Author: Dan Kennedy

More on the Herald apology

Smart stuff from Adam Reilly of the Phoenix and Paul Flannery of Boston Magazine. Also, Jon Keller of WBZ-TV (Channel 4) interviewed me for a story he’s doing.

As I told Keller, one of the big problems the Herald faces is that its sports section is a prime reason that people plunk down 50 cents rather than simply grabbing a Metro.

Today, angry Patriots fans are demanding blood and threatening a boycott. Unlikely to happen, but this is nevertheless a scary moment for Pat Purcell and company.

Rough play

After Peter Lucas, then a columnist for the Boston Herald, erroneously reported in 1983 that Mayor Kevin White would seek a fifth term — “WHITE WILL RUN” was the front-page headline — his unnamed source turned out to be none other than Kevin White.

Lucas offered to resign anyway, but the editors were not about to let him be punished for falling victim to a dirty trick.

This morning it looks as though the Herald is trying to close the books as quickly as possible on its erroneous Feb. 2 report about the Patriots’ having videotaped a St. Louis Rams walk-through before the 2002 Super Bowl, running an apology that’s teased in huge type across the front and back covers.

In a perverse twist, the Globe runs the covers online, while, at least at the moment, they are not available on the Herald’s Web site.

The theme of the day seems to be whether the Herald reporter who wrote the walk-through story, John Tomase, should be fired. That’s what they’re talking about on WEEI Radio (AM 850).

But Bruce Allen of Boston Sports Media remains struck by the specificity of Tomase’s story. “The situation isn’t as cut-and-dry as it might appear at a casual glance,” Allen writes.

Let’s get a grip. It’s not like Tomase wrote false, anonymously sourced stories that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But I would like to know more. I keep thinking about what happened to Peter Lucas, and wonder if the reason Tomase got it so wrong was because his source was so good.

If Herald editors have reason to believe that Tomase’s source was not acting in good faith, will they out him? Today’s apology would seem to preclude that. But, like Paul Flannery of Boston Magazine, I hope we haven’t heard the last of this.

A different kind of fight?

The quick pundit take seems to be that Hillary Clinton vowed to fight and fight and fight some more, all the way to Barack Obama’s inauguration next January and perhaps into his second term as well. But I thought I heard something else. Check this out, from her victory speech in West Virginia tonight:

And our nominee will be stronger for having campaigned long and hard, building enthusiasm and excitement, hearing your stories, and answering your questions. And I will work my heart out for the nominee of the Democratic Party to make sure we have a Democratic president.

No, she’s not giving up. Yes, she told her supporters that she still thinks she can win. But she’s obviously not stupid. She can do the math, even if Mark Penn can’t. This brief acknowledgment of reality means something.

An old lie recycled

Unexpectedly, it’s turned into Charlie Pierce Week here at Media Nation. Why? Because conservative media critic Tim Graham is smearing Pierce with a five-year-old lie — a lie that Graham had a hand in spreading in the first place.

Pierce has a story in the new Esquire on the presidential campaign. Graham doesn’t like it very much. Fair enough. But Graham, writing for NewsBusters, begins with this:

Charles Pierce is the infamous Boston Globe writer who tried to insist in 2003 that if Mary Jo Kopechne had survived Chappaquiddick, she would enjoy all the senior citizen benefits provided by Ted Kennedy’s beneficent policies.

Graham links to an old item at his own organization, the Media Research Center, which later bestowed on Pierce its “Quote of the Year” for what it considered his extreme liberal bias.

I’ve written about this several times before, and I don’t feel like doing it again; just read this and this. As you will see, Graham deliberately misconstrues what may be the single meanest thing ever written about Ted Kennedy (by a liberal, anyway), strips out the irony and sarcasm, and then pretends that Pierce is tastelessly using Kopechne’s death to praise Kennedy.

Since the record has been corrected several times, Graham is no longer mistaken. Now he’s lying.

Younger and cheaper (III)

Yet another knowledgeable source tells me that there will be some external hires at the Globe. My judgment is that this source supersedes the previous source.

What we’ve got here is the eternal blogger’s dilemma. Standard blogging practice is to post information as it becomes available. When stuff like this happens, though, I find myself wishing I’d done it the old-fashioned way — make calls, and hold off until I have the whole story.

Anyway, I’m now confident that I do have the whole story. Start polishing those résumés, kids.