Might as well queue up Jack Nicholson and “You can’t handle the truth!” from A Few Good Men.
Screen capture of comments section, Sunday, January 10, 2022, at 7:32 PM EST. Click to enlarge.
- I was surprised to see that The Philadelphia Inquirer allowed reader comments on this article. Since it is, supposedly, a sports article, and the Inquirer didn’t close sports articles to comments when they did so on everything else, maybe an editor hasn’t figured it out yet. As I start this article, at 9:10 AM, there are ten comments up, including two of mine; I wonder how long that will last.
The answer was: they didn’t last long!
I ran across a photo if the masthead of The Philadelphia Inquirer from February 25, 1953, and noticed the ‘taglines’ that it used: “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. By Public ledger, the Inquirer was setting itself up as Philadelphia’s newspaper of record, which Wikipedia defines as “a major newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative.” That Wikipedia article named four newspapers of record for the United States: The New York Times (Founded 1851), The Washington Post (1877), The Los Angeles Times (1881) and The Wall Street Journal (1889). First printed on Monday, Jun1 1, 1829, the then Pennsylvania Inquirer is older than any of them, and is the third oldest continuously published newspaper in America, behind only the Hartford Courant (1764) and the New York Post (1801). “An editorial in the first issue of The Pennsylvania Inquirer promised that the paper would be devoted to the right of a minority to voice their opinion and ‘the maintenance of the rights and liberties of the people, equally against the abuses as the usurpation of power.’”
Boy has that changed! As has happened to other great newspapers, the newsroom of the Inquirer was captured by the young #woke, who forced the firing resignation of Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski over the headline Buildings Matter, Too.
“Devoted to the right of a minority to voice their opinion”? Yeah, that failed, too, as the Inquirer closed comments on the majority of its articles, stating that:
- Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.
Screen capture of comments at 5:35 AM EST on January 10, 2022. Click to enlarge.
As of 5:35 AM — yes, I’m up early because I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep — there are five new comments, none of which support the idea that ‘trans women’ should compete equally against biological women, and it’s my guess that all of them will disappear as soon as the editors begin day shift and get to work. Of course, I screen captured them, because it wouldn’t be long before the Inquirer tried to hide the evidence.
The newspaper’s reasoning for eliminating comments on most articles was:
- Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.
It’s not just Inquirer staff who are disaffected by the comments on many stories. We routinely hear from members of our community that the comments are alienating and detract from the journalism we publish.
Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them. Most of our readers will not miss the comments.
If such a small percentage read the comments, how is it that they “routinely hear from members of our community that the comments are alienating”?
The truth that the #woke of the Inquirer can’t handle is that most people, people with some actual common sense, do not agree with the notion that someone like Mr Thomas, who was born male, who grew up male, who went through puberty as a male, and who competed, successfully, though not overwhelmingly so, as a male, can just decide that he’s a woman, take testosterone suppressants for a year, and is now indistinguishable from a biological female? For the journolists[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading at the Inquirer, the notion that girls can be boys and boys can be girls is ‘settled science,’ and must not be questioned.
This photo, from the Inquirer article, tells you all you need to know, but, who are you going to believe: the #woke, or your lying eyes?
References
| ↑1 | From Wikipedia:
I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias. |
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