Concern Over New Philly Newspaper Owners

At an auction conducted on Wednesday, the struggling and increasingly irrelevant Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News as well as their Internet arm "Philly.com" were all purchased by a group of creditors.

The new owners have quickly come under fire from the top politicians at both the Commonwealth and the City levels.

Governor Ed Rendell, the former 2-term Mayor of Philadelphia, voiced his concern that he believed that newspapers should  be owned by people from the area. He further stated "In the end, the newspaper is nothing if not the people who work for it. If you take that away, you take away it's soul."

Mayor Michael Nutter, the current Philly head honcho, called on the new owners to make their decisions on how to proceed with the operation of the papers "based on great journalism" rather than being overly concerned with the financial bottom line.

Both of these comments mask the actual concern of these two leading Democratic Party politicians. Their real primary concern is that with new ownership will come a basic change of direction in the editorial content and presentation of the two papers.

For decades, the Philadelphia Inquirer and even more overtly the Daily News have been outwardly liberal in their political and social commentaries and with the vast majority of their political endorsements. It is this liberal ideology as directed by Rendell and Nutter's Democrats that has demoralized Philly and reduced it to a shell of it's former greatness.

Pensions Not the Problem

Last night the local Fox News affiliate here in Philadelphia chose to devote a large portion of their 10:00pm news program spotlighting what they call "The Pension Problem" in Philadelphia, New Jersey and other places. In calling pensions the problem, Fox misled the public and missed an opportunity to highlight the truth for tax-payers.

Once again, the local news media, this time Fox in particular, cow-towed to liberal politicians and let them off the hook for a mess that they singularly have created. But not only that, they also portrayed hard-working city and state employees as the problem, seemed to be trying to pit tax-payers against pensioners, and never once keyed on the real problem.

That real problem? Out of control spending on issues, services, and frankly outright budgetary 'pork' over decades and decades as well as regular, intentional under-funding of employee pensions. All of that going on with little to no outcry from media watchdogs.

Fox missed an opportunity when they once again identified the real problems improperly in stating that "Pensions are at the heart of budget troubles in the state of New Jersey and in the city of Philadelphia."

Pensions are not the problem, politicians are the problem. Politicians who spend money that the city's citizens simply do not have and never did have on programs that make them feel and look better.

No, I am not going to take any time whatsoever to point out any particular program or project that I feel falls into this category. I will make one simple statement, however. If any fiscal conservative individual had been put in charge, this would not have happened.