Author: Dan Kennedy

Herald appeals libel ruling

The Herald has asked the state’s Supreme Judicial Court to reconsider its decision to uphold a $2.1 million libel verdict against the paper. The Herald lost a 2005 trial in a suit brought by Superior Court Judge Ernest Murphy, who charged that Herald falsely and recklessly reported that he had demeaned a teenage rape victim.

You wouldn’t think there would be much chance that the SJC would reverse its own unanimous ruling. But I’ve read the brief filed on behalf of the Herald, and it makes a strong argument that the SJC completely mischaracterized the testimony of the Herald’s only eyewitness source, former Bristol County prosecutor David Crowley.

I was in the courtroom, and I’d say the brief is right on the mark. So stay tuned.

Give Richardson a hand

Bill Richardson announced today that he’s running for president. He may or may not have what it takes, but give him credit for having made his peace with bacteria.

My former Phoenix colleague Mark Leibovich explained how in a New York Times story on hand sanitizer last fall. It turned out that Richardson refuses to use the stuff. Why? Leibovich wrote:

“It’s condescending to the voters,” said Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democrat.

A fervent nonuser of hand sanitizer, Richardson holds the Guinness Book of World Records mark for shaking the most hands over an eight-hour period (13,392, at the New Mexico State Fair in 2002).

Indeed, what message does it send when politicians, the putative leaders in a government by the people, for the people, feel compelled to wipe the residues of said people immediately after meeting them?

“The great part about politics is that you’re touching humanity,” Richardson said. “You’re going to collect bacteria just by existing.”

I’m sorry, but that’s just strange. I hope Richardson has a strong immune system.

Not such a linchpin

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen is ambivalent about doing interviews, and Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post asks him why. Kurtz, though, seems to think that the institution of the journalistic interview is more firmly established than it is. He begins:

The humble interview, the linchpin of journalism for centuries, is under assault.

In fact, what is widely regarded as the first newspaper interview was conducted not centuries ago, but in 1836, by New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, who talked with the proprietor of a brothel in the hopes of shedding light on the notorious murder of a prostitute.

It seems strange to realize that great American journalists from Benjamin Franklin to Isaiah Thomas never interviewed people, but such were the customs of the day.

Ron Borges’ departure

As you probably already know, Globe sportswriter Ron Borges has quietly left the paper. That means his two-month suspension for lifting chunks of a column from the Tacoma News Tribune will stand as the last word on his long career at 135 Morrissey Boulevard.

David Scott, who’s been blogging prodigiously on this (see this and this), invites me “to comment on the significance of the botched Borges bye-bye.” Well, I don’t know. At the time of Borges’ suspension, I wondered if he’d ever come back. I guessed he would, since the Globe has been his platform for various broadcasting and outside writing assignments. I guessed wrong — hardly the first time.

Readers of Media Nation know that I’m an exceedingly narrow sports fan. Since Borges didn’t cover the Red Sox, I’ve read very little of his stuff over the years. I do recommend this John Gonzalez profile of Borges in Boston Magazine, which includes the following hilarious passage:

Boston sports junkies might be surprised to hear this. Dan Shaughnessy has always been the guy they’d most like to dump into the harbor. But over the past few years, Borges seems to have supplanted his fellow Globe scribe as the most vilified writer in town. “We should have one of those Globe polls — ‘Who do you hate more?'” Shaughnessy says. “I’ve challenged Borges to see who could get out the vote. It would be close. And it would be a lot more interesting than who’s going to win the MVP.”

Actually, it would be a lot less interesting than to see who’s going to win the MVP, but that’s Shaughnessy: a sportswriter who doesn’t seem to like sports all that much.

One aspect of Borges’ meltdown continues to trouble me. You cannot judge whether or not he committed plagiarism without taking a close look at the disclosure that ran with his football notes column, as well as with the notes columns of several other Globe sportswriters: “[M]aterial from personal interviews, wire services, other beat writers, and league and team sources was used in this report.”

How do you hang someone out to dry for lifting material when there was a huge, blinking sign telling readers that the material they were about to read was at least partially — yes, lifted from other sources? Of course Borges should have rewritten the stuff he was taking, but it’s not as though he’d claimed that it was the fruit of his own labors. To this day, I doubt that he thinks he did anything wrong. (Just to be clear: He did.)

The most fully reported piece on Borges’ departure is by Jessica Heslam, in the Herald’s Messenger Blog. Reading between the lines, it sounds like Borges — who actually returned to the Globe two weeks ago — realized that his outside work was not going to disappear if he left, and that he’d rather pursue that than stay with an employer who had publicly accused him of being a plagiarist.

Update: Cold, Hard Football Facts, the Web site that first reported on Borges’ light fingers, weighs in on his departure — right down to some Snoop Dogg-style boasting about the size of its virtual testicles. Really.

Say what, George?

Al Sharpton, debating former Imus producer Bernard McGuirk on Fox News’ “Hannity & Colmes” on May 11:

Forgiveness has nothing to do with penalty. If you abuse a job, you can forgive somebody and say you lose the job. Moses was forgiven. He didn’t get to the Promised Land. There is penalty…. I think that there must not be amnesty. There must be — people pay for their deeds. And I think it was appropriate that y’all paid.

Boston-based PR magnate George Regan, in the Boston Herald today, talking about WRKO Radio’s decision to audition McGuirk for a possible stint as Tom Finneran’s sidekick:

If Al Sharpton has no problems with this man, neither do we.

Well, George, Sharpton does have a problem with McGuirk. Does that change your thinking?

