by JOE LaROCCA
In his recent Sunday column, "Data shows (sic) Erie region drifting in wrong direction," it's no surprise Pat Howard would blithely ignore the obvious parallel between the Erie region's demograph-driven economic decline, and the total disintegration of the Times-News as an instrument of legitimate community communication and interaction.
Pat relishes telling it like it is only where other entities and institutions are concerned, while ignoring the one for which he is the self-anointed spokesperson. The lofty pretensions of the Times-News fail to mask the pernicious intellectual corruption, morale and ethical breakdown that has infected the Times-News generally for decades, with a few bright exceptions that prove the rule.
In this column, wherein he profiles the demographic decline of Erie County broadly, and more specifically, the city of Erie, Howard notes that the county's population has remained level , while the city's is close to sinking below 100,000 for the first time since the Roaring 20s..
These and related trends, Howard pontificates, "have been enabled by a political culture that's been chronically incapable of shaking off the corrosive inertia reflected in the data," a culture for which the Times-News has ironically served as a model, and Howard its personification.
One example of this culture, according to Howard was the failure of outgoing County Executive Grossman "and his allies" to establish a proposed Erie County community college last year during his first and only term.
What Howard fails to mention is that the Times-News and he were Grossman's most prominent of allies, devoting acres of newsprint and gallons of printer's ink to a relentless barrage of editorials and biased news stories pushing for the community college rising to an hysterical pitch, while suppressing the mass of voices opposed to it, and who nevertheless won out.
The reality which Grossman, the Times-News and Howard blindly ignored was that county taxpayers could not afford the hefty increase in property taxes the proposed community college would engender, a reality which led a majority of county council wisely to vote it down.
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