Author: Dan Kennedy

I have class in six minutes, so I’ll keep this brief. But it looks like things might be coming to a head at both of Boston’s troubled dailies.

Mark Jurkowitz of the Boston Phoenix reports on a “palpable buzz” that Pat Purcell’s efforts to sell the Boston Herald and his Community Newspaper subsidiary may lead to a major announcement at any moment. Yes, I know this is cryptic, and it’s unclear whether Purcell will actually bug out or simply line up new investors. But it does appear that the uncertainty that hovers over One Herald Square may finally lift.

Meanwhile, the news at the Boston Globe just keeps getting worse. The Boston Business Journal yesterday reported that a 12 percent plunge in advertising revenues at the Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette is doing serious damage to the New York Times Co.’s bottom line.

The Herald weighs in with a two-fer on the Globe’s woes today, with Jay Fitzgerald handling the news side and Brett Arends offering analysis.

The Globe appears to be silent on these developments.

Jay Fitzgerald reports in today’s Boston Herald that New York Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is paying a visit to his company’s troubled Boston Globe subsidiary next week. Globe spokesman Al Larkin describes the visit as routine, but Fitzgerald’s sources tell him that the Globe may be preparing for another round of job reductions, including those of some high-ranking managers.

And please check out the comments to my Monday post on the Globe’s ongoing revenue woes. I’ve been expanding on my argument that you can’t talk about declining circulation unless you also take into account the fact that Web readership of the Globe (and other papers) is soaring. That doesn’t mean the Globe couldn’t be better — it just means that the readership situation isn’t as dire as the plummeting print circulation figures would indicate.

That said, one Media Nation reader yesterday reminded me of something I haven’t given enough (or any) attention to: the fact that some proportion of people who read the Globe online are also subscribers to the print edition. In my mind, I’ve been counting those people twice. No question that that fuzzy math undercuts my argument to some degree.

Mark Jurkowitz reports that the Boston Globe might actually have lost money during January and February of this year. Granted, the Globe and its sister paper, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, created some unusual one-time grief for themselves thanks to that credit-card mess-up. But this is a long way from the Knight Ridder-style laments that newspapers, though profitable, just aren’t profitable enough for Wall Street.

It’s important to remember that the Globe and other daily newspapers are not, for the most part, losing readers — at least not in any great numbers. Rather, readers are migrating to those papers’ Web sites. I freely confess that this item, which I wrote last October, oversimplifies matters. The point, though, is that newspapers are losing advertising to bank and department-store consolidation and to free-classified sites like Craigslist and Monster.com, even as readership is holding up pretty well.

But can papers keep those readers when they continue to hack away at the journalism? Not forever. That’s the dilemma.

Last week I received an e-mail from someone who thought it was curious, to say the least, that “60 Minutes” failed to mention former Massachusetts Senate president Bill Bulger in its piece on ex-Whitey Bulger goon Kevin Weeks.

I didn’t do anything on it at the time, but Romenesko today links to a worthwhile piece by J. Max Robins, who doesn’t think “60 Minutes” has played it straight when it comes to the Bulgers — or to Howie Carr, on whose radio show Robins is a regular.

Good, asterisk-laden quotes from “60 Minutes” executive producer Jeff Fager.

Here is the Web version of the “60 Minutes” piece.

I’m afraid I know the answer to this already, having spent the last half-hour poking around the Web. But does anyone know if it’s possible to rent, borrow or buy “The Selling of the Pentagon” in either DVD or VHS? I would like to show it to my History of Journalism students, but it seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

Update: Problem solved. And thank you for the suggestions I received.

Ramesh Ponnuru, writing for National Review Online, repeats a lie about Charles Pierce today. I’m calling it a lie because the essential untruth of this has long since been established, and because — something I didn’t know until today — Ponnuru had a hand, however slight, in creating this lie. [But wait! It wasn’t Ponnuru — it was Jonah Goldberg. See “Update and correction,” below.]

Anyway, the purported subject of Ponnuru’s item (at least I think it was Ponnuru; Jonah Goldberg’s name is slapped on this, too) is something Pierce wrote that established him as such a hopelessly out-of-touch liberal that he actually believed Ted Kennedy’s support for social problems more than negated his reprehensible behavior in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Imagine that. Only in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts! Here is Ponnuru’s item:

Ramesh: That reminds me of the winner of MRC’s wackiest comment award from 2004 (the year I was a presenter):

“Charles Pierce, Boston Globe Magazine:

” ‘If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.’ “

But hold on. The truth is that Pierce was employing irony in the service of a breathtakingly vicious putdown of Kennedy, in the midst of a profile that was far, far tougher than the Kennedys are accustomed to receiving in the Globe. Here is what I wrote at the time. As you will see, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, an honest conservative, accurately described what Pierce had written as a “paragraph of pure poison.” And a letter-writer to the Globe Magazine divined that Pierce had written “a savage attack” on Kennedy. (Fun fact: Mark Steyn didn’t get it. But of course.)

Unfortunately, that didn’t stop Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center from completely misconstruing Pierce’s intent. Here is the MRC’s account of the award, complete with video I watched a little of before my computer choked (I’m not sure whether to attribute that to a bandwidth problem or good taste), in which Jonah Goldberg called Pierce’s line “one of the most metaphorically moronic observations ever penned by a journalist,” and joked about Pierce hanging out with Jim Morrison and Osama bin Laden.

From there it was a simple leap. Bernard Goldberg picked up the MRC’s award in his idiotic book “Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite.” (No, I haven’t read it, but I most definitely have read its predecessor, “Bias: A Media Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News.” I am confident that “Arrogance” is more of the same.) And a lie was born — a lie that smears both Pierce and the Globe.

