Seth Moulton, left, and Ed Markey at Thursday’s Senate debate, sponsored by WCVB-TV, The Boston Globe and WBUR. Photo via YouTube.
As I wrote on Wednesday, The Boston Globe’s endorsement of U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton over incumbent Ed Markey in the Democratic Senate primary was a bit of a surprise, although it fits within a tradition of counterintuitive endorsements dating back through several different ownership groups.
Now, though, longtime Democratic political figure George Bachrach is claiming that Globe owners John and Linda Henry may have been motivated by an undisclosed conflict of interest: Since September 2023, Seth Moulton’s wife, Elizabeth Moulton, has been the chief talent and people officer at Elevate, a sports and entertainment consulting firm. In April 2024, Elevate acquired Fenway Sports Management’s Consulting Group. John Henry is the principal owner of FSM as well as the Boston Red Sox.
U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton. Photo (cc) 2019 by Marc Nozell.
Endorsements matter in lower-profile races because voters might genuinely be looking for guidance.
Follow-up: A longtime politico alleges the Globe had a conflict in its Seth Moulton endorsement.
For instance, The Boston Globe’s endorsement of Lori Trahan and Jake Auchincloss might have been key factors in their first congressional victories, given that there was no incumbent and there were multiple candidates running. On the other hand, The New York Times’ double endorsement of Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries stands out as an exercise in futility.
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In two weeks we’ll know which category the Globe’s endorsement of U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton (sub. req., but this is free) in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate fits into. The incumbent, Ed Markey, remains popular despite his advanced age: he leads Moulton by a 28-point margin, according to the latest WCVB-TV/UMass Amherst poll, and the Globe/Suffolk University poll (sub. req.) has Markey up by 14. Moreover, endorsements matter less in high-profile contests — president, governor, senator — than they do when voters are less familiar with the candidates.
At the Obama Presidential Center there are several small dioramas marking events from Barack Obama’s presidency. One is of a Girl Scout campout that Michelle Obama hosted on the South Lawn in 2015. We see white tents, neatly arrayed, with the girls in a circle around a tiny campfire. It’s heartbreaking. How can we look at such a scene and not think about how Donald Trump has trashed the White House, and the presidency? It’s impossible to think about it without getting choked up — which is how we spent most of our visit to the Obama Center during our trip to Chicago last week.
James Stewart in the 1939 movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
Now he tells us. In a recent podcast with Ezra Klein of The New York Times, former Graham Platner political strategist Morris Katz admits the obvious: that it shouldn’t have taken a credible accusation of rape to force Platner out of the race. Katz says:
In hindsight, knowing what we know now, the Reddit posts alone probably should have been enough — or should have been enough. The tattoo should have been enough. The initial New York Times story on troubling behavior should have been enough.
That being said, it appears that Maine Democrats have settled on a strong alternative in Troy Jackson, who is leading the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, in some polls. (By the way: Another former Platner consultant, Daniel Moraff, also faces accusations of sexual assault, reports progressive independent journalist Marisa Kabas. What a train wreck.)
Bill Siroty was an early supporter of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign. Photo (cc) 2003 by Elvert Barnes.
Bill Siroty, a New Hampshire political activist who died Sunday at 75, was one of the original political bloggers. I profiled him for The Boston Phoenix in November 2003 to find out how he’d turned his daily newsletter, New Hampshire News Links, into an influential outlet for political news ahead of that state’s presidential primary.
Paging through this 22-year-old story is like reliving the early days of the internet. There’s Chuck Todd, then with “Hotline,” now the retired moderator of NBC’s “Meet the Press.” There’s James Pindell, then with PoliticsNH.com, now with The Boston Globe. There’s Deborah “Arnie” Arnesen, still a force on New Hampshire talk radio. And there’s Josh Marshall, still blogging at his Talking Points Memo site. This was all before social media, which has distorted politics — and the media — beyond recognition.
My condolences to Bill’s friends and family, including his husband, Bill Stelling.
An unlikely bigfoot
Meet Dr. Bill Siroty: Physician, Dean supporter, and New Hampshire’s indispensable media activist
The Boston Phoenix | Nov. 7, 2003
NASHUA, N.H. — The doctor sitting across the table from me in the Southern New Hampshire Medical Center cafeteria, sipping iced coffee late on a Friday morning, would not be on anyone’s list of media stars in this state’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary.
William Siroty, a mild-mannered 52-year-old allergist and internist, doesn’t write about politics, analyze poll numbers, or blurt out pithy sound bites on TV talk shows. He speaks so softly that I have to ask him to repeat himself whenever a can goes clunk! in the soda machine behind me.
Fintan O’Toole’s review in The New York Times of Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump” includes a perfect summation of the fundamental challenge to journalism in the Age of Trump:
The profession is shaped by an assumption that has been around at least since the Greek tragedians: Revelation is followed by reversal. When Oedipus’ (or Richard Nixon’s) crimes are exposed, he must fall from power. But not so Trump. With a few notable exceptions, he relies on a collective shrug of indifference from those in his support system, and defies exposure. What can journalists do in a world where there is no shame and, apparently, no consequence?
It calls to mind then-Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron’s well-known response to a question about whether the Post was at war with Trump. “We’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work,” he replied — a succinct statement of how journalists should approach their coverage.
