Dancing to the cacaphony of the Meads

After reading the first few lines into retiring Erie Times News Publisher Jim Dible’s soporific swan song on the editorial page Sunday, I resolved to restrain myself from commenting on his exit in my usual acerbic way and allow him to fade with dignity into the sunset.

My resolve endured until I got about halfway down into his dissertation where he said he wanted to leave two messages to his readers. “First,” he opined, “a family-owned local newspaper is a community asset. The Mead family has been a wonderful steward of this asset for the past 119 years, and will continue to do so as the fourth generation takes its place in the company's legacy.” There my resolve vanished. Though debatable, I’ll give him the first part of his declaration, since some family-owned newspapers are an asset to the community they serve.
I don’t know Dible personally nor professionally, but the second part about the Mead family being a “wonderful steward of this asset for the past 119 years” is not a call he’s qualified to make, since he’s only been here 11 years. Even if he had confined his comment to his tenure here, there are tens of thousands of people within the Times-News’s circulation area who would vigorously disagree with him, and very few who would agree I, if you haven’t already guessed, among them.

While I can’t speak for those tens of thousands, from my perspective, the Times-News has not only not been a community asset during the half century or so that I’ve been exposed to it, it’s been a liability, a regressive force that has kept Erie from becoming the vital city it might have been, but never will, so long as the Meads impose their categorical imperative like an ill wind over its environs.

Sadly, this city has for decades reflected its only newspaper’s mediocrity and provincialism, powerless to rise above them because it has no compelling voice to assert its higher singular and collective aspirations.

One of the most important forces shaping the social order and public opinion in any community is its news media and, in a town unfortunate enough to have only one, especially its newspaper, the most dominant medium of all by far. That newspaper needs to embrace the full spectrum of a city’s humanity, not just those who serve its selfish needs.

Notwithstanding its hollow daily rhetoric purporting to represent the collective citizenry and pursue broad public interests, behind that hypocritical façade, the Times-News is fundamentally elitest and self-serving. Only those causes and moral imperatives which advance its own interests are granted an audible voice within its regime. The Times-News directs a choir tuned only to its own chords.

Over the years, succeeding news and editorial staffs have been forced to play to its top management’s warped tune or leave, notwithstanding this nation’s longstanding tradition of journalistic independence, an ethos to which the Meads have never subscribed. Most of the staffers, unwilling to compromise their principles and ethics, have gone on, leaving behind those willing to suppress their higher values for the sake of a vacuous job, and dance to the cacaphony of the Meads.