
Some very good news for freedom of the press in Massachusetts: Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone has ruled that Boston magazine reporter Gretchen Voss will not be compelled to produce notes she took from an off-the-record interview with murder suspect Karen Read (earlier coverage).
The ruling was first reported by Lance Reynolds of the Boston Herald.
Cannone’s decision reverses an order she had issued in December that would have required Voss to turn over her notes. In so doing, the judge found that those notes “are of a different character than the unredacted recordings of the ‘on the record’ interviews produced pursuant to the Court’s previous order.” Cannone continues:
Voss has articulated a compelling argument that requiring disclosure of the notes poses a greater risk to the free flow of information than the other materials produced. Conversely, the Commonwealth [that is, the prosecution] has not demonstrated to the Court that its need for the handwritten notes, separate from the audio recordings, outweighs the danger posed to the public interest in the free flow of information.
What Cannone is referring to is her earlier decision to allow the prosecution access to recordings Voss had made in the course of interviewing Read. The judge’s new decision, handed down on Friday, pertains to handwritten notes that Voss had taken while conducting an off-the-record interview with Read in June 2023. In an affidavit, Voss said:
The entire meeting was off the record; I agreed in advance with Ms. Read and her lawyers that if there were any quotes I wanted to attribute to her during this meeting, I would need her and their express permission. As I did not actually use any of Ms. Read’s statements from that meeting in the article, such permission did not end up being necessary.
Moreover, Voss said, being forced to turn over her notes would open herself up to a campaign of villification that began after her article about the case was published in September 2023 and had only recently begun to abate:
[T]he notes, standing alone, will likely require further explanation on my part to make sense of them. I have already suffered an enormous emotional toll from publishing this story: I have been routinely harassed, both online and in person; have received text messages from strangers to my private cell phone containing photographs of my children and indirect threats against them; have had my photograph posted without my consent on Facebook, with hordes of strangers accusing me of unethical behavior and other defamatory accusations; have been approached, verbally assaulted and photographed without my consent in public, including in the courthouse, among many, many other acts and incidents against my person, my family, my character and my career. While the level of harassment has subsided somewhat over time, I have no doubt it will pick up again if my interview with Ms. Read becomes an issue for debate at trial.
A separate affidavit was submitted by BoMag editor Chris Vogel, who said that allowing Cannone’s earlier order to stand would impede investigative reporting because it would increase the costs and resources necessary to produce such work. “Magazines like ours will not be able to risk becoming enmeshed in situations such as this one, with the result that the flow of vigorous reporting will suffer,” Vogel said. “We will feel we have no choice but to select tamer, less controversial topics for our coverage.”
In addition, an amicus (“friend of the court”) memo was submitted by several organizations devoted to freedom of the press: the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, the New England First Amendment Coalition, the New England Newspaper and Press Association and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
In their memo, written by First Amendment lawyer Jonathan Albano, they cited Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, who wrote a famous concurring decision in the 1972 case of Branzburg v. Hayes in which he agreed with the majority that journalists do not generally have a constitutional right to protect their anonymous sources and their confidential reporting materials — but that a journalist must nevertheless have the right to argue before a judge if he has “reason to believe that his testimony implicates confidential source relationships without a legitimate need of law enforcement.”
Judge Cannone’s decision represents a significant victory. Like 49 other states, Massachusetts recognizes some degree of protection for journalists to protect confidential sources and information, but that right is not enshrined in a state shield law, which has often been proposed but which has yet to be enacted.
Robert Bertsche, a noted First Amendment lawyer who represented Boston magazine, hailed the decision, telling me in an email: “It’s a huge win for Gretchen, and for Massachusetts reporters generally. And a nice parting gift to the city from Metro Corp., which underwrote the protracted battle even as it was negotiating the magazine’s sale to the Globe.” (Boston Globe Media recently acquired Boston magazine.)
At least in my layperson’s view, Cannone’s reversal was as unexpected as it was welcome. Courts generally afford less protection for confidential reporting materials than they do for anonymous sources, and the importance of the case enters into it as well. In this case, Read has been charged with murdering her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe. The case ended in a mistrial last July, and Read is expected to be retried later this year.
A tale of two obits
Some readers of The Boston Globe over the weekend may be wondering whether the paper edited an obituary about figure skater and commentator Dick Button in order to excise information about his sexual orientation. The explanation turns out to be pretty mundane.
A New York Times obit, by Richard Goldstein, noted that Button had once been assaulted in an area of Central Park “frequented by gay men,” and it listed his spouse and longtime partner, Dennis Grimaldi, as among his survivors. The Globe picked up the Times obit, but in Saturday’s print edition and, for a while, on its website, it omitted both of those details
The Times, however, initially left out those details as well. “The Times updated the original version of the obituary, and the Globe updated the obituary online today to reflect these changes,” said Globe spokeswoman Carla Kath in an email on Saturday afternoon.
Ted Rowse, 1921-2025
Arthur “Ted” Rowse, a legendary journalist who grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and who established the National Press Club’s media criticism award, died on Jan. 6 at the age of 104. Mr. Rowse’s stops included The Beacon in Maynard, Massachusetts, The Boston Globe, the Boston Herald Traveler, The Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report. He also worked in the Lyndon Johnson administration in the 1960s.
I first learned about Mr. Rowse while I was at The Boston Phoenix and won the 2001 National Press Club award for press criticism that he established. I was also part of a public television show at GBH-TV in Boston, “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” that won several Rowse Awards over the years. Arthur — I know that his close friends called him “Ted,” but he was “Mr. Rowse” to me — did a great service through his efforts to hold the news media to account. Later on, I learned he had written a wonderful book about informal English called “Amglish,” which, by coincidence, was illustrated by my friend John Doherty, a terrific artist who attended the same church as our family.
I got to spend some time with Mr. Rowse in 2018 when I was at the National Press Club for an event and he joined several of us for dinner afterwards. Despite his advanced years, he was sharp, lively and an entertaining raconteur, sharing stories from throughout his life and career. He lived a long, productive life and affected all those he met for the better.
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