Why's The Inky Covering For Larry Krasner?

By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

New crusading District Attorney Larry Krasner hires the largest and most diverse incoming class ever of 60 brand new prosecutors. But then we find out that 18 of those new ADAs can't go to court or write a brief because they just flunked the bar exam.

Is that a news story?

I certainly thought so. And so did the more than 8,000 readers who hit the blog in the last 48 hours to catch up with the latest chapter of the big criminal justice revolution in Philadelphia, starring Progressive Larry Krasner.

Another person who thought the ADAs flunking out was a story was Julie Shaw, a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. She had the story, but then her editor told her it wasn't news.

This isn't an isolated incident. In recent months, several other stories that attempted to take a critical look at Krasner wound up being spiked by the Inquirer. So it's time to ask why our relentlessly progressive Democratic paper-of-record is covering for our relentlessly progressive Democratic D.A.

Shaw isn't talking, so I sent an email seeking comment from some of her editors. In the email, I pointed out that these brand new ADAs, who will be paid at least $60,000 each, will cost taxpayers more than $1 million annually.

And since they can't go to court or write a brief, it's certainly a topic of public interest as to what these public servants will be doing if they hang around until next June. And that's what Krasner supposedly intends to do with his new recruits, to give them a second chance to pass the next bar exam.

Keep in mind the usual deal at the D.A.'s office is that if you're a newly hired ADA and you flunk the bar exam, you usually get fired. Because passing the bar exam has customarily been a condition of continuing employment.

But that's not how Larry Krasner plays the game. As for the Inky, well taking a dive isn't anything new.

As a former Inquirer reporter, I was fired 21 years ago because the editor of the paper at the time was trying to protect the late Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua from some unflattering publicity I was intending to write about him. So I am intimately familiar with how these things go down in a newsroom. But, as I wrote to Shaw's editors, killing stories that take a critical look at our radical new D.A. amounts to a "betrayal of the public trust."

"Why is the Inquirer acting to protect Larry Krasner?" I asked three of Shaw's editors. Amazingly, one of them responded.

"Without getting into our decision on any particular piece, we assess every possible story on its own merits," wrote Gabriel Escobar, editor and vice president of the Inquirer. "A close and objective assessment of our coverage would show there is no such pattern regarding the district attorney or his office, and that we in fact have applied more scrutiny to the new district attorney, and his new policies and impact than any news outlet."

Well, Gabe, thanks for responding, but with all due respect, that Inky infomercial you just wrote doesn't tell us anything about the issue I raised, namely killing critical stories.

In a city without democracy, where elections are as meaningless as those staged in Putin's Russia, we're in a double blind when our paper-of-record plays Mr. Softee when it comes to covering public officials.

Adding to the problem is the D.A.'s response to my story, which sadly was stonewalling. I got no response of any kind over several days from Jane Roh, who's allegedly a spokesperson for Larry Krasner, but is worthless because she doesn't say or write anything.

Sadly, I've been through this before. For years, the former D.A., Rufus Seth Williams, would stonewall my questions, before he went off to jail.

For years, I asked Williams about his crusade against the Catholic Church featuring a former altar boy who made up a wild story about allegedly being raped by two priests and his former home room teacher.

All three men were sent to jail, as well as the monsignor who was supposed to be overseeing abusive priests in the archdiocese. But then the lead detective in the case came forward to testify that he had caught the altar boy repeatedly lying in a pretrial prep session that the defense was never told about.

The former lead detective also testified that the former altar boy flat-out admitted that he had made up many of his most lurid allegations. And when the detective repeatedly told the lead prosecutor that the altar boy wasn't credible, and that his story wasn't checking out, she replied, "You're killing my case."

As the only reporter in town for years who questioned Williams about his phony crusade featuring a fake accuser, I kept asking questions but all I got was stonewalling from the D.A.'s office.

Meanwhile, the Inquirer covered for the D.A. for years by ignoring the story to this day, and continuing to portray the altar boy as a legitimate victim of sex abuse. In a case that's scheduled to be retried in January.

One of the falsely accused priests wound up dying in jail.

Stonewalling has consequences. So does our official paper-of-record going soft on covering a D.A.  who's emptying the jails while turning justice on its head. But apparently when progressives cover progressives, there's a different set of rules.

It's clear, former D.A. Lynne Abraham says, that "the Inquirer has a strong, unmistakable bias in Krasner's favor."

The "only person at the Inquirer vaguely critical of Krasner," Abraham says, "is Julie Shaw. The rest are, alas, all on the same page, servile to the web of falsehoods spread by Larry Krasner, Philadelphia's own Trojan Horse."