Tag Archives: #woke

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Political correctness in the Lexington Herald-Leader (Part 2)

As we noted in Political correctness in the Lexington Herald-Leader? something, something I attributed to being so #woke and #BlackLivesMatter and politically correct that the editors did not want to show the picture of a black man accused of murder, Juanyah Jamar Clay, because he is black. If there was another reason, I couldn’t think of it, because the Herald-Leader was willing to expend the bandwidth to include a useless article illustration of crime scene tape.

Well, Mr Clay has been apprehended, and, once again, the paper decided against posting his photo on their website:

Lexington teen arrested, charged with murder 1 day after police name him as a suspect

By Jeremy Chisenhall | March 31, 2021 | 8:55 AM EDT | Updated 9:07 AM EDT

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

A Lexington homicide suspect was arrested Tuesday after police publicly identified him just one day earlier.

Juanyah Jamar Clay, 19, was arrested and booked at the Lexington-Fayette County Detention Center Tuesday evening after police said he was wanted for the alleged murder of 26-year-old Bryan D. Greene. Greene was found shot to death in January inside his residence at Eastridge Apartments, police said.

Clay was concealing three handguns on him at the time of his arrest, according to an arrest citation. He also had nearly 3.7 ounces of marijuana, more than 10 Percocet pills, cash and a digital scale with him. The officer who filled out Clay’s arrest citation said all the items were indicative of drug trafficking.

According to jail records, Clay faces eight charges: murder, carrying a concealed weapon, giving an officer false identifying information, receiving a stolen gun, tampering with a prison monitoring device, trafficking in less than 8 ounces of marijuana, trafficking in opiates, and violating conditions of release.

Clay had previously been charged with burglary and violating conditions of release in 2019, according to court records. That case remained open in court, but Clay had been released on a $15,000 surety bond.

Translation: Mr Clay is a bad dude!

He was already out on bond, so he was already facing criminal charges. He knew that carrying illegal drugs, and a firearm — in this case, three handguns — and tampering with an ankle monitor were all additional crimes, but he did it anyway.

As in yesterday’s article, the current one has an illustration, albeit a different one, of a Lexington police officer stringing yellow crime scene tape. The Herald-Leader obviously had no concern with using the bandwidth for a photo, but, once again, chose not to use Mr Clay’s picture. The illustration added exactly nothing to the story, where using Mr Clay’s photo would have qualified as newsworthy. Given that I had notified both the herald-Leader in general and the article author, Jeremy Chisenhall, specifically, by Twitter, of the lapse of responsible journalism here, it doesn’t seem likely that this was a simple omission, but a deliberate decision.

I have previously noted that we should simply stop printing the dead-trees editions of newspapers, but if newspapers really want to survive into the digital age, they need to do something really radical like practice journalism. The Lexington Herald-Leader is failing to do so.

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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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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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The Special Snowflakes™ are just so upset! "Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views." -- William F Buckley, Jr

I’m old enough to remember when the left supported an absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment, and I agreed with them. From Wikipedia:

The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a massive, long-lasting student protest which took place during the 1964–65 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The Movement was informally under the central leadership of Berkeley graduate student Mario Savio. Other student leaders include Jack Weinberg, Michael Rossman, George Barton, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Michael Teal, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and others.

With the participation of thousands of students, the Free Speech Movement was the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American college campus in the 1960s. Students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students’ right to free speech and academic freedom. The Free Speech Movement was influenced by the New Left, and was also related to the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. To this day, the Movement’s legacy continues to shape American political dialogue both on college campuses and in broader society, impacting on the political views and values of college students and the general public.

In 1971, The New York Times and The Washington Post received parts of what eventually were called the Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg, who was partially an author of them. President Nixon’s decision to seek an injunction against the newspapers to prevent their further publication of them was overturned by the Supreme Court in New York Times Company v United States, by a 6-3 margin. Associate Justice Hugo Black wrote:

I adhere to the view that the Government’s case against the Washington Post should have been dismissed and that the injunction against the New York Times should have been vacated without oral argument when the cases were first presented to this Court. I believe that every moment’s continuance of the injunctions against these newspapers amounts to a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment. Furthermore, after oral argument, I agree completely that we must affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit for the reasons stated by my Brothers Douglas and Brennan. In my view it is unfortunate that some of my Brethren are apparently willing to hold that the publication of news may sometimes be enjoined. Such a holding would make a shambles of the First Amendment.

