Your front page Columbus Day piece (“5 facts you might not know about Columbus Day,” Oct. 14, Trib LIVE) was a disservice to your readers. Your effort appears to be more of an editorial or opinion disguised as balanced historical reporting.
While you refer to colonization, you fail to acknowledge the major accomplishment of opening the Western Hemisphere to settlement and the ultimate creation of the United States — perhaps the greatest achievement in human history. You do not characterize this accomplishment as contributing more good to mankind than any other.
I find no fault or offense in reporting Columbus’ shortcomings or sins. My ethnicity isn’t even seriously offended. What offends me is your lack of balance and the effect of diminishing his accomplishments. All of his shortcomings combined do not negate his courage and fervor to learn more about the world he lived in. Even if his motives were selfish, discovery is discovery. Results are results.
You have become part of the media trend to take the worst of a person or event and advance that to obscure the essential element, fact or accomplishment which you may not like. Did you forget that you owe your very existence to Columbus?
Would your front page article on Martin Luther King JR. include any reference to his extramarital affairs or his plagiarized Doctoral dissertation? Would you lead an article on Israel’s 1948 statehood with examples of the sufferings of the indigenous Palestinians, unintended or otherwise? I wouldn’t think so, and rightly so.
Louis F. D’Emilio
Penn Township, Westmoreland County