Author: Dan Kennedy

Blue Mass Group’s Charley Blandy has posted a rather mild reaction to tonight’s “Greater Boston” discussion of the blog war. He also writes:

The usually sensible Dan Kennedy dug in his heels a bit, wondering how we could get anything done if we actually read the NY Times skeptically.

Good thing Charley didn’t use quotation marks, because that’s not what I said. I’ve challenged him to post a transcript.

Update: The transcript has been posted and I respond. I think that’s a wrap, even if Charley doesn’t.

Still more: The Outraged Liberal (or the Massachusetts Liberal or the Bay State Liberal, whichever you want to call him) hits the nail on the head again:

But there’s still a call for Dan Kennedy to offer a supine admission of error when he continues to insist (as do I) that the real culprit in this is a New York Times op-ed that was not (and should not) have been fact checked for the purposes of a five-minute segment….

It’s up to the New York Times to fact check their own stories and op-eds — not readers. It’s been part of the bargain that we can trust what’s in the media — or question them if they mess up too much.

We have not even come close to that level of trust with blogs and bloggers — and won’t for a long time as long as the attitude is I can whine but you can’t.

Sorry for the self-referential nature of this update. But I’ve been trying to say this for two days. Mr. Liberal says it better.

The Herald’s Messenger Blog updates the dust-up between Scott Allen Miller and Eileen McNamara. Two key points:

• Scotto says the words he claims McNamara took from the WRKO Web site were not written by him, but, rather, were from a summary written by a producer. Credible? Yes. I’ve seen WRKO do this plenty of times.
• Boston Globe spokesman Al Larkin tells the Messenger that there will be no correction. His reason: McNamara accurately represented Miller’s views, even if he didn’t actually speak the words she attributed to him.

Media Nation’s view: The Globe ought to run a clarification to make it clear that McNamara was quoting from the WRKO Web site, not from anything Miller said on the air. A paper that can run this can surely set the record straight on what Miller did and didn’t say.

Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara went after WRKO Radio (AM 680) talk-show host Scott Allen Miller yesterday. Today, Miller says she’s got it all wrong.

I’ll be a panelist on an hour-long program about media concentration tonight at 8 on Somerville Community Access Television. As you can see if you follow the link, the show, known as “Critical Focus,” is being promoted by Danny Schechter. You can’t do much better than that.

Bob, the third member of the Blue Mass Group troika, has weighed in with his thoughts on the “Greater Boston” blogging piece. His contribution is clarifying, partly in a good way, partly not. Let me pull out what I think are the main points:

1. It all started with that New York Times piece. In Bob’s view, the Times op-ed on political bloggers who are paid by campaigns was “sloppy because it lumps all bloggers who have taken money from politicians together, even though what the bloggers have done, and what they have disclosed, is very different in many cases.”

Bob hails Charley’s analysis of same, but I think Bob’s summary is more useful. I thought it was hard to tell whether Charley believed the Times article was wrong, was accurate but misunderstood by John Carroll and company, or somewhere in between.

Any fair reading of the Times op-ed would lead one to conclude that some leading political bloggers were taking money from candidates to write favorable things about them on their own sites (as opposed, or in addition, to the candidates’ sites), and that some of them were disclosing that fact and some weren’t.

Now, if you think “Greater Boston” should not have used the Times piece as fodder for discussion without independently verifying every purported fact contained therein, then your view of the media-criticism world is very different from mine. Suffice it to say that it would take a month to put together a show if every single media report that’s used is treated as though it were wrong until proven right.

2. “Greater Boston” and Carroll made a mistake. Uh, I think that’s been established. And acknowledged. And corrected.

Like every working journalist, I’ve got a pile of corrections to my credit. If I can hang on until 2010, I’ll be able to say that I’ve had corrections published about my work over five decades. It happens. (OK, 2011 for those of you who think a new decade doesn’t begin until the end of the year ending in zero.)

3. BMG blogger David Kravitz was screwed. Kravitz has claimed that an interview “Greater Boston” did with him made it appear that he was directly speaking about Armstrong, and that his words were thus distorted and manipulated.

