By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Let’s see if I’ve got this right. We can watch every minute of all 162 regular-season games, not to mention spring training. But once the playoffs hit, we can’t see Game 2 of the Red Sox-Angels series until the extra-inning contest between the Yankees and Cleveland is over. Did no one at TBS anticipate this might happen? Unbelievable.
Put your Sox back on. Whoops. No sooner did I post this than I realized the Sox are on TNT. So never mind.
I have an essay up on ThePhoenix.com on how the democratic, grassroots, participatory media that the Internet has enabled is threatened by efforts by giant telecommunications companies to control the next-generation Net for their own, profit-driven purposes. An excerpt:
The Internet is the single greatest threat to corporate dominance of the media since the industrial model was established a century and a half ago. It would be naïve to think that these corporations wouldn’t fight back. In so doing, they are embracing (as Neil Postman predicted they would) not the strategy of Orwell’s 1984, but of Huxley’s Brave New World. By ensuring that all the latest, richest, coolest content is on the new, high-speed, corporate-controlled Net, they’ll deprive the independent sites of the oxygen they need to survive. And we’ll be so overloaded with entertainment that we won’t care.
This is pretty amusing. Boston Globe columnist Steve Bailey reports that WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) talk-show host Jay Severin is pouting because he didn’t get an invitation to the recent “Greater Boston” 10th-anniversary party at the new WGBH-TV (Channel 2) headquarters.
The upshot: “Greater Boston” host Emily Rooney has been disinvited from her regular Friday chit-chats with Severin. Hey, ‘TKK listeners’ loss is Rooney’s gain. The foul-mouthed Severin is the most self-referential of talk-show hosts, so I’m guessing he’ll spend most of the afternoon whining about this. We’ll see.
Disclosure: I’m a regular paid panelist on the “Greater Boston” Friday “Beat the Press” edition.
The Boston Herald has a splendid editorial today on Judge Merita Hopkins’ unconstitutional order preventing WHDH-TV (Channel 7) from reporting on the Boston firefighters’ autopsy documents. After asserting that Hopkins is the first judge to exercise prior restraint against the media since the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, the editorial continues:
There is no more sacred corollary to the First Amendment than the prohibition against prior restraint — something which apparently eluded Judge Hopkins. The news media are perfectly willing to take our lumps after the fact — fines, civil suits, even getting thrown in jail for refusal to name sources. That is often the price we pay for exercising those freedoms.
I’m not sure about the Herald’s Pentagon Papers citation. At the very least, we know that a federal district-court judge in 1979 stopped the Progressive magazine from publishing an article purporting to show how to build a hydrogen bomb, even though the article was based on publicly available reference materials.
Even so, the fact that the Progressive case invoked the specter of millions of people dying serves to underscore the trivial, ludicrous nature of Hopkins’ special favor to the firefighters union. The overturning of her ill-considered order shouldn’t be the end of this. Good for the Herald for speaking out.
I would like to watch Channel 7’s Andy Hiller, who has a commentary titled “Free Speech v. Privacy Rights” on the WHDH Web site. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to load despite trying several different tricks on both a Mac and a Windows-based PC. Perhaps you’ll have better luck.
Superior Court Judge Merita Hopkins’ chilling order prohibiting WHDH-TV (Channel 7) from airing its exclusive on the autopsy reports of two Boston firefighters has been overturned. John Ellement of the Boston Globe writes that Massachusetts Appeals Court Judge Andrew Grainger set aside Hopkins’ order with little comment, but that we can expect “a lengthier explanation” later.
I hope that explanation includes an acknowledgment that Hopkins ignored well-established First Amendment doctrine. Hopkins exercised prior restraint — censorship — in its rawest form. I also wonder, along with the Phoenix’s Adam Reilly, whether Grainger will say that Hopkins — former chief of staff and legal counsel to Mayor Tom Menino — should have recused herself from even considering the case.
I’d like to ease off on posting about casino gambling, but the media won’t let me. Today, the Boston Globe’s Andrea Estes manages to make two mistakes in one sentence in reporting on Gov. Deval Patrick’s plan to require binding referendums in communities before a casino can be built.
Estes writes: “Middleborough voters have already voted in favor of a Mashpee Wampanoag casino for their town in July.”
No, and no.
First, there has never been a referendum in Middleborough on casino gambling. On July 28, a massive town meeting was called to consider the Mashpee Wampanoag proposal. More than 3,700 residents took part in what has been described as the largest town meeting in state history.
Yet that number is paltry compared to what would be expected in a townwide referendum, which is what Patrick wants. There are 14,652 registered voters in Middleborough. If turnout were just 50 percent — and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were much higher than that to vote on a casino proposal — then more than 7,000 voters would show up at the polls, approximately double the number who voted at town meeting.
It would also be fair to infer from Estes’ sentence that Middleborough wouldn’t even have to have a referendum, as it has already taken care of business. Wrong.
