The union representing Washington Post employees has asked that no one engage with Post content during a 24-hour strike that began today at midnight. “On Dec. 7, we ask you to respect our walkout by not crossing the picket line: For 24 hours, please do not engage with any Washington Post content,” the Washington Post Guild said in a statement. “That includes our print and online news stories, podcasts, videos, games and recipes.”
The Post, which soared during the Trump presidency, is now losing money and shedding jobs. Management, currently in the midst of eliminating 240 jobs, has threatened layoffs if not enough staff members accept voluntary buyouts. Oliver Darcy of CNN has the full story.
Just as I would not cross a physical picket line, so will I not check in with the Post today. I urge you to (not) do the same.
The late Matthew Stuart’s lawyer is speaking out against The Boston Globe, saying the paper was “completely wrong” to suggest in its massive overview of the Charles and Carol Stuart case that her former client may have been directly involved in the shootings.
The Globe “has taken on the role of a tabloid” by “mischaracterizing grand jury testimony,” charged Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge, in an appearance on “Boston Public Radio” earlier today on GBH Radio (89.7 FM). You can listen to her remarks here; scroll forward to about 2:02. The segment is about 15 minutes long.
The Boston Globe’s multimedia series on Charles and Carol Stuart, “Nightmare in Mission Hill,” is good and important work. Everyone who wants to understand Boston and its racist past (and present) should read it. Especially impressive is the layered approach: a deeply reported text-based story, audio clips, a podcast, a documentary film, photos, front pages and documents.
Going into it, I wondered what I could possibly learn given how much those of us who were here were immersed in the tragedy at the time. If you’re new to Boston, the Stuarts were a white couple from the suburbs who, in October 1989, were shot while they were driving home from a childbirth class at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Carol Stuart and her unborn child died; Charles Stuart lived and told police they had been shot by a Black man. The city’s Black neighborhoods were turned upside down until, finally, law enforcement identified a career criminal named William Bennett as the likely shooter. But they later came to believe that the actual shooter was Charles Stuart himself and, with the police likely to arrest him at any moment, he jumped off the Tobin Bridge to his death.
The case was one of the most notorious crimes in Boston history, up there with the Boston Strangler and Sacco and Vanzetti. And you might wonder why investigators didn’t alight on the most obvious suspect, Charles Stuart, right from the start. The series answers that question. First, the trauma surgeon who operated on Charles determined that he couldn’t have shot himself given the angle of the bullet’s entry; and second, he nearly died from his wounds.
Given that 34 years have passed, it was hard for me to sort out what I learned from the series and what I might have known at one time but had forgotten. So I appreciate the Globe’s laying out its new findings in the eighth and final part. Among the revelations:
Police ignored evidence implicating Charles Stuart and sidelined two detectives who’d suspected him from the earliest days of their investigation.
The Stuarts and people around them couldn’t keep their mouths shut. By the time Charles Stuart finally jumped, more than 30 people knew that he had put together the plot himself. Yet the secret, such as it was, held, and at least two attempts to blow the whistle on Charles went nowhere.
Matthew Stuart, Charles’ brother, may have been more than an innocent dupe, as he had always been portrayed. The Globe found that “evidence points to Chuck’s brother, Matthew, playing a much larger role in the shooting than previously known, running counter to his claims he was tricked into helping get rid of the murder weapon.”
The series is not perfect. Matthew Stuart’s 2011 death from an overdose is relegated to a separate timeline, which a lot of readers aren’t going to see. More significant is that the Globe makes little effort to deal with the media’s shortcomings and failures. Certainly the media couldn’t solve the crime independently, and the severity of Charles Stuart’s wounds served to insulate him from closer scrutiny. Still, the press at that time, rather than serving as an independent monitor of power, went along for the ride.
I see that there’s an epilogue coming soon called “Media Sins.” I’ll be reading that closely. But even at the time it was clear that the media had failed in several ways, as Alex S. Jones detailed in The New York Times (free link) several weeks after Charles Stuart’s death. Jones’ explosive lead: “The tangled Stuart murder case has been a near-obsession for this city’s news organizations for the past three months, but the character and tone of their reporting coverage have prompted charges that the press has been racist, incompetent and reckless.”
Jones took on the Globe and the Boston Herald, then a much more robust daily paper than it is today, for running with anonymously sourced tips that didn’t pan out, such as a Globe report that Stuart had plotted his wife’s death as part of an insurance scheme so that he could start a restaurant and a Herald story that Stuart had been treated for cocaine addiction. Jones also wrote:
Critics have also said that the city’s news organizations allowed themselves to be manipulated by law enforcement agencies. For instance, during the investigation, two black men were identified at different times in news reports by anonymous police sources as the “primary suspect,” though there was no direct evidence against either one. Critics say this is a tactic investigators sometimes use to advertise for evidence.
