Newspapers, once the bare-knuckled standard-bearers of journalism, are now being forced to cower and their editors to resign when their own staffers are triggered by the wording of headlines.
At the Philadelphia Inquirer, a top editor is quitting after a headline reading “Buildings Matter, Too,” criticizing the destruction of businesses amid protests over the death of George Floyd in police custody, appeared in that paper.
Stan Wischnowski, 58, resigned June 6 as executive editor at the Inquirer, according to FOX News.
The day after the headline ran Wischnowski and other editors ran an apology on the paper’s website, calling their own work “offensive” and saying it never should have been published.
“The headline accompanied a story on the future of Philadelphia’s buildings and civic infrastructure in the aftermath of this week’s protests,” read the apology. “The headline offensively riffed on the Black Lives Matter movement and suggested an equivalence between the loss of buildings and the lives of black Americans. That is unacceptable.”
More than two dozen members of the Inquirer’s 210-member news staff called in sick earlier in the week, and black staffers condemned the headline, which topped an article about how buildings damaged in recent violence could forever change Philadelphia.
The more the Inquirer tried to appease those with hurt feelings, the deeper became the hole they were in. The headline was replaced online with one that read, “Black Lives Matter. Do Buildings?” Eventually, the newspaper went with “Damaging buildings disproportionately hurt the people protesters are trying to uplift.”
The backlash came as The New York Times was widely criticized for publishing an opinion piece by U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., advocating the use of federal troops to quell the protests.
More than 800 Times employees signed a letter protesting the publication of the op-ed.
Whatever happened to free speech? We are being told what we can and can’t say….and do. Where is freedom?! I’m not just talking about things that actually “should not be said”, but we are now being told how we have to word things, what we can talk about, who we can talk about, what we can mention in what we are saying and what we can’t. Raunchiness is permitted and even praised, those who are for racism against whites can say anything they like and call whites anything in the book, or out of it, and openly spew hatred against whites and even attack innocent people, but whites’ freedom and national free speech is being monitored and censored! Truth is being censored!!!! Hate at the other end of the spectrum is being encouraged! Violent protesters are being catered to and bowed to!!! This is not America…..nobody kowtows in America unless they are criminally wrong or coming against the very fiber of our nation’s make-up! Our enemies are at work among us! Our enemies are coming in under the pretense of standing up for the oppressed. The last time I checked….there are many rich, famous, powerful people of color in the US and the number is growing all the time! It’s the whites that are “going down”. The crazy thing is that as the number and power of “whites” goes down and the browns and blacks take more and more control it just seems to fuel their hatred toward the “whities”! They have learned to maximize their skills that God gave them and rise up, and they seem to be determined to do to the whites exactly what they have screamed at them was wrong to do to the blacks! But, that’s fair, right?!? So much for the equality that both sides have struggled for…..let’s flip this coin and let the people of color rule over the whites and take from the whites and destroy everything that they claim to have fought for. So all of these pleas for equality have been just so they could flip the focus and the weight on the scales to where they can enslave the whites and punish the whites…….and rule over the whites…..just a power play….and they are seemingly more than willing to erase history as they do it. Is this really what the black population wants?! Or is this what those who would destroy the United States and its citizens of any color want?!?