Our Government was launched in 1789 with the adoption of the Constitution. The Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, followed in 1791. Now, for the first time in the 182 years since the founding of the Republic, the federal courts are asked to hold that the First Amendment does not mean what it says, but rather means that the Government can halt the publication of current news of vital importance to the people of this country.

Freedom of Speech and of the Press continued to expand, and what appears to have been the last vestige of government censorship, that of censoring pornography, has finally faded away due to the ubiquity of pornography on the internet; technology has rendered porn uncontrollable.

But now, the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: “Woke is a political term originating in the United States referring to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It derives from the … Continue reading and the Special Snowflakes™, creatures of today’s left, have become utterly appalled that people who have different opinions than their are allowed to speak, allowed to publish:

Penguin Random House staffers broke down in tears over release of Jordan Peterson book: report

Employees cried to management at a town hall addressing the book’s release in March

By Joseph A. Wulfsohn | Fox News | November 24, 2020

A new report shows inner turmoil that is apparently taking place at Penguin Random House Canada over the publisher’s release of a book written by Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson.

Peterson, a psychology professor from the University of Toronto and a popular podcast host who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, announced on Monday that he is releasing a new book titled “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life,” which is set to be released in March of next year.

However, Vice reported on Tuesday that Peterson’s book has sparked an emotional outcry within the Canadian publishing giant with an effort by employees to pressure the company into canceling the book’s release.

According to the report, “several” employees confronted management of Penguin Random House Canada (PRHC), a subsidiary of Penguin Random House, at an internal town hall on Monday and “dozens more have filed anonymous complaints” about PRHC’s plans to release the latest work from the politically and culturally outspoken professor.

“He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book, I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him,” one town hall attendee, who is also a member of the LGBTQ community, told Vice.

So, quit! If this unnamed “member of the LGBTQ community” is not proud to work for PRHC, there is no law — other than the laws of economics, I suppose — forcing him to stay there.

Another employee alleged that “people were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives” with one explaining that Peterson had “radicalized their father” and another insisting the publishing of Peterson’s book will “negatively affect their non-binary friend.”

Well, wahhh! Dr Peterson’s arguments have persuaded some people, and the #woke don’t like it, so they want to clamp down on his speech so that others won’t hear it.[2]Full disclosure: if I have ever read anything by Dr Peterson, I do not recall doing so, or that he was the author of something I did read.

PRHC is, of course, a private company, and therefore their decision to, or refusal to, publish anything, by anyone, is not an act of government censorship. But Penguin Random House is in the business of publishing, so yeah, they are going to publish things that the company believe will make money.

PRHC told Vice in a statement, “We announced yesterday that we will publish Jordan Peterson’s new book ‘Beyond Order’ this coming March. Immediately following the announcement, we held a forum and provided a space for our employees to express their views and offer feedback. Our employees have started an anonymous feedback channel, which we fully support. We are open to hearing our employees’ feedback and answering all of their questions. We remain committed to publishing a range of voices and viewpoints.”

We have previously noted how the #woke are really, really, really opposed to Freedom of the Press, at least as far as printing things with which they disagree. But, at bottom, much of it is fear that healthy debate undermines their own positions, because their positions are, well, kind of stupid. How would you like to have to defend the position that girls can be boys and boys can be girls?

Children have their own ‘logic,’ and I suppose that it sounds good to them. But, being children, there’s always the great fear that the grown ups will show up, and to the #woke at Penguin Random House, Jordan Peterson is one of those awful grown ups.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia: “Woke is a political term originating in the United States referring to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It derives from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke”, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.

First used in the 1940s, the term has resurfaced in recent years as a concept that symbolises awareness of social issues and movement. By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics, socially liberal and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has also been the subject of memes, ironic usage and criticism. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.” I confess to being one of those who uses the term disparagingly.

↑2 Full disclosure: if I have ever read anything by Dr Peterson, I do not recall doing so, or that he was the author of something I did read.
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The lunatics are running the asylum The New York Times surrenders to the 'woke'

Those of us who pay attention to the media have been aware of the turmoil in Times Square. Most amusing is the fact that the New York Post has to report on The New York Times.