It lives on.

Update and correction: Anon. 5:04 has figured out what’s going on here, and my hat’s off to him (or her; and while I’m at it, I’m not wearing a hat). In the original National Review Online item, posted yesterday at 4:24 p.m., Jonah Goldberg was addressing Ramesh Ponnuru. So it was written by Goldberg, not Ponnuru. Then, at 5:27 p.m., Ponnuru wrote:

One of Lindgren’s commenters mentioned the Pierce quote, and another one responded that it had been taken out of context — and linked to this article by Pierce about the controversy. Not having read the original article, I’m inclined to take Pierce’s word on his intent.

So Ponnuru is blameless in this affair, and I’m sorry I doubted him, given that he’s struck me in the past as being pretty reasonable. For that matter, so has Goldberg (Jonah, that is; certainly not Bernie!). But Jonah’s way, way off on this, just as he was when he presented the “award” two years ago.

Good grief. Read this (third item), about this.

Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr may have bigger problems with David Boeri than with Whitey Bulger or Kevin Weeks. Boeri, a respected reporter for WCVB-TV (Channel 5), has written an exhaustive deconstruction of Carr’s much-hyped book, “The Brothers Bulger,” for the new Boston Phoenix.

The numerous Carr errors that Boeri cites strike me as piddling for the most part, although I can understand why someone who has done as much reporting on the story as Boeri has would be irritated. Probably the most egregious error Boeri alleges involves what might be called “the tale of two cars.” It’s arcane, but it speaks to the crucial question of how hard the FBI did or didn’t try to find Bulger when he disappeared a decade ago.

More damaging to Carr is what all these small errors add up to: that “The Brothers Bulger” is little more than a clip job, pieced together from what reporters for the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald have written over the years — right down to the inevitable mistakes that get made in the rush of daily journalism, but that certainly should have been fixed before being placed between two hard covers. As Boeri tells it, Carr just didn’t have the time to do any original reporting for his own book.

As Boeri observes, Carr is hardly the Lone Ranger of the Bulger saga. A host of first-rate Boston journalists have unearthed voluminous amounts of information about Bulger and his corrupt ties to the FBI. Carr, despite his self-styled persona as the world’s oldest juvenile delinquent, is a reliable and fearless reporter, which Boeri acknowledges. But so are current and former Globe reporters such as Dick Lehr, Gerry O’Neill, Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy, all of whom come in for kudos from Boeri. So is Boeri himself.

Though Boeri doesn’t name names at the Herald, columnist Peter Gelzinis immediately comes to mind as someone who was every bit as courageous as Carr in his willingness to go after Bulger — and Gelzinis did it while living on the Bulgers’ turf, in South Boston, rather than in the wealthy suburbs. (Not that it matters. If former Bulger associate Kevin Weeks is telling the truth, Carr’s living in Acton was no obstacle to the Bulger gang’s almost taking murderous revenge. Carr today lives in the even-more-upscale Wellesley.)

Will Carr fire back? He’s certainly got plenty of opportunities — in the Herald, on his radio show on WRKO (AM 680) and on either of his two Web sites (click here and here). My guess is that he won’t. Boeri is too respected, and he’s got the goods.

Besides, Boeri isn’t accusing Carr of being an unethical journalist — just lazy. I suspect Carr can live with that, as long as the checks keeps rolling in.

I’m late getting to this, but did you see the “Editors’ Note” in today’s New York Times? To wit:

The cover photograph in The Times Magazine on Sunday rendered colors incorrectly for the jacket, shirt and tie worn by Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor who is a possible candidate for the presidency. The jacket was charcoal, not maroon; the shirt was light blue, not pink; the tie was dark blue with stripes, not maroon.

The Times’s policy rules out alteration of photographs that depict actual news scenes and, even in a contrived illustration, requires acknowledgment in a credit. In this case, the film that was used can cause colors to shift, and the processing altered them further; the change escaped notice because of a misunderstanding by the editors.

Nothing about making Warner’s teeth look too big for his head, but it’s a start.

Irene Sege’s profile of Jason Wolfe in today’s Boston Globe raises a lot more questions than it answers. Wolfe, the 38-year-old vice president of programming at all-sports WEEI Radio (AM 850), was recently named to the same position at its news-talk sister station, WRKO (AM 680).

Wolfe helped turn WEEI into a huge success by encouraging a crude, locker-room approach that often veers into homophobia. (To be fair, he also presided over the hiring of Michael Holley and Mike Adams, the two best things to happen to the station in years.) Now, what will Wolfe do to WRKO? It’s a station many of us still care about thanks to the glory days of Jerry Williams and Gene Burns, even though it has offered less-than-compelling listening in recent years. (Disclosure: I’ve been known to cash a few freelance checks from the station, although not for quite a while.)

Wolfe tells Sege he wants to make the station “more exciting.” That sounds like a code phrase for something bad. Certainly mid-morning host John DePetro has made things more exciting by telling his listeners that murder victim Imette St. Guillen was “asking for trouble.” I don’t want to make too much of this — I’ve also heard DePetro says that what happened to her was not her fault (obviously). But I agree with Mark Jurkowitz’s observation that WRKO has been “shamelessly milking this for all its worth.”

Also, Wolfe seems to have liberated afternoon host Howie Carr to be himself, which is surely an ominous sign. I’ve definitely noticed that the David Scondras tape, which had been banned for a while, has been restored to airwaves.

When Wolfe took the helm, WRKO was in the midst of adding more local programming with a greater emphasis on quality. It would be a shame if he decided that what the station needs is WEEI-style towel-snapping “excitement.”