Media – Page 36 – Media Nation

‘The Big Dig,’ from GBH News, is a triumph of long-form audio journalism

The yellow is the path of what would become the Tip O’Neill Tunnel through the city. The red and blue are the Ted Williams Tunnel to Logan Airport. Photo (cc) from the 1990s by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.

Over the past few months, news organizations in Boston have unveiled massive projects that dig deeply into traumatic (for very different reasons) historical events — The Boston Globe’s series on the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart at the hands of her husband, Charles, whose claim that the killing was carried out by a Black man turned the city upside-down; and GBH News’ nine-part podcast on the Big Dig.

I approached both projects with some trepidation, wondering what more I could learn about such well-known events. Well, the Globe’s series and podcast were incredibly well done, and we did learn a few things we didn’t previously know; I did not see the Stuart documentary film made in conjunction with the series, but I understand it’s essentially a shortened version of the podcast. “The Big Dig” (that is, the podcast, not the tunnels) was outstanding as well. I just finished listening to it a couple of days ago.

Once I started “The Big Dig,” I got hooked because of the premise. We live at a time when it seems that we’re unable to build great public projects. They come in way over budget, they’re flawed and NIMBYs are able to keep them tied up for years. The way host and co-producer Ian Coss frames the podcast is that the Big Dig is among the earliest and most expensive examples of that phenomenon. As we all know, it cost far more than initial projections, it was years late, it was fatally flawed (literally) and opponents were able to tie it up in red tape.

It’s a dilemma that Ezra Klein of The New York Times has talked about a lot on his own podcast. Rather than liberalism that fetishizes process and empowers stakeholders (and non-stakeholders) in such a way that it makes it too easy to stop progress, he argues, we need a “liberalism that builds.” That will also be the topic of his next book, co-authored with Derek Thompson.

“The Big Dig” begins with an unusually righteous example of process liberalism — the fight to stop the Southwest Corridor, led by a bright young bureaucrat named Fred Salvucci and eventually embraced by Gov. Frank Sargent. Salvucci, whose voice holds together the podcast throughout all nine episodes (he’s now 83), rose to become secretary of transportation under Gov. Michael Dukakis and embraced the two projects that eventually became known as the Big Dig: the Ted Williams Tunnel connecting the city with Logan Airport and the Tip O’Neill Tunnel, which enabled Salvucci’s dream of removing the elevated Central Artery and knitting the city back together.

It makes no sense for me to summarize the podcast except to say that Coss does a masterful job of including a tremendous amount of detail and human-interest stories while keeping it moving. We learn all about Scheme Z, a phrase that I thought I’d never hear out loud again. The greedy parking lot owner who held up the airport tunnel. The soil that was softer than expected. The flaws in the slurry walls. That said, I do have three reservations.

At the end of episode 8, the Big Dig is portrayed as unsafe. Although Coss tells us that the improperly installed ceiling tiles that led to the death of a driver, Milena Delvalle, were fixed, you do not get the impression that the overall project was safe. Yet in episode 9, the epilogue, we learn that the Big Dig finally can be seen as a success story without any indication of how those safety problems — including significant leaks in the slurry walls — were overcome.
A personal pique, but audio clips of my friend and former GBH colleague Emily Rooney, who hosted “Greater Boston” and “Beat the Press” for many years, are heard over and over, especially in episodes 7 and 8 — yet she is never named. Even Howie Carr is identified after one brief snippet of sound. Emily was the face and voice of GBH News for many years, and she should have gotten a mention.
The series closes with the launch of the Green Line Extension, which is presented as a triumphant last piece of the puzzle. “It felt good to feel good about a big project that our city had accomplished,” Coss says. “To put the cynicism away for a day and just enjoy the ride.” Now, I’m sure the lead time for the podcast was long, but, uh.

Overall, though, “The Big Dig” is an extraordinarily well-done overview of a project that kept the city tied up in knots for years, and that has been a success despite the astronomical cost — more than $24 billion by some estimates, or triple the $7.7 billion that was budgeted once the work had started, which was itself far higher than the original $3 billion price tag.