Even after William Bennett’s exoneration following Charles Stuart’s death, then-Globe columnist Mike Barnicle wrote a column (available in databases but not on the open web) defending the police and blasting leaders in the Black community who were attempting to shine a light on the racism that undergirded much of the police response.
“Naturally, a pack of publicity hounds within the black community — a few ministers and headline-hunting politicians now passing themselves off as skilled homicide investigators — jumped on Bennett’s arrest as proof of a racist plot by the white power structure to make every black man, woman and child in Boston out as ruthless, bloodthirsty criminals,” Barnicle wrote in a column that appeared on Jan. 9, 1990, five days after Charles Stuart’s fatal jump. He added: “I guess they are upset because nobody thought to beat the truth out of Stuart that night in the hospital after he had shot and very nearly killed himself.”
As I said, I’m interested to see how the epilogue deals with this and other media failures.
“Nightmare in Mission Hill” is a tremendous contribution to Boston’s attempts to come to terms with its well-deserved racist reputation. The team that put this together deserve a lot of credit — including but not limited to reporters Adrian Walker, Evan Allen (the lead writer), Elizabeth Koh and Andrew Ryan. I just signed up for the newsletter, I look forward to dipping into the podcast, and I hope that the series serves to advance the ongoing conversation about how Boston can work toward becoming a better, more inclusive home for all of us.
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Evan Allen is leaving The Boston Globe, the paper’s second major recent loss. Allen, a highly regarded journalist who’s the lead writer on the paper’s series about Charles and Carol Stuart, will join her brother John Allen’s digital storytelling company, Ballen Studios, as her father, Scott Allen, did earlier this year. Scott Allen had been a top editor at the Globe.
“Evan is off to produce strange, dark, and mysterious stories for her brother’s burgeoning media empire,” Brendan McCarthy, the Globe’s assistant manager editor for projects, said in an email to the staff, which was forwarded to me by a trusted source. “It’s a bit of a family affair, and Evan will be running the creative department, where her spookiness will undoubtedly flourish.”
Earlier today I reported that Jason Tuohey, the Globe’s managing editor for audience and new platforms, was leaving for parts unknown.
Evan Allen was a winner of the 2021 Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting, as she was part of a team of Globe journalists who produced a series on dangerous drivers. She’s won a number of other awards as well, according to her Globe bio.
Boston Globe veteran Jason Tuohey is leaving the paper on Dec. 22. Currently managing editor for audience and new platforms, Tuohey has been the Globe’s go-to person on the digital side for quite a few years.
“I know this news will hit some of you hard, because I have seen first-hand how many people seek out his guidance and support, both personally and professionally,” Globe editor Nancy Barnes said in an email message to her staff, a copy of which was forwarded to me by a trusted source. “Brian McGrory [Barnes’ predecessor as editor] told me before I got here that he was the best in the business, and he has been invaluable to me upon joining the newsroom earlier this year.”
No word in Barnes’ memo about what is next for Tuohey, but best of luck to him.
Sunset in Akron, Ohio. Photo (cc) 2022 by Raymond Wambsgans.
Signal Ohio, a large, well-funded nonprofit news startup, is expanding into Akron. From the announcement:
Signal Ohio, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit news startups, launched Signal Akron today, its second newsroom in Ohio. The growing range of freely accessible journalism at SignalAkron.org will include accountability reporting and community resources. Stories already published include a deeper look at police accountability, the effects of the city’s efforts to set neighborhood boundaries, a column by local artists in Akron, and a guide to getting relief on utility bills.
“As we launch and continue to build Signal Akron, I’m excited to see our reporters include neighborhood voices and perspectives in their work. Our content will be driven by the community and the Akronites working in our Documenters program,” said Susan Kirkman Zake, editor-in-chief of Signal Akron.
Signal Ohio describes itself as “a network of independent, community-led, nonprofit newsrooms backed by a coalition of Ohio organizations, community leaders, and the American Journalism Project. With more than $15 million raised Signal is one of the largest local nonprofit news startups in the country with a growing network of newsrooms across Ohio.”
Akron, by the way, was home to The Devil Strip, a local arts and culture website that was at one time among the very few examples of a cooperatively owned local news organization. In 2021, The Devil Strip imploded in rather spectacular fashion, as Laura Hazard Owen reported at Nieman Lab. The legacy daily, the Akron Beacon Journal, is part of the Gannett chain.
Disinformation expert Joan Donovan, who was pushed out of the Harvard Kennedy School earlier this year, is now claiming that the dean, Douglas Elmendorf, wanted her out so as not to offend Meta, whose charitable arm had pledged to give $500 million to Harvard. The university denies the charges leveled by Donovan, who is now at Boston University. Joseph Menn of The Washington Post has the story, and here is a free link.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses a crowd in Houston. White House photo (cc) 2019 by Shealah Craighead.
