
                         THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
                 Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 8, 1994                    TAG: 9406080008 
SECTION: FRONT                     PAGE: A14    EDITION: FINAL  
SOURCE: Short 
DATELINE: 940608                                 LENGTH:

PARTY-LINE EDITORIAL PAGES

{LEAD} That I am disappointed at the new tone and point of view of the editorial page is an understatement. It seems as if I went to sleep one night and found that a tabloid like the New York Post had replaced the award-winning paper that we had in this area.

During my six years in Norfolk, I have found your newspaper to present a moderate and complex view of issues. The paper endorsed Republicans and Democrats alike.

{REST} It made me and others stop and think when we became dogmatic or self-righteous. Now the editorial pages are filled with a party line.

I can predict the ``no taxes'' line every other day. There is a simplistic formula for dealing with social problems. I am no longer challenged to consider the complexity of issues. The paper is no longer a leader but a panderer to what is seen as an angry ``I got mine, don't you take it'' public.

This is not a thoughtful conservatism, such as that of William Safire or George Will, but rather a daily one-sided polemic which trumpets ``individual freedom'' to the exclusion of the larger community to which we all belong.

The new editorial page editor, John A. Barnes - who is a first-generation Irish-American from New York, as I am - seems to have forgotten the lesson of his ancestors' famine: The ``free market,'' no-taxes philosophy in England at the time led to the starvation of 1 million Irish while the landowners and London merchants got wealthy on Irish crops. So quickly we forget.

GARRETT McAULIFFE

Norfolk, May 29, 1994 by CNB