Italian reader Giuseppe Scalas says that the murder in NYC of an Italian researcher by a black gang member out on parole has turned the left-wing Milan daily Corriere della Sera against The New York Times. He sent a translation of the Federico Rampini commentary in the Corriere today. Here it is:

The 25-year-old Vincent Pinkney, the killer who cut short Davide Giri’s life, belongs to one of the most ferocious New York gangs. He was a convicted felon, arrested several times for violent crimes, sentenced to a light sentence, released before having served it. He was at large despite being suspected of committing a recent assault.

Almost everything is known about the man who savagely assaulted the Italian researcher as he returned to Columbia University after a soccer game. But none of this news is visible in The New York Times. A landmark newspaper for the city and the nation. Yet distracted and reticent about a tragedy that occurred in the heart of Manhattan.

Name, surname, age of the murderer are the meager news provided to readers. The news article was confined to the local pages, with little visibility. On the newspaper website, the first version was not followed by any update. Brief testimonials from fellow students, a statement from the rector of Columbia University, make up an evasive and terse article. Zero news about the perpetrator of what could have been a massacre.

After stabbing Giri at 10:55 p.m. on Thursday at the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 123rd Street, a quarter of an hour later Pinkney wounded an Italian tourist, Roberto Malaspina, a short distance away on Morningside Drive; a few minutes more and he attempted to attack a couple in Central Park. Why don’t New York Times readers know anything about Pinkney except his age and last name?

The newspaper’s interest, and the investigative vigor put into the field, would have been different if the parties had been reversed. That is, if the victim had been African-American and the murderer a white man; all the more so if that white man had been a member of some organization that preaches and practices violence, for example a right-wing militia. The tragedy would have made the front page, a team of reporters would have been mobilized to investigate the murderer’s background, history, and motivations.

Pinkney is an African-American resident of Washington Heights, an area of Harlem. The police recognized him as a member of EBK, which stands for Everybody Killas, a gang whose base of operations is in the borough of Queens. EBK was born from other criminal gangs with which it maintains close relationships: the Bloods, the Crips, the Nightingales. EBK’s range of action extends to California, where a report by the San Joaquin prosecutor’s office describes it as “a gang whose policy is open warfare”. It is financed by drug trafficking; it is involved in a long line of shootings.

Pinkney had been arrested 11 times since 2012 for serious crimes. In 2018, he had been sentenced to four years in prison for participating in a vicious pack attack. He was released after two years. To find these news stories, released by law enforcement, you have to go to the sites of some local TV station, or a populist tabloid, the New York Post. The New York Times has chosen a reticence that borders on self-censorship, consistent with the editorial line of recent years. The canons of American journalism have been twisted, particularly during the Donald Trump years when it became a boast in progressive media newsrooms to practice “resistance journalism.” The search for balance or impartiality was considered a weakness: the end justifies the means.

With the murder of African American George Floyd by a white officer on May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis, and the revival of the Black Lives Matter anti-racist movement, major newspapers embraced slogans such as “defund the police.” Incidents of looting and violence that occurred under the guise of anti-racism were downplayed. The New York Times has promoted an initiative, The 1619 Project, which rereads the entire American history as a derivation of slavery that would still affect every institution, the entire legal system, culture and school. A purge within the editorial staff removed several reporters who were not aligned with the radicalism of Black Lives Matter.

A few dissenting voices remain isolated, such as columnist Bret Stephens, who warned a week ago: in the past, when the American left has been lax on the escalation of crime, it has favored a powerful right-wing uprising. In New York, homicides are up 42% since 2019. The first political reaction has already been there: the election of new Mayor Eric Adams, an African-American who comes from the ranks of the police. The less privileged ethnic groups, the main victims of the escalation of violence, voted for him.

“Black lives matter” is a slogan that for Black Lives Matter seems to apply only when the killers are white and racist; the vast majority of violent deaths, among Blacks as well as Hispanics, go unnoticed because the killers belong to the same ethnic group. The Times‘ reticence includes the issue of easy release. The newspaper supports “progressive” prosecutors who also set free dangerous criminals, professionals of violence, who pose a constant threat to the community.

In the aftermath of Giri’s death, an editorial from the editors confirmed this line, attacking those prosecutors who do not proceed fast enough to empty prisons. The pain for the absurd death of Giri would not be compensated by a different focus of the press, but this event offers a disturbing look at the “new journalism”, militant and conditioned by its ideological agenda. Even crime reporting bends to this tribal logic.

If you read Italian, read the original. 

The Italians are correct. It matters far, far more to the Times newsroom that a so-called Karen called the police unfairly on a black man in Central Park than that a black ex-con released from prison early in a time of progressive anti-incarceration initiatives savagely murdered a white man at Columbia. When this country takes a hard right turn out of disgust with crime and the ideological lying around race that America’s elites practice and mandate, The New York Times is going to wonder how it happened. I hope they have a big mirror in the newsroom.

And if you want to read actual news about this monster Pinkney, check out the New York Post.