I disagree. I’ve watched the segment twice now, and it didn’t strike me that Kravitz was addressing Armstrong’s situation specifically, but, rather, conflicts of interest involving bloggers in general.

I heartily endorse the Massachusetts Liberal’s take on this. He writes:

I’m not troubled by how David Kravitz sounded, even if he believes he was cut and pasted inappropriately. He comes across as a strong believer in the value of blogging and in the ability of the blogosphere to police its own.

4. Bob undermines himself with an inflated sense of his own importance. Without a shred of irony, Bob writes about “bits of arrogance continu[ing] to fall from the sky.” No, he’s not talking about himself and his fellow bloggers.

Bob follows up with a ransom note demanding that Carroll take a leave of absence, that “Greater Boston” issue a public apology and that Kravitz be included as a panelist. Good grief. Actually, the third demand wouldn’t be a bad idea were it not for the absurdity of the first two.

And by the way, I’m not saying that Bob and company are being arrogant because they’re trying to place themselves on the same level as the mainstream media. No, they’re being arrogant in a way that I’ve never seen on the part of journalists I respect.

I am in a place called Grading Hell this week, and shall not ascend from the fiery depths until sometime Friday morning. So expect blogging to be light or non-existent. Yes, this requires me to sit out World War III for a few days. So be it. I’ve already said pretty much what I had to say, which isn’t much.

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy Charley on the MTA’s comment on Blue Mass Group in which he says he doesn’t think it would be any big deal if a blogger signed a confidentiality agreement in return for taking part in the deliberations of, say, the incoming administration of Deval Patrick.

“Gary, we have conversations with people ‘off the record’ all the time,” Charley instructs his inquisitor. Me, too, Charley. But it doesn’t mean I jump into bed with them.

Caveat: If Charley is merely being satirical, my apologies in advance.

More: Yeah, what Massachusetts Liberal said.

Still more: Charley checks in, and I respond.

I’ve received e-mails from several people today asking when I’m going to comment on John Carroll’s piece about paid political bloggers that appeared this past Friday on “Greater Boston with Emily Rooney.” I wasn’t on last Friday, and I’m just catching up. Here is the clip in question:

The “Beat the Press” panelists — including me — will talk about it this coming Friday, so I’m not going to say much until then. Of course, my conflict of interest is obvious. Carroll is a colleague. He’s an honest and ethical journalist, and he deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Carroll did make a mistake in believing this satirical post on MyDD.com claiming that several well-known bloggers were actually aliases used by yet another well-known blogger, Jerome Armstrong. But the first rule of satire is that lots of people won’t get it. Media Nation is known to be a land of high density, and if I had been in Carroll’s shoes, I can easily picture myself making the same mistake.

David Kravitz of Blue Mass Group, who was interviewed for Carroll’s piece, is unhappy, as he tells us here and here.

The bloggers seem to be notably unflustered about Carroll’s larger point, which is that some of them (not BMG) are on the take from political campaigns, and some of them don’t bother to disclose that.

Instant update: This post on the Weekly Dig blog is pretty amusing. But, Joe, watch out. The satirical post was by someone named Jonathan Singer, not Armstrong. Get ready for several dozen comments accusing you of being a clueless running dog for the MSM.

Bay Windows has posted a copy of the letter that would-be presidential candidate Mitt Romney wrote during his 1994 Senate campaign to the Log Cabin Club of Massachusetts.

In the letter, Romney claimed he would be an even better senator for gay and lesbian interests than Ted Kennedy. “If we are to achieve the goals we share,” Romney wrote, “we must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern. My opponent cannot do this. I can and will.”

Here’s how Romney described Bill Clinton’s “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy: “I believe that the Clinton compromise was a step in the right direction. I am also convinced that it is the first of a number of steps that will ultimately lead to gays and lesbians being allowed to serve openly and honestly in our nation’s military.”

The New York Times reports on the letter today in an article that includes quotes from such right-wing figures as Tony Perkins and Paul Weyrich expressing their dismay with Romney.

But as Bay Windows editor Susan Ryan-Vollmar observes, the letter “was widely reported on at the time.” Why Romney thought he could ever fool the Christian right into believing he had always been an ally is a mystery.

