Unfair and unbalanced

Certain editors at the Erie Times-News frequently complain about deficiencies in, and violations of laws protecting freedom of speech, press and information perpetrated by local, state and government agencies. But the newspaper’s own actions within its publishing realm are equally or more pernicious and repressive. A famous editor once wryly commented: “Freedom of the press is granted only to those who own one.” The Times-News personifies that notion.

When its editors rant and rave about freedom of the press, they clamor on their own behalf, not for the public-at-large. On the contrary, the Times-News contributes to the suppression of the voice of the people. It grudgingly grants a few inches of space on the editorial page for letters to the editor, which are mindlessly censored, truncated, and distorted, if they are published at all, and then only weeks after they’ve been submitted, when the hot topic they were sent in to address has turned ice cold.

There are also more subtle games which the Times-News plays when considering whether and, if so, how to publish letters to the editor. There’s a good example in today’s paper. A tireless booster of the Presque Isle Downs horse racing track irrespective of its adverse societal effects, the Times-News has published two lengthy pieces this week praising race track income-generating production.

One of them, running more than 20 column inches in last Sunday’s paper, I’ve dealt with in my blog below entitled “The dark side of horse racing.” As a counterpoint to the Times-News’s one-sided article, I had submitted my blog as an op-ed article last Sunday, sending it to Rick Sayers, the paper’s executive editor for publication. He never acknowledged it. Nor did I expect him to.

The other biased piece appears as the lead editorial in today’s paper, entitled “Horse racing's return yields success, hope.” It, too, runs about 20 column inches. On the same editorial page, there’s a brief letter, perhaps three column inches, from Tina Halloran of Erie above which the editorial page editor placed this caption. “Reader opposed to horse racing.” There you have the Times-News’s concept of “fair and balanced.” Forty column inches versus three! Shades of Bill O’Neill.

Over it’s Sunday article and today’s editorial lavishly praising the race track, the Times-News editorial page editor, Bryan Oberle, placed a caption brimming with positive values, such as “success,” “hope.” Contrast that with the caption he placed over the letter. The operative verb there is “opposed,” in other words, a negative value.

In writing there’s a concept known as “parallelism,” which means in this context giving equal values to competing idioms. Here it was ignored. For comparable treatment, the editorial page editor should have written a caption for the editorial something like this: “Times News favors horse-racing.”

Or alternatively, he could have drawn from the text of the letter and placed a caption like this over it. “Horses helped build this country.” That he chose to do neither further underscores the Times-News’s failure, once again, to be “fair and balanced.”