be found could never, ever, be published.
 
I have written frequently on what passes for journalism in the Inquirer; you may read my articles at your leisure.
 
Sincerely, Dana R Pico.

I do not anticipate a response. 🙂

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, which brings to my mind the National Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but I thought it very apt.
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Political correctness in the Lexington Herald-Leader?

I recently wrote about the death of print newspapers, lamenting their one-foot-and-three-toes-on-the-other-in-the-grave impending demise, and hoping for a more positive future in the digital and internet world. I noted one major advantage of digital newspapers: they aren’t stuck with print deadlines, but can continually update stories, and they have much more room to publish photographs.

That was in my mind when I read this one in the Lexington Herald-Leader:

Suspect named after Lexington man found shot to death in his apartment, police say

By Jeremy Chisenhall | March 29, 2021 | 12:49 PM | Updated March 29, 2021 | 3:45 PM

A 19-year-old has been named as a suspect in the killing of a Lexington man shot to death in his apartment earlier this year, police said Monday.

Juanyah J. Clay, 19, was wanted on a murder warrant, Lexington police said.

Clay is accused of killing 26-year-old Bryan D. Greene, a man police found dead at the Eastridge Apartments on Alumni Drive on Jan. 30.

There’s a bit more at the original, including where anyone who spots Mr Clay can notify the Lexington Police Department of his whereabouts.

But while there’s a wasted photo of a Lexington Police Department crime scene, with an officer stringing yellow crime scene tape around a site, what there isn’t is a photograph of the suspect.[1]I checked the site again at 1:10 PM EDT, about ten minutes prior to publication of this article.

Juanyah J Clay, from the LEX18 website. Click to enlarge.

Naturally, I wondered: was there no photograph of Mr Clay available to the Herald-Leader? So, naturally, I checked, with a simple Google search for juanyah j clay, and shazamm! not only was his photo available, it was available in other Lexington media. WLEX-TV, Channel 18, the local NBC affiliate had the story with Mr Clay’s picture, in an article dated six minutes before the in in the newspaper, and updated three hours after the LEX18 article. WKYT-TV, Channel 27, the local CBS affiliate, also had an article, with the same photo. WTVQ, Channel 36, the local ABC affiliate had the story, and the photo, as did WDKY, Channel 56, the Fox affiliate.

The Lexington city government website had the photo, as did the Lexington Police Department’s Facebook page.

It seems that everybody had Mr Clay’s photo, everybody except the Herald-Leader. And every story, including the one in the Herald-Leader, had a very similar statement to that on the newspaper’s site:

Police asked anyone with information on Clay’s whereabouts to contact Lexington Police by calling (859) 258-3600. Anonymous tips can be submitted to Bluegrass Crime Stoppers by calling (859) 253-2020, online at www.bluegrasscrimestoppers.com, or through the P3 tips app available at www.p3tips.com.

Now, if people who might happen to spot the suspect are asked to call it in, including in the newspaper’s article, and the newspaper’s website had enough bandwidth available for a generic crime story photo, why didn’t the Herald-Leader include Mr Clay’s photo instead? Wouldn’t Mr Clay’s photograph be much more useful to people who might just happen to see him on the streets than a picture of crime scene tape?

That’s the big question, why? And being the very politically incorrect observer of media bias that I am, one answer springs immediately to mind. Having written about the horrible damage the #woke and #BlackLivesMatter activists have done in the newsrooms of The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer, I instantly thought: to have published the photo of a murder suspect who happens to be black might be seen as racist by the reporter or his editors.

Is there another explanation for this egregious failure of journalism? If there is, it hasn’t occurred to me. Perhaps someone else can give me a better answer, but right now, I’m calling it the way I see it: the newspaper cares more about political correctness than it does journalism.

References

References
↑1 I checked the site again at 1:10 PM EDT, about ten minutes prior to publication of this article.
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The Washington Post dances around the right question, but never actually asks it, because that would be too politically incorrect! If you are not courageous enough to ask the right questions, you will never get the right answers.