I hope GBH got the bounce they were looking for, because I’d like to see more such podcasts in the future. And if you’re new to Boston, you learn a lot about our city from both the Globe’s reporting on the Stuart case and from “The Big Dig.” Along with J. Anthony Lukas’ book “Common Ground,” the story of Boston’s desegregation crisis, these two works of extended narrative journalism have entered the library of essential Boston reading and listening.

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Kevin Merida’s departure from the LA Times raises doubts about its billionaire owner

Kevin Merida. Photo (cc) 2021 by Michifornia.

There’s some very bad news coming out of Los Angeles this week. Kevin Merida, the executive editor of the Los Angeles Times, is stepping down after just two and a half years on the job. Merida, who previously held high-level jobs at The Washington Post and ESPN, is perhaps the country’s most prominent Black editor, and his departure raises serious questions about the LA Times’ owner, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the paper in 2018.

Soon-Shiong has certainly been a better steward than a corporate chain or hedge fund would have been, but his time at the helm has been unsteady. He wants to grow toward profitability, but he keeps cutting the staff. Twice he has gone out of his way to deliver newspapers into the arms of the undertakers at Alden Global Capital, doing nothing to stop Alden’s acquisition of Tribune Publishing’s nine major-market dailies in 2021 and then selling The San Diego Union-Tribune to Alden in 2023.

Poynter media columnist Tom Jones notes that Soon-Shiong is now trying to reassure the LA Times newsroom that Merida’s departure will not lead to a similar fate:

Perhaps sensing the uneasiness of his newsroom, Soon-Shiong wrote in a note, “Our commitment to the L.A. Times and its mission has not wavered since the inception of our acquisition. However, given the persistent challenges we face, it is now imperative that we all work together to build a sustainable business that allows for growth and innovation of the L.A. Times and L.A. Times Studios in order to achieve our vision.”

Benjamin Mullin, writing in The New York Times, reports that Merida clashed with members of Soon-Shiong’s family over Merida’s edict that staff members who signed a petition condemning Israel’s war in Gaza would be temporarily banned from covering stories related to the war. Whether or not you think Merida was clinging to outmoded ethical standards, you can’t say that move was controversial. Indeed, two New York Times contributors resigned, apparently under pressure, after signing a similar letter.

At one time it looked like wealthy individual owners might be a solution to the news crisis — not that they could be expected to underwrite losses forever, but they could certainly provide the runway needed to build a new, sustainable business model. Now, with Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post floundering, it looks like the only wealthy newspaper owners who’ve fulfilled their promise are John and Linda Henry at The Boston Globe and Glen Taylor at the Star Tribune of Minneapolis.

Sadly, it’s hard to be optimistic about the future of the LA Times under Soon-Shiong.

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The late Joe O’Donnell was once part of a group that wanted to buy the Globe

There’s a small omission in The Boston Globe’s obituary of Joe O’Donnell. Bryan Marquard writes that O’Donnell was part of a group that once tried to buy the Red Sox, a prize that was ultimately won by John Henry. What the story doesn’t mention, though, was that O’Donnell also tried to buy the Globe itself. I made mention of it in 2007 in an article I wrote for CommonWealth Magazine, writing that there had been some talk the previous fall that the New York Times Co. might be getting ready to offload the Globe:

The speculation briefly reached a fever pitch last fall, when retired General Electric chief executive Jack Welch, advertising executive Jack Connors, and concession mogul Joseph O’Donnell spread the word that they would like to buy the Globe. But with Times Company chief executive Janet Robinson all but coming right out and saying the Globe is not for sale, talk of a Welch-led sale has died down.

Two years later, the Times Co. did try to sell the Globe, only to pull it off the market when it apparently couldn’t get the price it wanted. Then, in 2013, the Times finally sold the Globe to none other than John Henry, O’Donnell’s rival in the Red Sox sweepstakes. In my book “The Return of the Moguls,” I wrote that Connors was among the suitors who competed with Henry for the Globe; I did not record whether O’Donnell was part of that second Connors bid.