Curious George: The deceptive headline of the day appears in today’s Globe. “WRKO clarifies McGuirk bid” may be the head, but the story consists of a Regan obfuscation job worthy of Scott McClellan. To wit: “Regan said yesterday that the three-day spot was not an audition, but said he could not rule out the possibility that McGuirk would be offered a job.”

So it’s not an audition, but if McGuirk does well, he might be offered a job. Right.

Even curiouser: Brian Maloney on Regan’s triple play.

Jeff Greenfield on the “liberal” media

Jeff Greenfield on liberal media bias:

[I]n my view the danger of bias does not lie in political coverage. I mean, ask Al Gore and John Kerry if they were the beneficiary of a poodle press. They were treated very critically — appropriately.

“Appropriately”? As has been well-documented (start here and here), Gore in 2000 was subjected to the most viciously false media pounding of any modern presidential candidate. From the media-created lie that Gore had claimed to have “invented” the Internet to the hue and cry that he give up on a race that he’d actually won, the 2000 presidential campaign amounted to a shocking eruption of media irresponsibility. The media’s shoddy performance was just as responsible for Gore’s loss as the five Supreme Court justices who handed George W. Bush a victory he hadn’t earned.

No, it wasn’t as bad with Kerry. The swift-boat lies never really broke out of the cable and radio talk ghetto (although Eric Boehlert shows the mainstream media deserve at least some blame), and by 2004 the media were finally starting to catch on to Bush. But Greenfield really needs to bone up on what happened in 2000.

Then again, I remember Greenfield’s popping up on the radio some years ago — on Imus, naturally — to say that he wasn’t all that troubled by the outcome in Florida, because whatever went wrong was balanced off by the fact that the media had mistakenly called the state for Gore before folks in the Panhandle had finished voting. Good grief. (Via Romenesko.)

The serious and the frivolous

Should newspapers report what’s important or what interests people? Good ones do both, attempting to strike a balance between the serious and the frivolous.

Last night, at a panel discussion at the Boston Public Library sponsored by the fledgling New England News Forum, I caught an interesting exchange between John Wilpers, the editor of the free commuter tabloid BostonNOW, and Ellen Hume, director of the Center on Media and Society at UMass Boston.

Among BostonNOW’s innovations is a daily webcast of its editorial meeting, and the ability of viewers to send text messages about what they’re watching. On one occasion, Wilpers said, he and his staff were discussing a government story, and a viewer wrote in, “I’m bored already, and you haven’t even written the story.” Wilpers said he decided on the spot to kill the story, and then proceeded to offer a few disparaging words about the notion of government stories in general.

When Hume next got a chance to speak, she responded, “Part of what you said, John, gave me a little bit of a creepy feeling. You’ve got to cover government. I don’t want to kill the government stories.”

Wilpers responded, “I would never kill a story just because a blogger or a viewer of the webcast didn’t like it. I’m not going to turn my newsroom over to whoever happens to be
watching.”

Well, that’s a relief — even if Wilpers did seem to contradict what he’d said just a few moments earlier. Yes, it can sometimes be difficult to make government stories interesting. But the First Amendment wasn’t written into the Constitution to protect the right of newspaper publishers to cover Paris Hilton endlessly. That’s just a side effect.

Finneran’s race-baiting co-host

If talk-radio executives know one thing, they know this: racism sells. It’s titillating, it’s naughty, it gives some middle-aged white guys a thrill as they’re driving to work in the morning to hear jokes they’d never dare tell at the office being blasted out at 50,000 watts.

How else can we explain the decision by WRKO (AM 680) to audition fired Imus producer Bernard McGuirk alongside the substantive but ratings-challenged morning host, former Massachusetts House speaker Tom Finneran? (The Globe reports on the story here, along with a quote from yours truly; the Herald’s “Inside Track” weighs in here.)

Let’s be clear. McGuirk, at least in terms of his on-air persona, is worse than Imus. The standard shtick on the late, unlamented “Imus in the Morning” show was for McGuirk to come out with something so offensive that Imus would stop him, professing to be horrified. Indeed, it was McGuirk’s reference to “hardcore hos” that started the infamous exchange that led to Imus’ putting a torch to his own career.

And lest we forget, Imus told “60 Minutes” back in 1998 that he’d hired McGuirk to tell “[N-word] jokes.”

Media Matters has gathered a few of McGuirk’s greatest hits:

  • While portraying a stereotyped Irish cardinal, McGuirk referred to Barack Obama as a “young colored fellah.”
  • Claiming that Hillary Clinton was “trying to sound black in front of a black audience,” McGuirk exclaimed that Clinton “will have cornrows and gold teeth before this fight with Obama is over.”
  • During an appearance on “Imus in the Morning” by Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson, McGuirk was heard saying in the background, in Spanish, “Kiss my ass, fat one.” Richardson’s mother is Mexican.

Finneran’s show is not off to a good start. His ratings are worse than those of Scott Allen Miller, the host he replaced. Having a local morning program helmed by a smart host who really knows the Boston area is a good idea, and I want to like it. But it’s pretty dull.

But attempting to save it by pairing Finneran with an out-of-towner who made his reputation telling racist, sexist and homophobic jokes is reprehensible.

Jerry Falwell

Just because Jerry Falwell is dead doesn’t mean I’m obligated to weigh in, does it? I hope not — I’m not sure I can muster the energy, except to say that the only good thing about him I can think of is that he, like Pat Robertson, had lost much of his influence over the years. (Not that James Dobson and Tony Perkins are an improvement.)

Timothy Noah has a great roundup on Slate of the worst things Falwell ever said. Jon Keller shares some thoughts about what it was like to be David Brudnoy’s producer at the peak of Falwell’s influence.