We have been saying all along that the credentialed media have been ignoring the soaring homicide rates in our major cities.

Well, it took the mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder to focus their attention, but it looks like The Washington Post finally got around to noticing as well:

Shootings never stopped during the pandemic: 2020 was the deadliest gun violence year in decades

By Reis Thebault and Danielle Rindler | March 23, 2021 | 11:42 PM EDT

Until two lethal rampages this month, mass shootings had largely been absent from headlines during the coronavirus pandemic. But people were still dying — at a record rate.

In 2020, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 Americans, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, more than any other year in at least two decades. An additional 24,000 people died by suicide with a gun.

The vast majority of these tragedies happen far from the glare of the national spotlight, unfolding instead in homes or on city streets and — like the covid-19 crisis — disproportionately affecting communities of color.

Last week’s shootings at spas in the Atlanta area and Monday’s shooting at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., killed a combined 18 people and rejuvenated a national effort to overhaul gun laws. But high-profile mass shootings such as those tend to overshadow the instances of everyday violence that account for most gun deaths, potentially clouding some people’s understanding of the problem and complicating the country’s response, experts say.

OK, they are starting to identify the problem. A bit further down:

“More than 100 Americans are killed daily by gun violence,” Ronnie Dunn, a professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University, said, using a figure that includes suicides. “The majority are in Black and Brown communities. We don’t really focus on gun violence until we have these mass shootings, but it’s an ongoing, chronic problem that affects a significant portion of our society.”

Of course, the article and the interviewees are all using the currently politically correct phrase, “gun violence,” as though firearms just pick themselves off the shelf and start shooting people. No one seems to be willing to point out that these shootings are being done by bad people!

Dr Dunn noted that the majority of these homicides “are in Black and Brown communities,” but seems quite unwilling to note that while the majority of victims “are in Black and Brown communities,” it is also true that the majority of their killers are part of the “black and brown communities.“[1]Note that The Washington Post is using the Associated Press Stylebook, which capitalizes ‘black’ when referring to race, and now capitalizes ‘brown’ as well. The First Street … Continue reading

Overall, most homicides in the United States are intraracial, and the rates of white-on-white and Black-on-Black killings are similar, both long term and in individual years.

Between 1980-2008, the U.S. Department of Justice found that 84% of white victims were killed by white offenders and 93% of Black victims were killed by Black offenders.

In 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that 81% of white victims were killed by white offenders, and 89% of Black victims were killed by Black offenders.

In 2017, the FBI reported almost identical figures — 80% of white victims were killed by white offenders, and 88% of Black victims were killed by Black offenders.

Back to the Post. Dr Dunn, as you might expect, tried to place the blame on the increased killings on all sorts of things, including increased gun sales:

Researchers say the pandemic probably fueled the increases in several ways. The spread of the coronavirus hampered anti-crime efforts, and the attendant shutdowns compounded unemployment and stress at a time when schools and other community programs were closed or online. They also note the apparent collapse of public confidence in law enforcement that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Covid-19 and the protests over police brutality also led to a surge of firearm sales. In 2020, people purchased about 23 million guns, a 64 percent increase over 2019 sales, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data on gun background checks.

Dunn pointed to this flood of firearms as the most detrimental factor in the fight to curb gun violence. When shootings become “the soundscape of inner-city neighborhoods,” he said, “it increases anxiety and stress and creates toxic stress.” Dunn compared the effect to post-traumatic stress disorder akin to what war veterans experience.

What didn’t you see in that? You didn’t see Dr Dunn point to any research which shows that the legally-purchased firearms surge, as a result of the #BlackLivesMatter “Mostly Peaceful Protests™” were at all related to the killings in our inner cities.

When riots and violence are spreading through our cities, and the images and news of that are being purveyed over the network and cable news day in and day out, it’s perfectly natural that some people would believe that they needed additional protection; that’s why gun sales increased. Dr Dunn wants you to believe that it why homicides spiked, but offers no proof that those increased gun sales had anything to do with it.