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Congressman who banned the press from his events reverses himself

Several weeks ago I wrote about U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler, a New York Republican who’s been barring the press from his town halls with constituents. David McKay Wilson, a reporter with The Journal News of the Lower Hudson Valley, managed to get into one of Lawler’s events with a ticket given to him by a friend and reported on it for his paper.

Now Lawler appears to be backing down, saying that his previous policy “was to prevent these town halls from being hijacked by out-of-district political grandstanders desperately searching for a viral video clip” but that “upon reflection, while well-intentioned, these rules could have been explained and implemented in a better way.”

He said he will now allow credentialed reporters and news photographers into his town halls whether they live in his district or not, and that he will “hold a press gaggle and take questions” after each event once he’s finished taking questions from voters.

This is a significant change, and Lawler deserves credit for listening and learning rather than digging his heels in.

The full text of Lawler’s statement can be found here.

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Biden calls out Trump’s Nazi rhetoric — but the media can’t get past ‘both sides’

Photo (cc) 2021 by Alex Kent/Tennessee Lookout

President Biden delivered an excellent speech Friday on the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump and his supporters. He even used the N-word (Nazi) to describe Trump’s rhetoric in referring to his opponents as “vermin” and to refer to immigrants as “destroying the blood of our country.” If you missed Biden’s address, Heather Cox Richardson has a detailed overview.

But will it matter? Of course not. One of Trump’s go-to tactics when confronted with harsh truths is to childishly assert, “I know you are, but what am I?” So of course Trump’s response to Biden’s Valley Forge event was to hold a rally and accuse Biden of “fearmongering.” It worked because the first rule of media is to cover both sides. The tease on The New York Times’ homepage right now says:

Clashing Over Jan. 6, Trump and Biden Show Reality Is at Stake in 2024

Former President Trump and President Biden are framing the election as a battle for democracy — with Mr. Trump casting Mr. Biden as the true menace.

The actual headline is a little better, adding “brazenly” to Trump’s claim. And the story is better still, calling Trump “the only president to try to overthrow an American election” and adding: “Mr. Trump’s strategy aims to upend a world in which he has publicly called for suspending the Constitution, vowed to turn political opponents into legal targets and suggested that the nation’s top military general should be executed.” Good and true stuff. But wow, that tease.

Today, as we all know, is the third anniversary of the failed insurrection that Trump fomented. I may have written this before, but I remember returning to our car after a long hike in the Middlesex Fells and turning on public radio. The station was carrying the feed from the “PBS NewsHour,” and the first thing I heard was Judy Woodruff freaking out. What had happened? Were the Republicans pulling some sort of ridiculous stunt?

I soon learned the truth. As Biden reminded us Friday, a Trumpist mob, carrying Trump and Confederate flags, had invaded the Capitol. Gallows had been constructed to hang Mike Pence. (Mere symbolism? I don’t think so. What do you suppose would have happened if they’d actually got hold of him?) Angry Trumpers roamed the corridors, looking for Nancy Pelosi. Again, what do you suppose would have happened if they’d found her? Police officers were injured, and some died in the aftermath.

Now we’re waiting for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether Colorado, Maine and possibly other states can keep Trump off the ballot under the 14th Amendment, which bars officials who “engaged in insurrection” from serving. As I wrote earlier this week, this is where the question belongs. But I don’t trust the court, dominated as it is by two justices who occupy what are essentially stolen seats (Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett) and a third (Clarence Thomas) who is so corrupt that he ought to be off the bench and consulting with his lawyers.

But it’s all we’ve got. “Democracy is still a sacred cause,” Biden told his audience in Valley Forge. I wish I shared his optimism that we are capable of preserving it.

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Linda Henry thanks Globe readers — but what about digital?

Today’s Boston Globe includes a full-page ad from CEO Linda Henry thanking readers for their support. Yet the ad appears only in the print edition, even though digital readers far outnumber print subscribers. I’ll give the Globe the benefit of the doubt and assume that many readers are like me — they often look at the e-edition, especially on Sunday. Anyway, here’s the ad.

Update: Oops. Never mind. I figured I’d covered myself when I couldn’t find Henry’s message on the Globe’s website, but a couple of Media Nation readers immediately let me know that it went out in an email to subscribers on Saturday. I guess I should read my email more carefully.

