Social engineering at the Erie Times News

Sunday, May 10, 2008

In his weekly column today, Pat Howard, managing editor of the Erie Times-News, writes glowingly of the public forum held last week engineered by him and his colleagues at the paper.It was called "Times-News...,"uh sorry, "Erie Agenda '09." It was like reading a review written by the playwright of his own play. All raves, naturally.

According to Howard, about 150 people attended the forum, the discussion of which was "guided" by himself and three other of his newsroom colleagues, Liz Allen, Kevin Cuneo and Kevin Flowers whose qualifications are suspect, to put it kindly. And, by the way, aren't newsfolk supposed to report the news, rather than make it?

In the interests of full disclosure, I neither attended the forum nor watched the streaming video of the hyper-hyped event on my computer, so I can't evaluate the performance. But Howard's words speak volumes. Headlined "Erie's agenda comes into focus amid spirit of realism, optimism," his column extols and sums up the forum's ambiance. "It was very cool," he writes, with sophomoric eclat.

Those who happen to disagree with Howard's and the Times-News editorial board's myopic vision of what they see as Erie's future are portrayed as "loudmouths at the end of the bar" evincing "a strain of sour defeatism...that generates a hollow whine." Wow. And this is the guy who says "We're all in this together."

Howard's pet topic, on which he preaches incessantly but cluelessly, is "regionalism," once known as "metro government," which seeks at the furthest extreme advocated by Howard to lump most or all of the county's municipalities and functions under a single government umbrella.

Can you imagine an Erie city or county council, with their petty politics and relentless penchant for self-agrandizement infecting every other municipality within the county, big or small, writ large? It boggles the mind.

Apparently some regionalism advocates at the forum weren't prepared to go as far as Howard and the Times-News would lead them, and "came at the question from a different angle," with more limited visions of Big Brotherism.

While Howard prefers that big government be foisted on home rule venues wholesale by the corrupt gang in Harrisburg, he grudgingly concedes "that's not going to happen, so the incremental regionalism" described by others "is probably the best path available."

Most alarming of all was Howard's punch line: "...the dialogue on Wednesday night should be only the beginning. Here at the Erie Times-News and GoErie.com, it's our job to see to that." Shallow cliches aside, with the Times-News, it's never a dialogue. Think, rather, a monologue.