The closing paragraphs of The New York Times’ report on Graham Platner’s sexting-while-married problem are, uh, interesting.
The Democratic Senate candidate from Maine was speaking at an event in April, shortly after Gov. Janet Mills had dropped out, when he was asked a perfectly logical question: Other than the Nazi tattoo and the offensive social-media posts, is there anything else we should know? Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer write:
Toward the end of a town hall meeting in Sabattus, Maine, in April, the night before Ms. Mills dropped out, a Platner supporter named Carolyn Greeley asked him a blunt question.
“Is there anything you need to share with us?” she asked.
Ms. Greeley was bothered by his past comments about women, she said, and wanted assurances that there would not be more damaging revelations to come.
Mr. Platner was unequivocal in his response. Republicans would certainly “make stuff up” about him, he said. He had dated, had girlfriends, “gone through life.” But everything had already been “dragged up,” he promised the crowd.
“In my past, there is not some big, dark secret,” he said.
Asked in an interview how he could be so certain that there was no other information that would come out about him after the event, Mr. Platner was terse.
“I lived my life,” he said. “That’s how.”
We now know not just about the sexting but that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had warned a campaign official about it just as the campaign was getting under way. In other words, Platner failed to tell Greeley the truth, and it’s pretty hard to imagine that he’d forgotten about the sexting.
Meanwhile, Michael Shepherd reports (sub. req.) in the Bangor Daily News that a Platner adviser “warned a former aide she would be accused of lying and sabotage if she cooperated with news outlets reporting on sexually explicit messages Platner sent to women.”
The former aide, an ex-state legislator named Genevieve McDonald, went to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times anyway.
The blood is really in the water now, and you can be sure that news outlets are scrambling to get ahead of whatever might be coming next. And it is absolutely incredible that Maine’s now-she’s-Trumper-now-she-isn’t Republican senator, Susan Collins, may be on the verge of getting another free ride.
Barney Frank. Photo (cc) 2012 by U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The devolution of our political culture is perhaps best summed up in this passage from David Shribman’s Boston Globe obituary of Barney Frank, the legendary progressive congressman who died Tuesday evening:
Mr. Frank was involved in two bailout efforts to battle the 2008 economic crisis, first for foundering financial services institutions and then for the nation’s automobile companies.
“If Barney had not been chairman of the House Financial Services Committee during the financial crisis, I shudder to think what would have happened to our economy,” said Henry Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs who served as President George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary during the meltdown. “He was in the right spot at the right time.”
Now we are dealing with what looks a lot like a tech bubble plus mounting economic pressures from Donald Trump’s illegal war against Iran — and there isn’t a Barney Frank in sight.
I also found this Shribman sentence particularly graceful:
Through more than a half-century of political activism, political agitation, political campaigning, and political maneuvering, his presence on the left in Massachusetts politics exceeded the combined left field tenure of Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski in Fenway Park.
Today Frank is probably best known as the first member of Congress to come out as gay voluntarily. But there was a lot more to his career than that. His work stretched back many decades, and it was consequential.
I’m old enough to remember when Frank was a top aide to Boston Mayor Kevin White and, later, a member of the state legislature. He was elected to Congress for the first time in 1980, when he succeeded Father Robert Drinan, himself a progressive legend. Two years later, he defeated moderate Republican Margaret Heckler in a battle of incumbent House members, a situation forced by reapportionment. He continued to serve until 2013, when he was succeeded by Joe Kennedy III.
I think I only interviewed Frank once, briefly, while I was at The Boston Phoenix. Frank was notoriously abrupt with reporters, so I tried to steel myself — but he must have been in a good mood that day. What I remember is that I’d asked for his thoughts on a story I was writing, and he called me back from outside a committee hearing. I’m paraphrasing, but he began something like this: A Democrat’s talking, so I’ve got a few minutes. I only have to pay attention when it’s a Republican.
Like Hillary and Bernie in 2016, or Grady Little’s decision to send Pedro Martinez back out for the eighth, the media’s coverage of Joe Biden’s decline in 2024 is going to be litigated forever.
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The latest example came Friday night on the “PBS NewsHour,” when Geoff Bennett asked Jonathan Capehart why coverage of Donald Trump’s mental state hasn’t matched similar coverage of Biden’s decline two years ago. Here’s how it went down:
Public domain Illustration of Jeffrey Epstein, left, and Donald Trump by Michael Gode.
The Jeffrey Epstein story is getting weirder, more disturbing and is moving ever closer to Donald Trump. The latest details come from Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, who has done more to expose Epstein’s depravity than any other journalist.
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Brown’s latest comes in the form of two articles. The first, published on Friday, advances earlier reporting by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger and NPR that the Justice Department had withheld some of the Epstein files regarding a woman who told the FBI that Trump sexually assaulted her around 1983, when she was about 13 years old. Those files have now been produced. Brown writes that in one of the interviews:
She said he unzipped his pants and forced her head to his penis. She said she immediately bit him and Trump struck her, the report said. She told the FBI agents that she bit him because he “disgusted” her.
In a follow-up interview, she said that after she rebuffed him, he “pulled her hair and punched her on the side of the head.”