Have the police linked any of these additional forearms sales to the increased homicide rates? If they have, I’ve managed to miss that story.

One recent study, from the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, called gun violence “a public health crisis decades in the making.” An analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found Black males between the ages of 15 and 34 accounted for 37 percent of gun homicides, even though they made up 2 percent of the U.S. population — a rate 20 times that of White males of the same age.

Here Dr Dunn provides the test. If black males between 15 and 34 account for 37% of homicides by firearm, while making up just 2% of the population, if the increased firearms sales have significantly contributed to the increased homicide rate, then we should see a heavy predominance of black males in that age group making up the increase in applications to purchase a firearm legally. Such would, if perhaps not prove what Dr Dunn is saying, at least provide a strong inference of it.

On average, there was one mass shooting every 73 days in 2020, compared with one every 36 days in 2019 and one every 45 days in 2017 and 2018. The slowdown interrupted what had been a five-year trend of more frequent and more deadly mass shootings.

That gun violence increased overall even as mass shootings declined underscores the fact that those high-profile events account for a relatively small share of firearm deaths. It should draw more attention to the victims and survivors of gun violence across the country, (Mark Barden, a co-founder of the gun violence prevention group Sandy Hook Promise) said.

So, while homicides have increased, mass shooting events have decreased. It’s almost as though the random events of nuts going off and committing these high-profile crimes has nothing to do with the increased homicide rate.

But, of course, it’s the mass shootings which make the news, because, let’s face it: a couple of gang-bangers getting killed in Philadelphia isn’t even news anymore.

If black males between 15 and 34 are the victims of homicide at a rate twenty times that of white males of the same age, then we need to ask why that is, but one thing is certain: it’s not guns. There is something different in the education, culture and experiences of white and black males that is causing black males of those ages to kill each other at such rates, and until we start asking what those differences are, we will never honestly address the issue.

But in our age of political correctness, we cannot ask the questions, without being accused of being the world’s most horrible racist, an accusation which shuts down the questions, and shutting down the questions means shutting off all hope of coming up with the right answers.

Me? I’m less than a month from my 68th birthday, and I’m retired. I have no job from which I can be fired for asking politically incorrect questions, have nothing from which I can be #canceled. I can ask the uncomfortable questions, when no one else seems to be willing or able to do so.

But if other people don’t step up, if other people won’t ask the right questions, we might as well face it: we’ll never have the right answers. But, sadly enough, our friends on the left already know that. They have had the choice between asking the right questions, and hoping to find the right answers, or ignoring the right questions, because by doing that they risk far less for themselves, and the only real price for that is more dead black people on the streets of Washington and Chicago and Philadelphia.

We know what choice they have taken.

References

References
↑1 Note that The Washington Post is using the Associated Press Stylebook, which capitalizes ‘black’ when referring to race, and now capitalizes ‘brown’ as well. The First Street Journal does not go along with that.
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Virtue must be signaled!

Robert Aaron Long, 21, a guy with some serious, serious mental problems, shot up three Atlanta metropolitan area ‘massage parlors,’ killing eight people, six of whom were of Asian descent. Four were Korean. Naturally, it’s being called a hate crime by the left, though the details don’t quite match up.

But that doesn’t matter; the Usual Suspects are all over this as a hate crime, as though any deliberate murder isn’t an act of hate. From The New York Times:

Why Some Georgia Lawmakers Want Last Week’s Shootings Labeled Hate Crimes

Violence that left eight dead, including six women of Asian descent, will be the first stress test for a Georgia hate crime law.

By Astead W. Herndon and Stephanie Saul |March 21, 2021

A year ago, Georgia was one of four states that had no hate crime legislation.

But the deadly rampage last week that left eight people dead, six of them women of Asian descent, is now providing a test of a law passed last year — and a window into the way that the state’s increasingly diverse electorate has altered its political and cultural chemistry.

Georgia, after earlier false starts, passed its legislation following the shooting death of a young Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, who was stopped, detained and then shot to death by white residents in a South Georgia suburban neighborhood.