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The Andrea Estes saga leads the list of most-read Media Nation posts in 2023

It’s time once again to take a look at the state of Media Nation and share the most-read posts of the past year. It’s a little complicated this year — in late July, I moved the blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, and the numbers for January through July look different when compared to August through December. It seems to be an apples-and-oranges problem, but I can’t put my finger on it. Given that, I’m going to list the top five for the first seven months and the top five for the last five months. Presumably it will be easier to figure it out next year.

January-July 2023

1. Andrea Estes has left the Globe following an error-riddled story about the MBTA (May 4). One of The Boston Globe’s top investigative reporters was fired after the paper erroneously reported that three top managers at the MBTA were living in distant locations when in fact they were in the Boston area. Six others really were working remotely. The Globe has still not disclosed what went wrong, and, by fall, Estes was working at the Plymouth Independent, a well-funded nonprofit with some prominent Globe alumni.

2. Liz Cheney for speaker (Jan. 3). With the dysfunctional House Republicans unable to agree on a speaker, I suggested that a bipartisan coalition turn to Cheney, a hard-right conservative who had nevertheless endeared herself to some Democrats with her service on the House committee that investigated the role played by Donald Trump and others in the failed insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021.

3. An ombudsman could have explained what went wrong with the Globe’s MBTA story (April 28). Following a lengthy correction to Andrea Estes’ story about the MBTA, I urged that the Globe, as well as other news organizations, bring back the ombudsman’s position, something that nearly all news organizations had abandoned over the past 10 years. Sometimes called the public editor, the ombudsman’s role is to act as a reader advocate and look into problems with coverage, standards, tone and other matters.

4. Globe editor Nancy Barnes tells her staff she’s working to unravel the MBTA fiasco (May 4). We’re still waiting — although, to be fair, Estes’ decision to file a union grievance may make it difficult to go public with any information about what went wrong, and who was to blame, in that botched MBTA story.

5. Why the Internet Archive’s copyright battle is likely to come to a very bad end (March 21). We all love the Internet Archive. In my view, though, it’s heading down a very bad road, claiming the right to copy and lend books without first reaching a licensing agreement with the publishers, as every other library does. Early indications were that the courts would not look kindly upon the Archive’s arguments, and I doubt that’s going to change. There are many negative observations I could make about copyright law, but it is the law.

August-December 2023

1. The late Matthew Stuart’s lawyer blasts the Globe (Dec. 6). After The Boston Globe published its massive overview of the 1989 Carol Stuart case, Nancy Gertner, who had been the late Matthew Stuart’s lawyer, took to GBH Radio (89.7 FM) and blasted the Globe for suggesting that Matthew may have been directly involved in fatal shooting Carol Stuart, the wounding of her husband, Charles Stuart, or both. (A brief synopsis: Charles Stuart, who had planned the murder, blamed the shootings on “a Black man,” turning the city upside-down for weeks, and then finally jumped to his death off the Tobin Bridge as police were moving in.) Several days after Gertner’s remarks, Globe columnist Adrian Walker, who worked closely on the project and narrated the accompanying podcast, appeared on GBH to defend the Globe’s reporting and assert that the paper did not draw any conclusions about Matthew Stuart’s role.

2. The Globe announces expanded regional coverage of Greater Boston (Sept. 6). The Boston Globe is among a tiny handful of regional newspapers that are growing and hiring — and the paper took another step in September by announcing more coverage in Cambridge, Somerville and the suburbs. The Globe already has bureaus in Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Good news all around, although it’s no substitute for detailed coverage of local government, schools, development and the like. Some communities are now being well-covered by startup news outlets, most of them nonprofit; others, though, have little or nothing.

3. A devastating portrayal of Elon Musk raises serious questions about capitalism run amok (Aug. 23). The world’s richest person was unavoidable in 2023, mainly for his destruction of Twitter, the plaything he bought the previous fall. Ronan Farrow, writing in The New Yorker, took a deep dive into Musk’s life and career, describing him as an out-of-control egomaniac with scant regard for safety at SpaceX and Tesla, his grandiosity fed by what may be his overindulgence in ketamine. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk got more attention, but Farrow delivered the goods.

