Dear Ben Liebing,

Thank you for explaining in your recent essay why my friends and colleagues lost their jobs this week. It was enlightening to learn they had it coming.

I didn’t think you could bring so much insight to this painful time after working here for only a few months last year, but you nailed it. The Cincinnati Enquirer’s problem is not its failure to adequately adapt to a digital world in which advertising revenue continues to decline and readers balk at paying for the online product. No. The problem is the men and women who work here are a bunch of liberal, elitist carpetbaggers who’d rather sip lattes and wax poetic about their moral superiority than go out and cover a community they secretly despise. As you put it, “most of the real writers have quit or been fired.” Those left behind are ruled by “servile timidity,” “political correctness” and a desire to attack a city they deem racist and backward. So this latest round of layoffs is no big deal. Just more hacks getting sacked.

How did I not see this sooner? You clearly paid closer attention during those months you spent in journalism than I have in my 27 years.

I never knew, for example, that journalists at The Enquirer, especially non-natives like me, so despise the city we cover. Or that we hate business and development. Or that we don’t know anything about the Big Red Machine and Cincinnati history. Or that we couldn’t find our way to the West Side if Buddy LaRosa himself gave us directions to the Harvest Home Parade.

I drive home every night to the West Side, past the park where Pete Rose played ball as a kid, to a wife who grew up here and a child who goes to school here. Sometimes, we go out to businesses and new developments in town to shop or eat or have fun with friends. But now I realize it’s all a front for a hidden agenda. I want to tear this city down.

Thank you for teaching me so much about myself.

I also never realized our journalism was so worthless. “The bad apples from top to bottom far outweigh the good,” you wrote. “A well-curated Twitter feed would be better.”

You are so right.

Cincinnati would be better off if the lousy reporters, editors and photographers here hadn’t done their jobs this year. We wouldn’t have offended our readers with stories about the devastation of the heroin epidemic, questionable contracts at the city’s parks, millions of dollars in waste at the sewer district, a political scandal at City Hall, the travails of the pro baseball team, the intensity of the presidential campaign, and a cold case in Oxford, Ohio, that turned into a first-ever Enquirer podcast with more than 3 million listens.

Who needs that crap? As you suggested, the locals can learn all they need to know about Cincinnati from The Business Courier and Vice Media. And The Onion.

I don’t remember the diversity meeting you mentioned. Newspapers, like many businesses, talk a lot about diversity. The idea is that newsrooms could benefit from having journalists who don’t all share the same cultural, ethnic or economic background. I don’t doubt there was some hand-wringing at that meeting, or that someone said something simplistic or stupid about Cincinnati’s racial history, which, as I’m sure you know, is complicated. What I hadn’t considered, until you brought it to my attention, is that such a comment was actually indicative of how everyone at The Enquirer thinks. It wasn’t just an off-hand remark, but a call to action that dictated The Enquirer’s coverage of this community for years to come.

If you’d stuck around longer than a few months, you would have had the opportunity to attend many more meetings on a wide range of topics, and no doubt would have heard, on occasion, other simplistic and stupid comments. I can only imagine what deep insights into the soul of the newsroom you would have gleaned from them if you’d had the chance.

As for those elitist suckers who lost their jobs this week, I guess we just need to move on. It is, after all, their own damn fault for hating Cincinnati so much. For refusing to tell the truth.

As you duly noted, those of us here are guided by a “powerfully subliminal” message: “The rich and powerful are, by nature, evil. The poor and minorities are, by nature, good. The Left is right, the Right are bigots, and the barometer of morality rests on the desk of the Editorial team.” Some might say that sounds like a tired cliché, or that it’s intellectually lazy. But not me. You’ve convinced me. We really aren’t, as I had always believed, journalists trained to ask hard questions of those in power, on the Left or Right. We aren’t just doing our best to dig out the truth and share it with readers in an increasingly ugly, partisan world. We are the problem. No wonder so many of us are losing our jobs.

The thing is, the journalists who got laid off this week seemed like good, hard-working people. They covered small communities and college sports. They edited stories about Cincinnati and did their best to make the online operation as competitive and profitable as it could be. One of them had worked as a news photographer in this town for longer than you’ve breathed air. When he needed to climb a tree or a roof to get a shot, he climbed it. When he needed to wade into the Ohio River for breaking news, he went in up to his waist. He raised kids in Cincinnati, made a good life for his family and spent almost every day of his career exploring the city he loved, looking for news and doing all he could to share it with our readers. Every day, he reminded us why journalism matters.

Now I know better.

So, thanks again for making sense of these complicated times for me. I admit I had my doubts about someone who’d been here for such a short time. But after reading your analysis of this whole layoff thing, I’ll take your word for it. You’ve got it all figured out.

Sincerely,

Dan