Pat Howard's hysteria, histrionics and the community college

In his hysterical advocacy for an Erie County community college opposed, according to his own newspaper's survey, by nearly 90 percent of readers, Erie Times-News Managing Editor Pat Howard, in typically prolix prose, resorted to prevarication and half-truths, even urging an elected public official to disobey state ethics law.

These combined with an array of factual errors in last Sunday's vituperative column denigrating two county councilmen who have displayed the courage of their convictions, undermines what little credibility Howard may have as a putative journalist, none in my estimation.

It would take more time and space than his epistolary histrionics are worth to disprove all of Howard's fanciful notions about the role of two of the four council members - Lyle Foust and Joseph Giles - who, along with two other council colleagues, have bravely withstood the gross falsehoods and misrepresentations published almost daily in the monopoly Erie Times-News by Howard and his cohorts, so I'll just address a few of the most glaring ones.

It begins with the headline Howard wrote over his Sunday column: "Foust's decision to abstain not as clear-cut as he portrays it.", an assertion so at odds with reality it boggles the mind. Foust took his principled stand to abstain from voting on the community college issue based upon a thorough legal analysis by county council's own attorney, Thomas Talarico. He concluded it would be a clear conflict of interest and violation of state law for Foust to vote on the community college question whether he voted yea or nay. It doesn't get more clear-cut than that.

Nevertheless, Howard wrote that Foust should "push" what Howard misperceives as "the legal limits of the gray area," and vote in favor of a community college, but which a rational person would see as a black and white legal admonition against voting either for or against it. In other words, according to Howard, break the law.

Howard claims Foust "advocated" (Howard's word, not Foust's) in favor of an Erie county community college when two years ago he wrote in the Meadville newspaper that it was "an opportunity that northwest Pennsylvania must seize if it is to make progress in the challenging years ahead."

Howard fails to note that was long before first (and quite likely one) term County Executive Barry Grossman was elected to that position and "advocated" that the community college's unknown but considerable costs should be financed by Erie County's already heavily-burdened property taxpayers. That provision is at the very root of Councilman Giles' opposition to the community college proposal advanced by the dissembling county executive.

The most pernicious aspect of Howard's and his newspaper's relentless campaign on behalf of a community college is their abject failure to give not merely equal, but ANY time and space to opponents. Instead they publish slanted news stories, editorials and op-ed columns on its behalf almost daily, but none in opposition, while printing every letter to the editor favoring their pet project, but only one in ten of those opposed to it, despite their pious editorial pronouncements proclaiming freedom of speech and the press. It underscores the cynical truism that "A free press is guaranteed only to those who own one."