While the international journalistic community is focused on the fate of Evan Gershkowitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter who’s been held by Vladimir Putin’s Russia since March 29, Russia is far from the only country where journalism has been criminalized. Sadly, one of those places is India, still sometimes described as the world’s largest democracy, but which has taken an authoritarian turn under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Among the journalists who’ve gotten caught up in Modi’s repression is Fahad Shah, who’s based in Kashmir and is a contributor to The Christian Science Monitor. Shah was released on bail recently after spending 658 days in jail on charges of “glorifying terrorism,” publishing “anti-national content” and illegally receiving foreign funds. The court system, however, ordered that Shah be freed on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence. The Monitor’s Aakash Hassan reports:
Global media watchdogs and journalists from the region view Mr. Shah’s experience as part of a wider crackdown on media in Indian-controlled Kashmir, where authorities have been accused of intimidation, harassment, and the systematic targeting of critical voices. Press freedom advocates have welcomed Mr. Shah’s release, demanding that all remaining charges against him be dropped and the blockade on his popular news portal, The Kashmir Walla, be reversed.
Reports Without Borders ranks India 161st on its list of 180 countries in terms of press freedoms, observing:
The violence against journalists, the politically partisan media and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis in “the world’s largest democracy,” ruled since 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the embodiment of the Hindu nationalist right.
The photo on the book cover is of Demetracopoulos and Kissinger
Last Thursday, following the death of Nixon-era secretary of state Henry Kissinger at the age of 100, I posted a long essay I’d written in 2001 for The Boston Phoenix about the late journalist Christopher Hitchens’ claims that Kissinger was a war criminal, stemming from his nefarious activities in Cambodia, Chile and elsewhere. As I noted, that idea wasn’t novel, but Hitchens did a superb job of pulling it all together. I also wrote in that 2001 piece:
In what is the [Hitchens] essay’s only completely new and perhaps most dubious charge, Hitchens writes that Kissinger was involved in the attempted assassination of a Greek journalist named Elias Demetracopoulos, a Washington-based foe of the military junta that ruled Greece in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The documentary evidence is intriguing (the Greek government had apparently prepared a statement saying Demetracopoulos had died in an Athens prison, should he have been so foolish as to have returned home), but on this count, at least, Kissinger seems to be in the clear — or, to use a phrase forever linked to his sleazy boss, to have “plausible deniability.”
Or not. As I also noted, in 2020 I interviewed James H. Barron about his Demetracopoulos biography, “The Greek Connection,” focusing on attempts by the Greek junta to tilt the 1968 election to Richard Nixon through a secret $549,000 payoff. (I know; it sounds like Dr. Evil threatening to destroy the world unless he was paid $1 million.) In fact, Barron speculated that the Watergate break-in may have been motivated by the Nixon gang’s fears that the Democrats had evidence of the payoff and were going to use it to attack Nixon during the 1972 presidential campaign. So, what role may Kissinger have played in all of this?
“Greece was one of the countries that Henry Kissinger treated as a minor piece on the global chessboard and supported the military dictatorship that had overthrown its democratic government in 1967 as part of America’s Cold War strategy,” Barron told me by email. “Elias Demetracopoulos was a fiercely independent journalist who escaped the junta to become the leading activist in Washington fighting to change U.S. policy, overthrow the dictatorship, and restore democracy in his homeland. During its years in power 1967-1974 the junta stripped him of his citizenship and organized various plots to kidnap and kill him.”
Barron gave me permission to reproduce this except from “The Greek Connection,” which describes events from 1975.
After the dictatorship’s implosion, the Greek government had embarked on a “de-juntification” process, dismissing or replacing some military personnel and bureaucrats. There were promises that junta leaders would be put on trial for their crimes. Hearing that KYP chief Michail Roufogalis was to be deposed, Demetracopoulos hoped that secrets from the seven-year reign might come to light. Maybe he could find out the details behind his near miss of an escape, his blocked return to visit his dying father, and the intermittent warnings he had heard since 1967 that the colonels were out to “get” him and interrogate him. He did not yet know the full scope and intensity of their plots and the names of those involved.
But after the government announced it would limit its investigation and trials to those responsible for the most egregious tortures, Elias assumed that his concerns for justice were unlikely to be vindicated. After all, Greece had no laws providing a right of access to government records. Getting answers would take hard digging, and relevant files might have already been destroyed. Continue reading “Another possible stain on Henry Kissinger’s blood-soaked legacy”
Great to see Serge Schmemann’s recent New York Times opinion piece about local news (free link) pop up in today’s print edition. Schmemann interviewed Ellen Clegg and me and cites our forthcoming book, “What Works in Community News.”
