Category: Rants a.k.a. Commentary || By

(Mildly bad language here. You have been warned.)

Someone asked me privately, over email, just what I thought the political slant of an editorial page in the Mon-Yough area should be.

There's no right or wrong answer. Personally, I don't want to read stuff that agrees with me all the time. It's boring. To use a favorite K.C. Constantine expression, people on the far left and the far right both "make my ass tired."

But my gut feeling is that many residents of the Mon Valley grew up in working-class households, where dad or mom or both were union members and the entire family attended a mainstream Protestant or Catholic church.

We tend to believe in low taxes and a strong national defense, but we're also inclined to mistrust big business (a legacy of the mill closings of the 1980s).

We take a live-and-let-live approach to religious issues; many of us disapprove of abortion, but aren't inclined to see a constitutional amendment banning it (maybe because we know someone who had one).

Generally speaking, we support civil-rights laws (though the occasional slur passes our lips).

In short, we're mostly Kennedy Democrats. (John, not Ted.)

We vote for Bob Casey Jr. and Arlen Specter. We love conservative Democrats like Mike Doyle and liberal Republicans like John Heinz.

My point --- and I do have one --- is that if you're going to connect with people in the Mon-Yough area, you'd better be pretty middle-of-the-road and willing to embrace those contradictions. Trying to hammer far-left or far-right opinions down our throats is going to alienate us.

And if you really want to piss us off, then try telling us day after day that we're "Dimmycrats" and "socialists" because we voted for Barack Obama, or because we think health insurance is a right, not a privilege.

By the way, it would be just as bad if you were trying to sell the People's Weekly World at the corner of Fifth and Walnut. You'd be lucky if someone didn't stuff you into a trash can.

Newspapers everywhere are struggling. McKeesport's Daily News has been struggling for longer than most, the victim of a market that's been in decline for 30 years, and also of some tremendously bad business decisions made by former owners.

I realize this entire piece will be regarded as "sour grapes" by some of my old bosses, who will say I'm jealous, or a lousy writer, or that I "couldn't hack it" in the business. That's fine.

But this failed ex-newspaper reporter says that if you want to preserve the Daily News, the way to do it is definitely not to yank the editorial page hard to the right, or towards Pittsburgh, for that matter.

Although we live in the Mon Valley, and dress funny, and probably live in the past too much, we still know when someone's pissing down our backs and telling us it's raining.

Just my opinion; God knows, I've been wrong plenty of times in the past.