DEAR EDITOR:

While Salena Zito’s March 1 op-ed (“Where Was ’60 Minutes’ Crew When Youngstown Jobs Were Cut?”) contains a number of objective historical truths, she surrounds these with rhetorical distortions that undercut her credibility.

For example:

She declaratively states, “National newspapers buried the story on page A-12,” but doesn’t mention a single national newspaper that did this, and so it’s impossible to verify that broad claim. She then goes on to chastise The New York Times for not reporting the story “in real time,” which is amusing, since “real-time” news reporting was an impossibility for a print newspaper in 1977. And despite her obviously disingenuous search of the Times’ archive that, she claims, turned up nothing, my quick search of the archive does indeed show a front-page article two days later (September 21, 1977 see link below:

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1977/09/21/issue.html

This article starts with the bold, unambiguous headline: “Shutdown of SteelWorks Stuns Youngstown” … It then goes on to state, “… a tornado or flash flood might as well have wiped [Youngstown] from the face of the earth,” which Zito practically plagiarizes for her op-ed when she writes, “Had the Mahoning Valley been hit by a rocket, the region would have looked no less hollowed out a few years later.”

While the national news media of 1977 almost certainly didn’t fully appreciate or anticipate the history-making change that the closing of the Campbell Works set into motion, Zito must surely recognize that only hindsight is 20/20. More to the point, even a cursory Google search reveals that the story was, indeed, widely and repeatedly reported on by both The New York Times and The Washington Post — to name but two “national newspapers” — in the waning months of 1977, and beyond.

I would expect more diligence, and less rhetorical

disingenuousness, from a

reporter and analyst with a national profile.

MARK MELNICK

New Middletown