By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Beware the narrative shift. Two stories that have become media obsessions are slowly being recast. One is deadly serious; the other is ridiculous, although it nevertheless says a lot about journalism ethics.
First, the deadly serious story. We are beginning to see the emergence of a narrative that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is in the clear, more or less, as long as he can show that he didn’t order a second attack on that boat in the Caribbean in order to kill two wounded crew members.
Here we go again. It’s the last day of the month, and I haven’t shared all of my gift links to The New York Times. Use ’em or lose ’em. These should continue to work for some time to come; what matters is when I post them, not when you access them. So here we go.
The coffee shop chain that refused service to retired GBH News reporter Phillip Martin at one of its stores recently will bolster its “anti-discrimination and harassment training,” according to its chief operating officer.
Caffè Nero COO Paul Morgan was quoted in an update published Wednesday afternoon by Boston.com. Reporter Abby Patkin writes that Martin met with company officials earlier this week for what he described as a “very cordial, pleasant conversation.” He added that he accepted their apologies, saying, “I told them I had no interest whatsoever in anyone being fired over this.”
Although Martin, a former colleague of mine at GBH, handled the situation with his customary class, what happened to him raises some troublesome issues. The facts as originally laid out in The Boston Globe were that a barista thought Martin resembled someone (sub. req.) who had recently caused trouble at the Central Square store recently, even relieving himself inside.
Yet Martin now says he’s seen a photo of that person, and he was “befuddled,” adding, “I looked at the photo, and I told them, ‘He looks nothing like me.’” Patkin reports that Martin says the person in the photo was a much younger, light-skinned Black man.
Neither the original Globe story nor the Boston.com follow-up reports whether the barista is white, although it’s clearly implied that she is given that Martin filed complaints with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination and the Cambridge Human Rights Commission, and that Caffè Nero is going to double down on training.
Those of us who are white have an obligation not to fall into the trap of confusing one person of color with another. If the barista had paused for a moment and thought about whether Martin truly resembled the person who’d gone off in her store earlier, she almost certainly would have realized that he didn’t.
A former GBH News colleague of mine has gotten caught up in a mess involving a Cambridge coffee shop in which he was told he’d been mixed up with another Black man who’d reportedly caused trouble.
Phillip Martin, an award-winning journalist who retired earlier this year, told The Boston Globe (sub. req.) that he was refused service at a Caffè Nero in Central Square last Thursday after he attempted to order a cup of tea. Martin said he was there to meet another journalist. Globe reporters Nick Stoico and Alexa Coultoff write:
A woman working at the counter told Martin that her boss instructed her not to serve him if he came into the cafe again, according to Martin. He said he told her she must be mistaking him for someone else, but the woman insisted, “No, we have you on video.”
Martin and the employee each called police, he said. After officers spoke with Martin and the cafe worker separately, they told Martin that he was allowed to stay.
In addition to his work as an investigative reporter for GBH Radio, Martin would also pop up on various GBH-TV shows, including “Basic Black” and “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” on which I was a regular panelist until it was canceled in 2021. I thought Phillip brought a particularly erudite sensibility to the program.
More recently, I spoke with Martin this past summer for a story he was working on about the dangers posed by so-called pink-slime news outlets — that is, websites that appear to be legitimate sources of local news but that are actually part of a politically motivated network, and that are increasingly powered by AI.
I posted about the Caffè Nero incident on Facebook Sunday evening, and Martin added a comment that I quote here with his permission:
I’m not personally boycotting Caffe Nero or encouraging anyone else to. It’s not my favorite coffee but that’s not the point. The only thing I was trying to accomplish is for the cafe to be held accountable and aware of potentially discriminatory practices and policies. Distributing a video of someone who is identified as a miscreant without some type of training about racial and other common forms of misidentification is a recipe for disaster. And I also thought it important to emphasize that no one should be fired over this.
According to the Globe, a Caffè Nero spokesperson said by email that a person closely resembling Martin had recently been “abusive to the staff” and had relieved himself inside. “While it is not acceptable to confuse any customer with another, the prior incident was traumatic for the barista involved and it triggered her response,” the spokesperson was quoted as saying. “Everyone at Caffè Nero is deeply sorry for the behaviour towards Mr. Martin, which should not have happened, even though it was a genuine error driven by a recent prior experience.”