The Gray Lady’s convulsions continue.

Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson says she’s dismayed by the troubles surrounding the New York Times op-ed section, particularly the departure of its editor James Bennet after he published a commentary by a U.S. senator calling for military force to quell riots.

“I don’t think that James Bennet should have been forced out at The Times,” Abramson told The Post, adding she “felt terrible” about it.

“He and I worked together in the Washington Bureau of the Times and I think he is one of the great journalists of our time. So I was very sad to see him pushed out,” Abramson said.

Abramson, who led the Times newsroom from September 2011 to May 2014, expressed sympathy for Bari Weiss, who shockingly resigned from the op-ed desk this week in a blistering open letter to publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Weiss said she’d been bullied and criticized by a Twitter-obsessed Times culture increasingly intolerant of any ideas outside its progressive, leftist orthodoxy.

There’s more at the original.

We have previously noted the ‘turmoil’ at the Times, and that, just a few days later, editorial page editor James Bennet was fired resigned, and deputy editorial page editor James Dao was demoted reassigned to the newsroom. We noted Bari Weiss Twitter thread that “The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same.” A few days later, Miss Weiss was gone, too.

And, of course, we noted how the Gray Lady retained young reporter Ali Watkins, even though she had been sleeping with one of her sources, though the Times at least tried the fig-leaf cover of reassigning her to a different beat.

Well, there is a rather simple solution. Get rid of your child staffers!

Miss Weiss noted, in her resignation letter, that:

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

Miss Weiss used the terms “unlawful discrimination” and “hostile work environment” in her letter, something which should have immediately alerted the Times management and its attorneys that there is a huge potential legal problem. Assuming that Miss Weiss’ allegations are true, the Times maintained and paid for an internal chat system which some employees used to harass, on the basis of religion and ethnicity, another employee, to the extent that it forced the employee to resign. How is that not a firing offense?

At the very least, the Times ought to research and discipline all employees who created the hostile work environment, and specify that inter-company communications systems may only be used for professional communications.

But it’s worse than that: The editors of The New York Times quickly surrendered to the woke in its newsroom:

New York Times Says Senator’s Op-Ed Did Not Meet Standards

After a staff uproar, The Times says the editing process was “rushed.” Senator Tom Cotton’s “Send In the Troops” essay is now under review.

By Marc Tracy, Rachel Abrams and Edmund Lee | June 4, 2020

Executives at The New York Times scrambled on Thursday to address the concerns of employees and readers who were angered by the newspaper’s publication of an opinion essay by a United States senator calling for the federal government to send the military to suppress protests against police violence in American cities.

James Bennet, the editor in charge of the opinion section, said in a meeting with staff members late in the day that he had not read the essay before it was published. Shortly afterward, The Times issued a statement saying the essay fell short of the newspaper’s standards.

And here comes the money line:

“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication,” Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman, said in a statement. “This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short-term and long-term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”

There you have it: Not only are the editors going to ‘expand’ their fact-checking of other people’s opinions, but they are going to reduce the number of outside opinion pieces they publish.

It was a matter of safety, don’t you know!

The new York Times is the most respected newspaper in the country, with a reputation for seriousness, sobriety, and maturity. But by surrendering to the “woke,”¹ the Times is surrendering to silliness, drunkenness and immaturity. The Gray Lady has repainted herself with the rainbow.²

The only way for the Times to regain its seriousness is to get rid of the unserious people. Just fire them all, and hire sensible reporters and writers to replace them. When your staff are significantly composed of people sympathetic with antifa and the crazies who set up the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, they are too far gone and too lacking in sane judgement to be working for you. Let them serve coffee at a Starbucks or something, and hire some of the good reporters out there, some of whom have lost their jobs due to industry downsizing, who have demonstrated some common sense.

A hint for the Times: the #woke and #BlackLivesMatter and #CancelCulture aren’t your customers in the first place! Those people get their news from television and internet click bait.
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¹ – From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
² – Yes, by using the rainbow, I am mocking the “LGBT+” movement, which I consider to be scientifically unsound, morally wrong and culturally stupid. Every bird, every reptile, and every mammal on earth can distinguish between males and females of their own species, but the LGBTQ+ movement have lost that ability.
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