Second, the July 28 town meeting voted only to approve a deal the selectmen had negotiated with the tribe over amenities that would come to the town if a casino were built. In a separate, nonbinding question on whether people even want a casino in Middleborough, the answer was what Estes’ Globe colleague Sean Murphy, writing in CommonWealth Magazine, has reported was “overwhelming against a casino.”
Can we please start getting a few of these basic details right?
Friday morning update: There’s a trackback in a sidebar on page B8 this morning. Christine Wellgren, who covers Middleborough for the Globe and who does understand what happened on July 28, mentions the second town-meeting vote. I’m pretty sure this is the first time the Globe has mentioned the second vote since a Web update filed by Wellgren and another reporter shortly after the town meeting. By the next day, the second vote had somehow disappeared.
Superior Court Judge Merita Hopkins issued a shocking decision yesterday. By stopping WHDH-TV (Channel 7) from reporting on autopsy reports that allegedly show two Boston firefighters killed in an August restaurant blaze had abused drugs and alcohol, Hopkins violated the most basic of First Amendment protections — the protection against prior restraint. (Boston Globe coverage here; Boston Herald coverage here and here.)
The courts — right up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court — have consistently ruled that when a confidential document ends up in the hands of the media, there’s nothing that can be done about it. The legal responsibility is on the keepers of those documents not to release them; the media, by contrast, have no legal obligation not to report on them.
There are many cases I could point to, but consider that of Jim Taricani, an investigative reporter for WJAR-TV (Channel 10) in Providence. A few years ago Taricani broadcast videotapes of an aide to then-mayor Buddy Cianci taking a bribe. The tapes had been sealed by a federal judge, Ernest Torres, and thus it was illegal for anyone to give those tapes to Taricani — a perfect analogy to the situation involving the autopsy reports yesterday.
Taricani was in big trouble with Torres — but not for broadcasting the material. That, the judge made clear, was absolutely protected by the First Amendment. Instead, Torres insisted that Taricani reveal his source, because it was that person, not Taricani, who had violated the law. Taricani refused, and was sentenced to home detention. (The source, later revealed to be defense lawyer Joseph Bevilacqua Jr., was punished as well.)
It could very well be that the journalists who revealed the contents of the autopsy reports in the matter of the Boston firefighters will be pressured to give up their sources as well. Those of us who champion a free press ought to be concerned about that, but at least it’s well-established legal terrain.
Judge Hopkins, on the other hand, ought to be sent to her corner and forced to repeat 50 times: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
More: Here’s the text of Near v. Minnesota, the 1931 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in which prior restraint was deemed a violation of the Constitution in almost all instances. The exceptions — national security, obscenity and incitement — are narrowly drawn, and obviously do not come within a mile of the Boston case.
My latest for The Guardian takes one last look at Verizon’s attempt to ban pro-choice text messages from its cell-phone network. Verizon may have backed down quickly, but the issue — free speech in a public square that is increasingly in the hands of private owners — isn’t going away.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind paying a higher gasoline tax. As Boston Globe columnist Steve Bailey points out today, the state gas tax hasn’t been raised for years, and is now lower than it is in most nearby states. Besides, it’s good public policy — it would provide a disincentive for gas-guzzling SUVs, and a boost to public transportation as well.
But I have to disagree with Bailey when he writes, “Saying no to gambling is not enough; opponents must be willing to offer an alternative.” Massachusetts ranks 28th in state and local tax burden. So yes, 27 states take away more of their residents’ income, but 21 take away less. That puts us in about the middle.
So even if a higher gas tax makes sense, it’s wrong to say we’re so undertaxed that we absolutely have to do something about it. And certainly not on a day when a story like this appears on the front of the City & Region section. As a private-school teacher patiently explained to Tom Finneran on WRKO Radio (AM 680) this morning when he tried to defend this outrageous expenditure on pension-fund bonuses, most people in the private sector don’t even get pensions.
Bailey has been steadfast in his opposition to casino gambling, and I especially like his nickname for Gov. Deval Patrick: “Governor Slots.” But he’s wrong about this being an either/or proposition. Casino gambling is bad for the state, and opponents do not need to apologize or come up with alternatives. After all, it’s Patrick who proposes to sell out our future, not us.
Is technology costing Barack Obama points in the polls? National Public Radio yesterday broadcast a fascinating report on the looming meltdown of polling as we know it.
Officials with the Obama campaign believe their guy is receiving disproportionate support from young, black and Hispanic voters. All three of these groups are more likely than the rest of the population to have ditched their land lines in favor of a cell-phone-only lifestyle. And pollsters rarely call cell phones, for obvious reasons. (How would you like to receive a cell-phone call from a pollster?)
According to the NPR story, polling experts believe the cell-phone conundrum isn’t out of hand yet, and that the sampling population can be adjusted by weighting it differently. Clearly, though, technology is changing the face of polling. If Obama does better than his polling numbers in New Hampshire, we’ll know one of the reasons why.