Now last week’s shootings, in which Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with eight counts of murder, are providing a major stress test for when the legislation can be applied, what it can achieve and how it plays into the state’s increasingly polarized politics.

Political leaders, civil rights activists, and national and local elected officials condemned last week’s attack as an act of bigoted terror, drawing a connection between the majority-Asian victims and a recent surge in hate crimes against Asian and Pacific Islander Americans.

Mr Long has already been charges with premeditated murder. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Georgia not only has capital punishment, but carries it out, having executed 76 people since the restoration of capital punishment in 1976. An obvious question is: why bother to charge Mr Long with ‘hate crimes’ if there’s really nothing more they can do to him?

Law enforcement officials and some legal figures have shied away from labeling the killings a hate crime, saying there is insufficient evidence of motivation. Prosecutors in two separate counties are still weighing whether to invoke the hate crimes law.

If the evidence for a hate crime is weak, charging under the hate crime stature becomes problematic. It adds to the length and expense of any trial, and runs a serious risk of acquittal on such charges.

But that has not stopped the shootings from resonating as bias crimes for many in Georgia, a state that has been at the forefront of the demographic changes coursing through the South.

“I don’t want to draw any conclusions, but it’s obvious to me that if six victims were Asian women, that was a target,” said Georgia State Representative Calvin Smyre, a longtime Democratic lawmaker who helped shepherd the hate crimes bill through the General Assembly.

And there it is: it’s just obvious to Representative Smyre that, because women of Asian descent were killed, they must’ve been targeted because they were Asian. But sometimes, just because someone thinks that something is obvious doesn’t make it true.

Eight people are dead, and Mr Long has been charged with their murder. He is facing life in prison without the possibility of parole or perhaps even a capital sentence on those charges. If he is convicted on those, there’s nothing more a hate crimes rider can do to him.

But virtue must be signaled! My question is: if the killings of the six Asian women was so horrible, and must be charged as hate crimes, does that make the deaths of the other two victims somehow less significant, less important? Are the two non-Asian victims somehow less dead than the six Asian ones?

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Politically correct crime reporting

The Lexington Herald-Leader reported Tuesday on the 2020 homicide numbers in Kentucky’s second largest city, home of the University of Kentucky, and where I lived from August of 1971 through December of 1984. There were 34 homicides in the city in 2020, up from 30 in 2019, which was the previous record. With a guesstimated population of 323,152 in mid-2019, that puts the city’s murder rate at 10.53 per 100,000 population, far, far behind places like Philadelphia and Chicago. Lexington-Fayette County is the 60th largest city in the United States, larger than St Louis, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.[1]Unlike some other larger cities, Lexington has no contiguous suburbs, in that the Lexington city and Fayette County governments merged in 1974.

Teens, disputes drove a Lexington homicide record. COVID-19 made cases hard to solve

By Jeremy Chisenhall | January 5, 2021 | 2:57 PM EST | Updated: 4:12 PM EST

Lexington Police Chief Lawrence Weathers, from the city website.

Many of Lexington’s record-breaking 2020 homicides were violent conclusions to arguments or other crimes involving male adults or teens.

There were 34 homicides in Lexington in 2020, a 13 percent increase from 2019, according to Lexington police data. The previous record was 30, set in 2019. The difficulty of identifying suspects in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic made matters worse for police.

“Everybody’s wearing masks,” Lexington Police Chief Lawrence Weathers told the Herald-Leader. “That puts a little extra work on us, and we have to corroborate a little bit more on some of the things without having a full face.”

Well, Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) did mandate that, so, how about that, even criminals are obeying the orders!

There’s a lot more at the original, which you can read at the embedded link.

Jeremy Chisenhall, the article author, included some graphics in which homicides were mapped by location, by time and day of the week, by the ages and sexes of the victims and suspects.

You know what’s missing? Any data or graphics on the race or ethnicity of the victims and suspects.

