Category: Politics

New York Times blunders on Blumenthal

Richard Blumenthal

It’s now clear that the New York Times was sloppy in its report on Connecticut Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal. Maybe the fact that he told the truth about his Vietnam-era military service doesn’t negate his saying something totally misleading a few minutes later. But the Times should have gotten out the whole story at once. You can consider me one Times reader who feels manipulated this morning.

To review: On Monday night, the Times posted a story reporting that Blumenthal had, on several occasions, falsely claimed to have served in Vietnam when he was in the Marine Corps. “We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” he said at a speech in 2008. Weirdly, the Times also reported that he’d apparently misled people about having been captain of the Harvard swim team. In fact, he was never a member.

Yesterday, in a follow-up, the Times reported that former congressman Chris Shays had grown increasingly uneasy over the years as he watched Blumenthal transform himself from a humble Vietnam-era veteran into someone who had actually served in the war. “He just kept adding to the story, the more he told it,” Shays was quoted as saying.

But then, later yesterday, the tide turned. The Associated Press reported that Blumenthal truthfully described his military service in the same speech in which he said “I served in Vietnam.” In the opening moments of the speech, he correctly described himself as “as someone who served in the military during the Vietnam era.”

How important is this latest development? I don’t know. We already knew that Blumenthal had often told the truth about his service, but that he had also, on occasion, allowed his audiences to believe he’d been in Vietnam. But to do both in the same speech? That suggests that maybe, as he said at a defiant news conference on Tuesday, it really was just “a few misplaced words.”

I don’t want to let Blumenthal off the hook. I think anyone who watches the full video clip would come away thinking he had served in Vietnam. But Times journalists should have moved heaven and earth to make sure they had investigated this thoroughly, especially since they were relying on a dime-drop from the campaign of Republican candidate Linda McMahon.

Democrats have apparently rallied around Blumenthal, the state attorney general, in advance of this weekend’s state convention. Blumenthal’s poll numbers have plummeted, but they may bounce back if he can create the perception that he has been wronged by the media. To that end, this story by NPR on the media’s role in perpetuating half-true stories about Blumenthal may help him.

In a statement to Politico, New York Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty said:

The New York Times in its reporting uncovered Mr. Blumenthal’s long and well established pattern of misleading his constituents about his Vietnam War service, which he acknowledged in an interview with The Times. Mr. Blumenthal needs to be candid with his constituents about whether he went to Vietnam or not, since his official military records clearly indicate he did not.

Trouble is, when you find yourself defending your reporting to other news organizations, that’s usually a pretty good indication that something went wrong. The Times had a perfectly good — and, I would argue, devastating — story about Blumenthal’s misleading statements regarding his military service.

By letting others reveal the existence of potentially exculpatory material, the paper now finds itself playing defense.

Update: The Stamford Advocate reports that Blumenthal, at the city’s Veterans Day parade in 2008, said, “I wore the uniform in Vietnam and many came back & to all kinds of disrespect. Whatever we think of war, we owe the men and women of the armed forces our unconditional support” (via Greg Sargent). More interesting quotes from Shays, too. I suspect we’re going to find that the Times took a perfectly legitimate story and blew it by not nailing everything down ahead of time.

Photo by Sage Ross via Wikimedia Commons.

Bound for Blumenthal country

Later this morning I’m heading to New Haven for a day of research and reporting. I don’t think I’ll be anywhere near former future senator Richard Blumenthal, who is preparing to tell Connecticut voters they should believe him rather than their own lying eyes and ears.

The poor man has spoken “thousands” of times to veterans groups. I sympathize. Under those circumstances, I could totally imagine myself slipping up once or twice and mistakenly saying I’d served as a reconnaissance officer during the first Gulf War.

Nate Silver nails it. Josh Marshall swings and misses. My personal prediction: Blumenthal won’t make it through the Democratic state convention, which is being held in Hartford this weekend. If he can somehow manage to hang on as state attorney general, he’ll be able to count himself very lucky indeed.