Interestingly, the Romney revelations (re-revelations?) coincide with a cover story (sub. req.) in The New Republic about the only other religious-right presidential candidate, U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas.

Like Romney, Brownback comes off as someone who, a dozen years ago, held distinctly more moderate views than he does today. Unlike Romney, Brownback appears to have undergone a sincere religious conversion, from mainline Protestant to evangelical Christian and, finally, to devout Catholic.

Romney, on the other hand, is trying to claim that his Mormon faith makes his views one with those of the religious right. Never mind that his mother, also a Mormon, appears to have been pro-choice. Never mind that Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, among the best-known Mormon politicians in the country, favors embryonic-stem-cell research, which Romney does not.

And never mind that Romney himself, in his first run for office, portrayed himself as pro-choice and as a staunch supporter of what the religious right likes to denounce as “the homosexual agenda.”

For connoisseurs of political hypocrisy in its purest form, the Romney letter is gold. But have his presidential hopes been destroyed?

Not necessarily. The number-one issue for gay men and lesbians today is same-sex marriage, which Romney can claim never to have supported. Marriage equality was barely on the radar in 1994. Even when he ran for governor in 2002, it had not quite attained critical mass. So he’ll try to thread the needle, saying he supports gay and lesbian equality but not marriage.

Will religious-right voters buy it? It’s hard to say. But Romney had certainly better hope he’s not on record supporting, say, civil unions.

It continues apace, according to the Weekly Dig’s blog. Among the latest victims: Sean McCarthy, whose cheeky sensibility is the sort of thing I thought they wanted at One Herald Square.

One thing that’s inexplicable is the utter lack of planning. You’d think Pat Purcell could sit down with his money people and say, OK, here’s what we can afford to do for the next year, no matter what happens. And if that required whacking 30 more people, well — horrible though that would be, it would certainly be better than dribbling it out a week at a time.

I assume the end is not at hand — otherwise, he wouldn’t have given his daughter a promotion this week. But this is as ugly as it gets.

The headline on this article in Bay Windows by Laura Kiritsy is grossly inaccurate. Gov. Mitt Romney is not fat. Indeed, not only is he always impeccably turned out, but he’s as slim as a twentysomething gay guy at the gym.

Am I out of bounds? Well, 12 years ago Romney might have taken a remark like that it in stride, or even hoped it would win him a few votes. After all, he had adopted the persona of a gay-friendly, Bill Weld-style moderate Republican in his unsuccessful attempt to defeat U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy. In 2002 Romney was at it again, courting gay men and lesbians in his campaign for governor.

As we all know, Romney is now running for president as a hard-right conservative, flipping on such crucial social issues as abortion rights (he used to be in favor; now he’s against) and gay and lesbian equality (he’s become an outspoken foe of same-sex marriage).

The problem is, everyone knows when Romney is lying: his lips move. You may recall that, some years ago, former senator Bob Kerrey referred to Bill Clinton as “an unusually good liar.” It’s always seemed to me that Romney was the opposite. There’s a long public record of Romney’s making statements that are 180 degrees different from what he’s saying today. There’s no shading them; all he can hope for is that everyone forgets.

So kudos to Kiritsy and Bay Windows for digging up and publishing what the rest of us knew was there but were too lazy or distracted to go looking for.

And here’s one of my personal favorites, from a 1994 Kennedy-Romney debate at Faneuil Hall that I watched from the balcony. According to the Boston Globe of Oct. 27, 1994, here’s what Romney said about the Boy Scouts of America’s policy of discriminating against gay boys and adult leaders:

Asked about the policy in Tuesday’s debate, Romney said, “I support the right of the Boy Scouts of America to decide what it wants to do on that issue.” But he then added, “I feel that all people should be allowed to participate in the Boy Scouts regardless of their sexual orientation.”

After Romney’s defeat, Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby lambasted him as “a watered-down liberal” whom voters found less appealing that “the genuine article.” Well, he’s not going to make that mistake again.

Here is today’s Globe story on the Bay Windows revelations.