4. More evidence that Woodrow Wilson was among our very worst presidents (Oct. 9, 2022). Why this post from 2022 popped up is a mystery to me, but it’s nevertheless heartening to see that Wilson’s reputation continues to disintegrate. I shared a New York Times review of a Wilson biography by Adam Hochschild. The reviewer, Thomas Meaney, wrote that the book deals mainly with Wilson’s “terror campaign against American radicals, dissidents, immigrants and workers makes the McCarthyism of the 1950s look almost subtle by comparison.” And lets not forget that Wilson was also a vicious racist.

5. Nobel winner weighs in on a shocking police raid against a newspaper: ‘It’s happening to you now’ (Aug. 12). One of several posts I wrote about a police raid of the offices of the Marion County Record in rural Kansas as well as the homes of the publisher and a city official. Publisher Eric Meyer’s mother, Joan Meyer, still involved in the paper at the age of 97, died the next day, apparently because of stress. “It’s happening to you now,” said Maria Ressa, the Filipino journalist who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her courageous resistance to her own country’s authoritarian regime. The ostensible reason for the police department’s thug-like action involved supposedly confidential driver’s records belong to a local restaurateur; more likely, it involved the paper’s investigation of Police Chief Gideon Cody’s alleged misconduct at his previous job. Two months after the raid, Cody resigned.

This might be my final post of 2023. Thank you, as always, for reading. And I wish all of you health and happiness in the year ahead.

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A look back at when local TV newscasters were our biggest celebrities

A video clip of Liz Walker’s first newscast on WBZ-TV. Bob Lobel is at left.

For anyone under 40, or maybe 50, the idea that local television journalists used to be among our most prominent celebrities may sound unimaginable. Yes, today’s TV journalists are well known, but it’s a far cry from several decades ago.

This coming Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine takes us back to the 1980s, when WBZ-TV (Channel 4) had a five-member “dream team”: co-anchors Liz Walker and Jack Williams, weather forecaster Bruce Schwoegler, sports reporter Bob Lobel and entertainment reporter Joyce Kulhawik. Walker, Williams, Lobel, Kulhawik and Barbara Schwoegler, Bruce’s widow, take part in a wide-ranging conversation about what it meant to be local TV news stars some 40 years ago, and why that era ended. (Corporate greed, mostly.) Several of their contemporaries and successors are heard from, too.

Walker, who later became an ordained minister, was the first Black woman to anchor a local newscast in Boston, and — as she recalls — making the transition from her previous post in Little Rock, Arkansas, wasn’t easy:

Really, I had no idea. Boston is a tough city anyway, but in 1980 it was a tough city layered with all the racial implications. People were angry, people were traumatized, because they were still reeling from busing. We couldn’t go to Charlestown, they didn’t send us to Southie, because it was too explosive. You go to Roxbury, and they were just pissed at the media in general. There was no safe space.

The feature is tied in with WBZ’s 75th anniversary. As interesting as it is, I wish the Globe had acknowledged that WBZ was involved in a fierce rivalry during the 1980s with WCVB-TV (Channel 5), which had a dream team of its own: anchors Natalie Jacobson and Chet Curtis, who were married at the time, along with weather forecaster Dick Albert, sports reporter Mike Lynch and entertainment reporter Dixie Whatley. My friend Emily Rooney was assistant news director and, later, news director during those years.

The third network affiliate, Channel 7, which has had various call letters (it’s currently WHDH but is no longer a network affiliate), never established a similar identity, although it did unveil a high-powered anchor team of its own, Robin Young and Tom Ellis, in the 1980s.

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The Stuart podcast underlines a dilemma over the ethics of paying sources

Earlier this week I finished listening to the nine-part podcast that accompanies The Boston Globe’s series on the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart and her unborn child, Christopher Stuart. The last two episodes of the podcast were the most interesting from a media standpoint.