Why were teenage sexual-assault victims named?

Not long after I wrote about the Boston Globe and Cape Cod Times stories regarding congressional candidate Jeff Perry’s ties to former Wareham police officer Scott Flanagan, who illegally conducted strip searches of two teenage girls in 1992, Julie Manganis posted a comment in which she asked an important question: Why did the Times name the two victims, who were 16 and 14 at the time they were assaulted?

“Does the Times now have a policy of identifying victims of sexual crimes, even when the girls are minors?” asked Manganis.

I put the question to the reporter, George Brennan, who in turn referred it to his editor, Paul Pronovost. Here is Pronovost’s answer:

While the Cape Cod Times typically does not name the victims of crimes, we make exceptions when the news warrants. Here’s a link to a recent ombudsman column on the subject, though not related to the Perry story.

You should be aware the girls’ names have been in the public domain for years; you will find published accounts in the Enterprise papers and the Standard Times in New Bedford long before Saturday’s CCT story.

Of course, we don’t justify our decision on the basis of what others do. For the CCT, the compelling factor was the rights of the accused to face his/her accuser. We concluded that publishing the full facts — including the names of those who made the allegations regarding the Wareham police — outweighed privacy issues in detailing the civil action. We gave a full airing of the case and its chronology, including speaking with the father of one of the girls. I believe the story stands as a fair record of what happened and our readers can decide what it means to them in the context of the congressional race.

I did some checking, and found that the Standard Times did indeed name both victims on at least one occasion — on Nov. 29, 1995, when the older of the victims won a civil suit against the Wareham Police Department. The Enterprise newspapers, based on the Cape, recently named the 16-year-old. It’s clear from the context that those papers named one or both victims in 2002 as well.

This strikes me as remarkable. It is highly unusual for news organizations to identify sexual-assault victims, let alone victims who were also minors. Pronovost is right that the names have been out there for many years. I’d be interested in knowing how that happened.

Finally, you may be interested in this long take on the case by Falmouth lawyer Richard Latimer, who blogs for Cape Cod Today. Latimer, as you will see, is no fan of Perry, a Republican state representative who hopes to succeed retiring congressman Bill Delahunt. But Latimer seems to have read every document, and he quotes from them at length.

Perry was a Wareham police sergeant in 1992, when Flanagan assaulted the two girls. Perry has never been charged or found civilly liable in connection with the cases, and has denied that his resignation from the department stemmed from his failure to bring Flanagan to heel.

A non-story about Perry and strip searches

Jeff Perry

What did Cape Cod congressional candidate Jeff Perry know about a police officer who twice conducted illegal strip searches of teenage girls when they were both members of the Wareham force?

If you read today’s Boston Globe story, you might think the answer is “a great deal.” Perry denies it, but given the facts as described by reporters Donovan Slack and Frank Phillips, his explanation doesn’t seem all that credible.

But if you read George Brennan’s more detailed account in the Cape Cod Times, you might be inclined to give Perry the benefit of the doubt. It’s not that the facts are substantially different — it’s that the fuller narrative makes Perry’s denial come off as plausible.

Perry, a Republican state representative from Sandwich, is hoping to succeed U.S. Rep. Bill Delahunt, a Quincy Democrat, who’s retiring. The last thing a candidate for public office needs is to be linked to strip searches of teenage girls. Based on Brennan’s reporting, though, this looks like a non-story.

Could the anti-incumbent fever be breaking?

It depends on how seriously you regard polls taken six months before the November election. But there’s some intriguing news on several fronts today:

  • Gov. Deval Patrick’s standing in his re-election battle has jumped 10 points in a month, according to Rasmussen. He now leads Republican Charlie Baker by a margin of 45 percent to 31 percent, with independent Tim Cahill bringing up the rear at 14 percent. It appears that the Republican Party’s relentlessly negative anti-Cahill ads have damaged Cahill without doing much for Baker.
  • Public Policy Polling reports that President Obama’s approval/disapproval rating is now 50 percent/46 percent, his best standing since last October.
  • Even Harry Reid is looking less like a goner than he has in many months.