Martin has reportedly filed complaints with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination and the Cambridge Human Rights Commission.
In 2021, The Boston Globe Magazine published a personal essay (sub. req.) by Phillip in which he recalled the culture shock of coming to Boston in the 1970s to fight racism. He was so bruised and battered by the experience that he returned home to Detroit — only to come back a year later and stay. He wrote:
Boston was a 1970s version of 1960s Birmingham, Alabama, in my view, with white grievance over desegregation and voting rights updated as white protests over school desegregation through court-ordered busing. That history was precisely why I enlisted, somewhat naively, to go to Boston in the summer of 1975: to fight against racism.
We like to tell ourselves that Boston has come a long way since then, and perhaps it has. But Phillip’s encounter at Caffè Nero shows that we still have a long way to go.
Colby Hall’s Mediaite commentary about Olivia Nuzzi is winning a lot of praise. The redoubtable Jay Rosen goes so far as to call it “the best thing I have read about her.”
This morning I’d like to offer a countervailing view. Hall’s take is smart, but it’s not quite as smart as a lot of people seem to think. Ultimately, Hall is caught up in a particular kind of insular, New York-based media world that has little to do with the experience of actual journalists. As just one example, I’m going to offer the career that independent journalist Marisa Kabas has built for herself, so stay tuned.
The Washington Post’s increasingly Trump-friendly editorial page has rediscovered its soul, however briefly.
In a piece published Tuesday afternoon, the Post tears into Donald Trump for his friendly White House get-together with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who, according to a CIA intelligence assessment, was behind the 2018 murder of Saudi dissident (and Post columnist) Jamal Khashoggi.
The editorial is unsigned, which means that it represents the institutional voice of the newspaper, including its owner, Jeff Bezos. Better still, The New York Times reports that Bezos was not among the tech moguls who attended Trump’s dinner for bin Salman, even though others were there — including Apple’s Tim Cook, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Dell’s Michael Dell, Cisco’s Chuck Robbins, Elon Musk and others.
We’ve been hashing out the pros and cons of ending the government shutdown on Facebook this week. My position has been that the Democrats shouldn’t have caved, but that it was a close call. Certainly the shutdown couldn’t have gone on too much longer, especially with families in danger of going hungry and federal workers not receiving paychecks.
More than anything, I didn’t see any possible way that the Democrats could achieve their stated objective of forcing Donald Trump and the Republican Congress to extend health-care subsidies. The government could have stayed shut for six more months and that wouldn’t have changed.
On several occasions recently, I’ve argued that The Boston Globe ought to make a few gift links available each month so that subscribers can share them. Among other things, it might entice some casual readers into subscribing.
That’s the practice at The New York Times and The Washington Post, both of which allot subscribers 10 gift links per month. The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic let subscribers share an unlimited number of stories. Surely the Globe could offer, oh, five or six.
Well, the other day I heard from a reader who told me that the Globe does allow sharing in a limited way. If you email someone the link to a Globe article by copying the URL at the top of your web browser and sending it with your email program, they will hit the paywall. But if you use the email thingie embedded at the top of each article (as in the illustration above), it will produce a link that can be opened by a non-subscriber. I’ve tested it with some of my social media followers, and it works.
What won’t work is if you use any of the other sharing bottons for Facebook, Bluesky and the rest. You’ll get a link, but it won’t get anyone around the paywall. But, uh, let me just also say that the link you get when you use the email button can be shared on social media or anywhere else, and anyone who opens it will have free access to that article.
I’m not going to use those free links on social media. Globe executives have the right charge for their journalism the way they see fit, and the social sharing workaround is clearly an unintended backdoor. On the other hand, I’m not inclined to keep this information to myself. I imagine they’ll implement a fix at some point. But it’s there — at least for now.
It was sadly ironic that the death of McClatchy’s Washington bureau was announced on the same day as that of former Vice President Dick Cheney. Because it was McClatchy — then known as Knight Ridder — that did more than any news organization to expose the Bush-Cheney administration’s lies and falsehoods in the run-up to the disastrous war in Iraq. Cheney, through frequent speeches and media interviews, became the public face of the war and its subsequent horrors, including the torture of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of American forces.