Now, I didn’t know if it was political correctness on the part of the Herald-Leader or Mr Chisenhall that omitted that information, or whether the Lexington Police Department failed to provide it, so I did the obvious thing: I went to the Police Department’s website. There I found a chart on homicide investigations, listing all 34 victims and the current dispositions of their cases, including named suspects, plus the ages of the victims and where they were killed. But it doesn’t disclose race or ethnicity.

The LPD certainly keeps that information, because in another chart, on the same page I found the homicide chart, is a three page .pdf file of assaults with firearms, which specifically states that it does not include homicides, in which the races, sexes and ages of the victims are specified.

I was able to dig a bit deeper. On the homicides page, the 25 named offenders were hyperlinked to their mugshots. Based on observation of mugshots and names, I counted 11 non-Hispanic black males, 2 non-Hispanic black females, 4 non-Hispanic white males, 1 non-Hispanic white female, 2 Hispanic white males, 1 black Hispanic white male, 2 unidentifiable suspects and 3 juveniles.

So, why did I have to manually count a number that the LPD provided much more easily available in shooting victims?

Why hide this stuff? The omission was so glaring that anyone could have noticed it, and Mr Chisenhall’s graphics made that even more obvious. Eventually, the city will have to report the numbers anyway. But we’re not supposed to talk about race, are we?

References

References
↑1 Unlike some other larger cities, Lexington has no contiguous suburbs, in that the Lexington city and Fayette County governments merged in 1974.
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You cannot tell the truth in The Philadelphia Inquirer

Around 10:00 AM yesterday morning, I read the story Archdiocese of Philadelphia spins off Downingtown psychiatric center where pedophile priests were sent in The Philadelphia Inquirer, and I made two comments. Several hours later, my initial comment was still there:

This article ignores one important point: the accused priests sent to Vianney couldn’t be reported to law enforcement, due to patient privacy laws. Accusations made to the archdiocese could be reported, but it was the archdiocese, not the Vianney Center, which took the decisions as to what to do with accused priests after receiving reports from the Vianney Center.

The Inquirer’s website does not provide separate links to individual comments.

However, I made a second comment, which the system accepted, and was posted, noting that the majority of victims of the predatory priests were teenaged boys, yet that couldn’t be mentioned, because it might be seen as condemnatory of homosexuality. By 5:12 PM EST, that comment has disappeared, but there were, at that time, nine red tabs noting “comment disabled.”

Now there’s a new article up, Former adviser to Monaco’s royal family and DeSales University priest charged in Philly child porn case. In it the readers are told that the Rev. William McCandless, from the Wilmington-based religious order Oblates de St. Francis De Sales, has been arrested on possession of child pornography charges.

But the charges unsealed Wednesday were not the first time McCandless had been accused of misconduct. In fact, his overseas assignment in 2010 was announced the same summer the clergy sex abuse watchdog group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests called for his suspension, saying his name had surfaced in an ongoing clergy abuse lawsuit.

According to the organization, a sex abuse victim said in a sworn deposition filed in Delaware courts that McCandless had once admitted to him that he abused a 14-year-old French boy attending a church camp.

Details of that deposition could not be immediately confirmed on Wednesday.

At the time, McCandless had been assigned to the Salesianum School, a Catholic private high school in Wilmington. He had also previously served for seven years as a chaplain at North Catholic High School in Philadelphia.

I am surprised that the article author, Jeremy Roebuck, mentioned that there was an allegation that Father McCandless molested a “14-year-old French boy” rather than just a “14-year-old.” The story said to check back later; I wonder if that part will be changed.

The John Jay report noted that sexual abuse cases studied between 1950 and 2002 indicated that, rather than prepubescent children, abusers targeted older children:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

The Inquirer doesn’t have a nifty masthead tagline like The New York Times’ All the News That’s Fit to Print or The Washington Post’s Johnny-come-lately Democracy Dies in Darkness, added after the horrible Donald Trump was elected, but if it did, it should read something like All the News That’s Politically Correct . . . and noting that the sexual abuse problem among the Catholic priesthood is primarily one of homosexual attraction to teenaged boys is anything but politically correct.

