Soon after the Kahle family sold the Inquirer it has moved away from “just the facts” to a conservative bent. They stopped running Doonesbury, a favorite of non-conservatives. Doonesbury had been in the editorial section before it was removed. When I spoke with management at that time they provided a joke of an answer as to why they stopped running it. I know of no other newspaper that stopped running Doonesbury. Apparently they thought the readers of the Inquirer might be harmed by even knowing it was in the editorial section.

This lack of “just the facts” has been a steady feature. Yes, they infrequently do print a column that isn’t conservative, but most columns are conservative. Conservative is fine, all perspectives should be available. What is not acceptable are the instances of cognitive dissonance generated by nearly every column written by a conservative.

For instance in a column by Ross Marchand, which appeared in the Feb. 3 edition, he repeated the net losses sustained by the US Postal Service (USPS) numbers. My guess is that those who read the Inquirer would understand this to mean “operating losses.” You might notice that Marchland did not use the term operating losses, but instead used the correct term “net losses.” That is because the USPS is not sustaining $9.2 billion in operating losses. The main driver of the net losses is something provided by the George Bush administration called the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act (PAEA). This act mandated that within 10 years the USPS would have to fully fund retirement health care benefits for the next 75 years. Or to put it more plainly, the USPS had a decade to fully fund the retirement health care benefits for future employees that would not even be born until 2057 at the earliest.

Next Marchand refers to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s “long overdue operational changes.” The most significant of these “long overdue operational changes” was the removal of high speed sorting machines ahead of the expected tens of millions of mail-in ballots. How did that work? Huge delays for incoming as well as outgoing. Even into 2021 most Galionites received their utility bills a month late.

And Marchand wonders why many of us see DeJoy’s changes as intentional kneecapping of the capabilities of the USPS to slow down those ballots.

John Smella

Galion, OH