Episode 8 covers much of the same ground that’s explored in the epilogue, thought it’s more expansive. In episode 9, Globe columnist Adrian Walker, who narrates the series, talks about the dilemma posed by Joey Bennett’s demand that his family be paid for being interviewed about how their lives were upended by suspicions that Joey’s uncle Willie Bennett was the killer. In fact, the murderer was Carol’s husband, Charles, perhaps with the assistance of an accomplice. As Walker explains, the Globe is bound by ethical rules that forbid paying sources — but HBO, which co-produced the podcast as well as a documentary TV series, paid the Bennetts a licensing fee. Walker explains:

HBO says it is part of a standard archive licensing agreement for the use of family photos and audio materials and that the arrangement is in line with industry practices. That agreement includes a confidentiality clause.

This is a world my Globe colleagues and I don’t inhabit. We can talk about the ideals of truth and justice but our sources can’t use that to pay the rent. All told, this is an ethical dilemma that sits at the very heart of journalism today.

I don’t have all the answers. In this podcast, we used audio of Jason’s interview with Joey. It’s a great interview — it’s good tape. All we can do is be transparent.

Walker is referring to Jason Hehir, whose company, Little Room Productions, produced the film for HBO.

I also want to bring up something that I wrote recently about the series. There is no question that racism within the police department, the media and the city at large was a major contributing factor in Charles Stuart’s getting away with his crime for as long as he did, finally jumping off the Tobin Bridge to his death as the police were closing in. And yes, there were a number of observers even at the time who believed Chuck was the real killer, especially within the Black community. We all need to wrestle with the legacy of that racism.

And yet there is the fact that Charles Stuart’s own gunshot wound nearly killed him, and that the trauma surgeon who operated on Chuck was convinced he couldn’t have shot himself. Surely that had a lot to do with Chuck’s nearly getting away with it. That doesn’t excuse the police for embarking on what was essentially a wilding spree in Mission Hill as they targeted one Black man after another in an attempt to identify a suspect. Nor does it excuse the media for abandoning any pretense of skepticism. But the specific details of Charles Stuart’s wounds shouldn’t be overlooked, either.

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A murder that didn’t happen, reported by a news outlet that didn’t check

This is about as bizarre a media story as you can find. On Dec. 4, a small digital news outlet called the Mid Hudson News reported that a man had been fatally shot in Newburgh, New York. It turned out to be fake news, but not before it was picked up by the aggregation site Newsbreak — which, in turn, published a commentary written by artificial intelligence falsely blaming the incorrect story on the rise of social media.

The owner of the Mid Hudson News, a former New York state senator, Mike Martucci, and the founder and editor, Hank Gross, blame it all on the city of Newburgh, citing its policy of funneling all media comment through a spokesman who they claim doesn’t get back to them in a timely manner.

The story is laid out in a Dec. 21 article in the Times Union of Albany, written by reporters Lana Bellamy and Phillip Pantuso.

Incredibly, the Mid Hudson News’ story, headlined “Man says his cousin is shot dead,” is still online. An editor’s note appears at the bottom: “Our earlier story about an alleged incident in Newburgh was incorrectly reported as there was no incident involving a shooting of any kind in the City of Newburgh.” As you can see, the report is based on the word of someone named Major Bradley, who heard from relatives the next day that Bolder had been fatally shot. In other words, not only did the News publish a one-source story, but that source had no first-hand knowledge about the murder. Then again, there was no murder.

Gross told the Times Union that there was, in fact, a second source who he did not cite in his report, and that he chose to go ahead and publish after city spokesman Mike Neppl failed to respond in a timely manner. “You’re lucky if you get a response, and if you do, more often than not it’s not timely,” Gross was quoted as saying. “How long do you wait?”

Now, there’s not one word I can offer in defense of the Mid Hudson News. But according to the Times Union, Neppl and the city of Newburgh really do have some issues when it comes to dealing with the press; among other things, city officials have clashed with a television reporter over their apparent refusal to provide crime data.

And despite Neppl’s claim that the city’s policy of funneling all media responses through one spokesperson is common, the Times Union reported that “few if any municipalities in the Times Union’s coverage area, large or small, have a similar requirement for all non-elected officials.”

The whole tale is just astonishing.

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