The credentialed media like to believe that they are the guardians of truth and the defenders of a democratic society, but what so many of them have become is the guardians of truthiness. When the facts are inconvenient, when the truth does not fit the editors’ notions of what can be said, when the facts upset the #woke, well, the Inquirer has its problems with the idiots, and Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski was fired resigned because he published the article “Buildings Matter, Too,” which expressed concern that some historic buildings in Philadelphia had been and more could be damaged in the #BlackLivesMatter protests.

If we cannot expect the Inquirer to print the truth when the truth is not what they want their readers to see, how can we have any confidence that what they do print is the truth, rather than just some shaded version of it?
_____________________________________
Cross-posted on RedState.

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Do they not even see themselves?

I have previously noted how the Associated Press surrendered to political correctness on language, saying that, when referring to race, it will capitalize “black” but leave “white” in lower-case.

After changing its usage rules last month to capitalize the word “Black” when used in the context of race and culture, The Associated Press on Monday said it would not do the same for “white.” The AP said white people in general have much less shared history and culture, and don’t have the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color. Protests following the death of George Floyd, which led to discussions of policing and Confederate symbols, also prompted many news organizations to examine their own practices and staffing. The Associated Press, whose Stylebook is widely influential in the industry, announced June 19 it would make Black uppercase. In some ways, the decision over “white” has been more ticklish. The National Association of Black Journalists and some Black scholars have said white should be capitalized, too. “We agree that white people’s skin color plays into systemic inequalities and injustices, and we want our journalism to robustly explore these problems,” Daniszewski said. “But capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.”

I found the whole thing not only obviously silly, but poor grammar. The use of “white” or “black” is simply shorthand for large racial groups, Caucasian and Negro, which are properly capitalized. Irish or French should be capitalized, as they refer to the inhabitants of countries as well as ethnic groups, while white should not be. Similarly, I would capitalize Kenyan or African, but not black. That the Associated Press would treat the words differently is just not very bright.

And now The Philadelphia Inquirer has provided, through its apparent adoption of the Associated Press stylebook, the silliness of it. In an article entitled “Why the term ‘legal votes’ is racist,” Jeffrey Barg wrote:

News media use the descriptor Black three times as much as white, which normalizes white and others Black. Similarly, legal vote others ballots from areas that aren’t predominantly white.

One would thing that a writer who styles himself The Angry Grammarian would have the capitalization of “Black” without a similar capitalization of “white” almost jump off the page at him as an obvious error. More, it would be discordantly harsh on the perceptions of the reader, especially the white reader whom one would expect Mr Barg to wish to influence.

Then again, one would not expect someone who claims to be a “grammarian” to write sentences such as, “It’s the insinuation of illegality in service of eliminating Black votes”, or “Adding the adjective legal implies the presence of illegal votes, which lawsuits, the Department of Justice, and even super-sleuth Rudy Giuliani have been unable to provide evidence of.”

Then, in the article “Haverford students end strike after getting demands met,” Inquirer writer Susan Snyder wrote, “But concerns about the college’s treatment of Black and brown students had been mounting long before the college leaders sent the email”, and “Raymond, who is white, announced last week that she would step down as the interim chief diversity officer, a position she didn’t intend to keep, and that provost Linda Strong-Leek, who is Black, would step into the position.”

https://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_yahoo.gif I suppose that the Associated Press’ and the Inquirer’s stylebook failed to consider whether “brown,” when used as a racial identifier, should be capitalized. One wonders: will “brown” readers of the Inquirer be offended?

In the end, the decision by the Associated Press, one followed by many but not all media organizations, paid homage to political correctness, but wound up exposing the folly of it. In arriving at their decision, the AP might have limited their discussions to what they said in their press statement, but when the stylebook change effects are seen in print, in actual stories meant to inform or persuade the reader, the ridiculousness of it becomes apparent.

Cross-posted on RedState.