By Roldo Bartimole

Maybe you have to give the Columbus Dispatch, the Dayton Daily News and the Plain Dealer credit for trying something new.

I am speaking of the three newspapers “Teaming Up,” as the PD says, to “address problems facing the state of Ohio and its gubernatorial candidates.”

However, I view it more as an attempt to do what the candidates aim to do. Try to convince the public that they are doing something about Ohio’s problems without really doing much at all. The newspapers are marketing to the public that they are responsible citizens with ideas.

It’s really being done on the cheap.

The three papers are advertising “responsibility” just as the candidates they want to influence do.

I do not think this pleading is the job of the newspapers or its commentators. I also don’t believe that they have the expertise to give such advice. Certainly, they do not have the power to make any of it happen.

It’s similarly deceptive as Voices and Choices is as a solution to the area’s economic problems. We have one attempt after another to talk our way out of trouble. (By the way, whatever happened to Civic Vision 2000? Or for that matter, the 1973 Doxiadis plan, or the 1975 Halprin plan, or the many Lakefront Plans or the other forgotten plans. How quickly we fail to remember the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on these plans before the rush to the next gimmick.)

The public doesn’t have the voice to make the real economic choices any more than the newspapers are going to determine how the state government functions with obligatory columns about do good governmental ideas.

This civic/booster kind of journalism is not new. I remember in the 1960s at the Plain Dealer when I was a reporter everyone on a beat was assigned to write something “positive” about his or her subject for a “What’s Right in Cleveland” special, all published with a flourish. I was the welfare (poverty) beat reporter and refused by memo to do so. It would have been dishonest. I guess the editors thought so too since there were no repercussions.

Newspapers are not competent and should not be in the business of attempting to govern or set policy. Nobody elected them.

I admit up front that I don’t know that much about the details of state government.

That does not disqualify me from observing that legislative religious extremists should be in the pulpit, not the statehouse.

Yet we seem to have government by creed.

We have a bunch of right-wingers in control. They apparently view the state as their congregation. Cleveland, of course, is sin city, only to be made more so if slots and casinos become reality.

The state’s newspapers ought to be clearly and strongly pinpointing every one of these legislators and the games they are playing as legislators of state theology.

Wedge issues made the public’s business by those who rule by religion rather than law range from the abortion issue to creationism, from the privacy of sexual persuasion to avoidance of science for belief.

Sex apparently to some legislators is the most crucial problem in Ohio.

These legislators ought to be laughed out of office with journalistic ridicule, if the papers want really to provide a service to the public.

Not going to happen. That would lose them subscribers.

The “responsible” tact they appear to be taking, however, is a safe one. It may fool some people into thinking of them as conscientious public servants. Therefore there’s little downside to this kind of editorial preaching.

The other great lack in these attempts at honesty is the dishonesty of avoiding talking about other matters that hold us back.

One, racism. Little is said of the various forms of racism, a damaging issue to divide people.

Two, class. There’s no talk about rich and poor in the sense of which class fairly is paying the bills and which is not. We keep getting regressive taxation. We keep getting scams for business and development. We keep giving more and more resources to those who don’t have needs, instead of those with needs. We keep making multi-millionaires. (The Dayton paper at least editorially questioned the jobs hoax of generous subsidies to keep and “grow” jobs. No names mentioned, however.)

Let’s have another shopping center with government subsidies, by all means.

So thanks for the essentially wasted space, worth about the value of the TV ads by the candidates.

Nice try. Better luck next time.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole roldoATadelphia.net (:divend:)