for BigTrial.net
Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, some 30 shell-shocked editors, reporters and columnists at The Philadelphia Inquirer gathered in a conference room to discuss how the hell Hillary Clinton, the most qualified candidate in history, had just lost to a huckster like Donald Trump.
As the newspaper's only conservative columnist, Christine Flowers had mixed feelings as she sat through the grim post mortem.
"It was almost like doing triage," she recalled. "They wanted to be in touch with the community that they purportedly covered so well." But when Trump pulled off the upset by carrying Pennsylvania, Flowers said, "It did blindside them." The Inky staffers -- a bunch of card-carrying liberals, Progressive Democrats and social justice warriors -- were completely clueless about "what the hell happened here."
When somebody suggested they might actually talk to some Trump voters to find out what they were thinking, Flowers looked around the table and was stunned to see "the anger and hatred in some of these journalists' eyes."
Why talk to the enemy, right?
Last week, the Inquirer turned its scorn on Flowers, who, as the newspaper's only conservative columnist, was sent packing after 17 years as a regular freelancer.
Way back in 1965, when riots broke out in Watts, the Los Angeles Times was in a pickle. The paper's lily white reporting staff was understandably nervous about venturing out into a neighborhood where blacks were rioting, smashing store windows and overturning police cars.
But the Times didn't have any black reporters on staff to cover the story. So the editors had to press into service as their roving correspondent in a flaming ghetto, Robert Richardson, a former Army sharpshooter who was a messenger in the newspaper's advertising department.
For decades afterwards, the Times and every other newspaper in the country launched one recruitment drive after another to hire more minority reporters to diversify their staffs.
But after Trump won the presidency, the Inquirer and the other clueless newspapers who totally missed the story saw no pressing need to hire any more conservatives or independent thinkers.
In the Inquirer newsroom where I used to work, diversity was a towering gold statue, a false god that everyone had to bow down to. By hiring more journalists of color, as well as female journalists, and gay and lesbian journalists, or so the mantra went, the newspaper would be far more enlightened and thus infinitely better.
But nobody had a problem if everyone on that diversified staff all thought alike.
At the Inquirer, Flowers agreed, diversity "is what you look like and what your DNA says you are." For the journalists at the paper of record, it's all about superficialities.
"Diversity of thought," however, Flowers said, "is not a factor."
The Inquirer, for example, doesn't have any black conservatives around, Flowers noted. Or any Latinas who are against open borders.
So when it came to promoting so-called safe injection sites that the newspaper was relentlessly campaigning for, once again the liberal Dems and the Progressives and the social justice warriors in the newsroom were all on the same page with their philosophical soulmate, Mayor Kenney, as well as former Governor Rendell, a late convert to the cause.
But Flowers saw a problem.
"I think it was horrible," she said of the paper's coverage of the so-called safe injection sites.
"It was totally one-sided," she said. "Every single writer and every single columnist" saw it the exact same way. So when Mayor Kenney went on Twitter and "was trying to shame people into having compassion" for addicts, Flowers saw red.
Because the latest Progressive cause was so virtuous, the people of South Philly only got one week's notice before Kenney and Rendell and the rest of the Safehousers sponsored by the Inky were going to invade their neighborhood with an army of freshly shot-up drug Zombies, and their entourage of hookers and drug dealers.
Anybody got a problem with that?
"It's pathetic," Flowers said of the Inquirer's coverage of the South Philly safe injection site that another recent Inky exile, former columnist Stu Bykofsky, dubbed the "not safe shooting gallery."
"They've done a huge disservice in the way the they covered that issue," said Flowers, who lost a brother to a drug overdose. "They [The Inky] ignored and disrespected huge parts of the community."
So when South Philly rebelled, once again the Inky was caught flat-footed.
"Just as they were shocked at the Trump election they were blindsided by the South Philadelphia reaction," Flowers said.
But nobody suggested changing their relentlessly Progressive outlook. At the Inky, they always view as aliens Republicans and conservatives and anyone who might actually believe in God.
So there was nothing wrong, for example, when the late Tony Auth drew a cartoon of all the sitting Catholic justices on the Supreme Court wearing papal mitres.
It was similarly Ok for the editorial board to run a recent March 9th editorial urging readers to light more candles for 86-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg's health, as the Supreme Court prepared to reconsider the abortion issue.
It took a reader to point out the irony of advocating the lighting of candles "so that one justice will live, in order to continue the killing of another 750,000 lives a year."
"The tone deafness there is overwhelming," Flowers said.
It's similarly OK for Progressive columnist Will Bunch to denounce Donald Trump on an almost daily basis as the "Trump nightmare" or the "bombastic narcissist," etc. But it wasn't Ok for Flowers to go on Twitter and argue with people.
"I think the thumb was on the scale because of my conservative views," she said.
Her official reason for termination was her "interaction with readers," which her editors told her was inappropriate and disrespectful. But Flowers was left wondering how she was supposed to be respectful to people who called her a fascist and told her she should be raped or killed.
Flowers will be OK without her Inky gig. She never set out to be a journalist. She's an immigration lawyer. Seventeen years ago, she sent in a letter to the editor of the Daily News that was so well-written it became an op-ed.
A new career was born.
Most of the years she wrote her column, it was published in the Daily News. As anyone who worked there could tell you, it was a helluva lot more fun than writing for the Inquirer. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning paper of record, the serious journalists at the Inky always felt they had a license to bore everyone to death.
But when the Inquirer absorbed the Daily News, Flowers watched in frustration in recent years as she was edited more heavily, in addition to being closely monitored by her bosses on Twitter. As a result, she admits now, in her last Inky columns, she found herself pulling her punches.
Now, she feels she's gotten back the freedom to say whatever she wants, so she can continue to annoy her Progressive friends. She's still got a syndicated column, a talk show gig on WPHT radio, and she also appears Sundays on 6ABC's Inside Edition.
Upon reflection, Flowers is grateful to both newspapers for the platform they gave her for all those years, but she's not happy about how her firing went down.
"I'm angry at what they did and the way they did it," she said. "The thing is, I really was kind of like the token conservative so they could say they had balance. What happens when that minimal balance is gone?"
I can answer that question for you, Christine. The Inky happily returns to being a safe place for social justice warriors, a Progressive paradise, a gated community for the like-minded.
No independent thought allowed.