Following the attack by Al Qaeda in the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush-Cheney administration invaded Afghanistan, which the terrorist group had made as its base. But the White House wanted to expand the war to Iraq, claiming that dictator Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction and had ties to Al Qaeda. Neither of those allegations proved to be true, but the U.S. nevertheless marched into Iraq in the spring of 2003, a debacle that ended, more or less, in 2011. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, mostly Iraqi civilians.
This morning I’d like to call your attention to three outstanding recent examples of enterprise journalism in The Boston Globe. On Friday I shared my last gift links for the month to The New York Times (those links should still work, by the way); the Globe, unfortunately, has a tight paywall with no gift links. One, however, is a podcast that you can listen to for free. So here we go.
“The DEA said it arrested 171 ‘high ranking’ Sinaloa Cartel members. A Spotlight investigation found that’s not true.,” by Andrew Ryan, Hanna Krueger, Joey Flechas, Steven Porter and Amanda Milkovits, and edited by Gordon Russell.
The federal Drug Enforcement Administration has claimed that it’s made a major dent in the flow of illegal drugs in New England by arresting high-value suspects from a Latin American drug cartel. The Globe found that, in fact, the suspects were overwhelmingly “addicts, low-level dealers, shoplifters, and people living at a homeless encampment.” The Spotlight Team wrote:
“I can guarantee that he’s not part of the Sinaloa Cartel,” Scott Alati said of his son, Tyler, who was charged in state court in Franklin with a felony-level drug sale and immediately released without having to post bail. “He isn’t a high-ranking member of anything. He’s high-ranking dumb.”
In an editorial published today, the Globe asks: “If the Trump administration isn’t telling the truth about drug raids in New Hampshire, can people believe its rationale for killing supposed drug runners in the Caribbean?”
The answer is no. No, we can’t.
“Water is coming for the Seaport; the whole city will be poorer for it,” by Catherine Carlock and Yoohyun Jung. The story about how climate change threatens to inundate the Seaport District because of rising water levels is just one of a package. Other articles examine the effects of climate change-induced flooding on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester, the low-lying town of Hull, the pressure on levees in cities like Chicopee, and what is happening in small coastal communities.
Carlock and Jung write of the Seaport:
Rising seas threaten to reclaim those old mud flats, and, together with more frequent and severe storms, could swamp the neighborhood that has risen atop them. In all, 99 percent of what’s been built in the Seaport in the last quarter-century is at risk of flooding by 2050, according to a recent analysis from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.
I want to call your attention to an interactive map put together by Jung and John Hancock that’s based on data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which the Trump regime has been busily wrecking. You can enter any address and see what the risks are. It turns out that we’re far enough uphill from the Mystic Lakes that we have little to worry about, but that’s not true of our neighbors closer to the shore.
The digital presentation of the entire series is outstanding.
“The Harvard Plan, Season 2,” by Ilya Marritz. I do not share the Globe’s obsession with all things Harvard. But I listened to Season 1 on the fall of former Harvard president Claudine Gay and got more out of it than I had expected. Over the weekend I caught the first episode of Season 2, which deals with the Trump regime’s assault on Harvard and other universities. As someone who works for a large university, I couldn’t help but be enthralled.
The podcast is a collaboration between the Globe and the public radio program “On the Media,” and it’s free. I was especially taken with Kit Parker, a bioengineering and physics professor, Army officer and self-described conservative Trump supporter. Parker is in favor of Trump’s crusade. At one point he says:
We’re unable to complete our mission by hosting debate and thoughtful discussion about the issues of the day represented by both sides. We continue to lower standards for admissions and scholarship, and integrity of scholarship.
We had spent 10 years talking about diversity, equity, inclusion, while we were aggressively excluding or silencing conservative voices on campus. Harvard should be like an intellectual cage match.
Of course, there are also more liberal faculty members who express horror at what Trump is doing as well as ambivalence over how Harvard should respond.
If you live in the Boston area and you’re reading this blog, then you’re probably already a Globe subscriber. But as I’ve said before, I wish they’d offer a few gift links per month, and I think it would result in more paid subscribers.