City Safari: AWAKE, WOKE, And WOKEN: When Free Speech Is Broken.
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Wed, Jun 17, 2020
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By Thom Nickels
Contributing Editor
The political forces of Leftist hypersensitivity have had quite a month in Philadelphia.
An award winning top editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Stan Wischnowski, resigned his post after a small band of ‘woke’ journalists in the newsroom objected to his mislabeling a headline on an Inga Saffron architecture column about damaging buildings in the name of social justice.
Wischnowski was the editor responsible for the Inquirer’s Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for a 2011series on violence in Philadelphia Public schools. He was raked over the coals for his "Buildings Matter, Too” headline, a headline, according to woke critics that put human lives on a par with bricks and mortar. Wischnowski and two other Inquirer editors wrote a signed apology to readers and staff and then Wischnowski abruptly resigned.
Inquirer publisher Lisa Hughes, the first woman publisher in the newspaper’s almost 200 year history, delivered her own missive to readers in which she thanked Wischnowski for his service and then in the next breath stated that the Inquirer was committed to finding an editor who "understands the diversity of the communities we serve.
In one fell swoop Wischonowski’s twenty years at The Inquirerwas reduced to rubble. He was taken down like a statue: statues or people, it makes little difference to the American Taliban.
Wischonoswki’s resignation is another example of the "gotcha” culture that’s filled with micro-aggression landmines and that led to Hilary Clinton’s defeat in 2016.
The mood at the Inquirerwas set sometime before the offending headline came into being. That’s when Wischonoswki held a ZOOM meeting with Inquirer staff (numbering over 200). Reports indicate that during the meeting the editor was put on the defensive about the racial and gender mix of the newsroom. Dissatisfied with Wischonoswki’s answers during the meeting, about 50 woke Inquirer staffers immediately got to work and signed an open letter to the editor demanding that the newspaper accede to their demands.
"We’re tired of shouldering the burden of dragging this 200 year old institution kicking and screaming into a more equitable age,” wrote Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong who numbered herself among the signers.
Another woke woman staffer wrote, "There is much within the Inquirer that still needs to change.”
The Inquirerfiasco came on the heels of a big woke moment at The New York Times.A fewstaffers there were angry about an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) and made the claim that its publication threatened their fragile lives.
Reasonmagazine reported that, "They [woke ones} specifically chose ‘running this puts black Times staff in danger’ as their mantra because it invokes workplace safety. When the authority figure—the boss, the principal, the government—is responsible for ensuring safety, and safety is broadly defined as not merely protection from literal physical violence but also the fostering of emotional comfort, norms of classical liberalism will suffer. The Times conflict ended with opinion page chief James Bennet out of his job.”
Journalism, like most of the theater world, has become increasingly political in Philadelphia. A journalist without a left wing bias is likely to find it harder going in Philadelphia, as would a theatre company that did not automatically sympathize with left wing causes. A conservative voice may appear periodically in Philadelphia Magazinebut it would never truly become part of the magazine unlike radical left voices, which the magazine seems to celebrate.
There’s even less chance that a conservative voice would make it into the orbits of Philly Voice, Billy Pennand The Philadelphia Weekly, where the woke mentality reigns supreme.
When Mayor Kenney removed the statue of Frank Rizzo in the dead of night, he was following the example of Catherine Pugh, former mayor of Baltimore who made good on her 2017 pledge to remove Confederate statues in Baltimore. Former Mayor Pugh did not want the statues destroyed but moved to a Confederate cemetery while some Baltimore City Council members called for their complete destruction. The riots and looting in Center City was, of course, the catalyst in having the Zenos Frudakis statue removed and put into storage.
A columnist for Philadelphia Magazine online, a writer named Queen Muse, wrote a piece entitled, "Mayor Kenney, Tear Down the Rizzo Statue Right Now.”
Muse castigated Frank Rizzo for removing MOVE from an apartment building in Powelton Village way back in 1978.
Muse was not around during the time of MOVE to know that MOVE in the late 1970s had all of West Philadelphia up in arms, white and black neighbors alike. For most people at that time being against MOVE was not a racial thing but a peace and serenity issue. The group’s round the clock bullhorn rants not only disturbed the peace, but in many instances directed threats at neighbors.
Several times MOVE raided gay rights lectures at the University of Pennsylvania sponsored by Gays at Penn. The group crashed the stage, chased the speaker away and took to the podium uttering expletives about homosexuality and the so-called homosexual life style. In both instances they forced the lecture to shut down as audience members nervously headed towards the door.
Revisionist "revolutionary” history has conveniently forgotten this part of MOVE’s history. The passage of time has romanticized MOVE and glossed over many unpleasant realities.
Queen Muse gets it wrong again when she writes about Frank Rizzo’s 1980 encounter with KYW-TV News Anchorman Stan Bohrman outside the mayor’s home in Chestnut Hill.
Muse reports that Rizzo "once called a news reporter a ‘crumb bum’ and threatened to smash a camera over his head for merely doing his job.” The truth is that Bohrman and his camera crew parked an unmarked KYW news van down the street from Rizzo’s house for more than three hours, in effect stalking him. After local police spotted the van and informed the former mayor of its existence, they confronted Bohrman. "We want to know who you are and what you are doing up here,” an annoyed Rizzo says. In a video documenting the incident, Bohrman holds up his press pass as if that were a pass to stalking the former mayor in an unmarked vehicle. Rizzo, in a rage, destroys a camera and the film goes blank but Bohrman, still adamant for a story, returns another day and stalks Rizzo again as he walks his dog in front of his house. Bohrman sticks a microphone in Rizzo’s face and demands that he answer a few questions.
Rizzo doesn’t want to talk and winds calling him a "crumb bum yellow sneak,” and more.
When Bohrman complains to Police Commissioner Morton Solomon, Solomon gives Bohrman a blank stare as Bohrman babbles on about his press pass, as if a press pass gave a journalist permission to stalk people in any manner whatsoever. (I’m reminded of the paparazzi photo journalists who stalked Princess Diana in 1997 in a speeding car causing Diana’s car to crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris.)
First it was the Rizzo statue, then it was the Rizzo mural.
On June 3, Mural Arts Philadelphia issued the following statement:
We do not believe the mural can play a role in healing and supporting dialogue, but rather it has become a painful reminder for many of the former Mayor’s legacy, and only adds to the pain and anger.We do not believe the maintenance and repair of the Rizzo mural is consistent with our mission. We think it is time for the mural to be decommissioned, and would support a unifying piece of public art in its place.
I’ve interviewed Jane Golden of the Mural Arts Philadelphia many times throughout the years. These interviews have always been enjoyable and enriching. When I heard that MAP was disavowing any further connection to the much-beleaguered Frank Rizzo mural in South Philadelphia, I felt a tinge of sadness. Throughout the years whenever I’d tour the latest MAP murals with Jane Golden we would usually end the tour with an update on the Rizzo mural: how was it faring? Were people who hated Rizzo leaving it alone? In most cases, I would hear that people were not leaving it alone.
In the best good humor that Jane Golden could muster, she always tried to mitigate the offenses committed against the mural, but I could plainly see the writing on the wall. The mural’s days were numbered.