Who knows what will happen over the next few months? These things generally come down to the economy, and the recovery has been slow and unsteady. At the very least, though, it seems that the throw-them-all-out story line has been called into question.

Getting more than he’s betting on

Writing in the Boston Globe, Paul McMorrow raises an important point about Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo’s quest to build two casinos and install slot machines at four racetracks.

Right now, the Mashpee Wampanoag bid to build a casino in Middleborough is being stymied mainly because casino gambling is illegal in Massachusetts. Once it’s legalized, the door is open not just for the Middleborough location, but for other tribal casinos as well. McMorrow writes:

In DeLeo’s rush to appease the building trades and carve out some action for the two racetracks in his district, the speaker of the House is setting the table for a gambling expansion in Massachusetts that has the potential to be far broader than anything he’s pitching. He’s opening the door to new gambling halls on Martha’s Vineyard and the Cape, in Middleborough and Fall River. It’s also something neither he, nor anyone else on Beacon Hill, can control.

And though McMorrow doesn’t say it, you can be sure that officials in New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut won’t stand pat if casinos are built in Massachusetts.

It is sad that none of the major candidates for governor — not Gov. Deval Patrick, Republican Charlie Baker nor independent Tim Cahill — opposes this financial and social boondoggle-in-the-making.

A social compact on the verge of breakdown

Public employees are our friends, our neighbors and our family members. Police officers, firefighters and teachers are a necessary part of a well-ordered civil society. But in Massachusetts, the social compact is on the verge of breaking down because of paychecks and benefits for public employees that are grotesquely out of whack with what folks in the private sector earn.

Here are four quick examples — three from the Boston Globe:

  • Boston police officers are getting as much as $250,000 in salary and overtime — some of it legitimately, some of it for staying a few minutes past their shift to finish paperwork. “The salaries are excessive,” Police Commissioner Edward Davis told the Globe. “Clearly the average person on the street does not make this kind of money.”
  • In Framingham, town employees and retirees are at loggerheads with the taxpayers who fund their health benefits, which in most cases amount to 87 percent of premiums — a far better deal than anyone in the private sector can hope to get.
  • An arbitrator recently awarded Boston firefighters a 19 percent raise over four years in return for agreeing to drug and alcohol tests and some limits on sick time. The Globe has called on the city council to reject the $74 million cost of the agreement, but there are no signs that the members will find the requisite backbone to do so.
  • There’s a new reform administration in charge of the Essex Regional Retirement Board, and it seems that every day it finds something gross crawling out from under a rock. The latest, according to the ever-vigilant Salem News: the previous board spent more than $200,000 in legal fees to advance a sleazy scheme to put 39 workers on a housing authority payroll for one day so they would be eligible for higher benefits and Social Security.

How this will play out in the fall election is anyone’s guess. You’d think it would have a significant effect on the governor’s race. But Gov. Deval Patrick has pushed harder (though not hard enough) against such abuses than his predecessors, and neither Republican candidate Charlie Baker nor Treasurer Tim Cahill, the independent, has advanced a credible case for being the change agent voters are looking for.

At the very least, though, Republicans ought to be able to make their first significant gains in the legislature since 1990.

Insurer profits by denying needed care

My friend Clif Garboden, with whom I worked for many years at the Boston Phoenix, has written a compelling op-ed piece for the Boston Globe about his battles with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, which refuses to cover a chronic condition caused by his successful treatment for cancer. Clif writes:

I have the right to appeal this rejection …, but frankly, I have better things to do with my remaining time on earth than play against a stacked deck with a bunch of bandits.

Garboden’s tale may provide some insight into how former chief executive Charlie Baker, now the Republican candidate for governor, engineered Harvard Pilgrim’s turnaround. As Clif observes, maybe we can move something better now that we have near-universal health care.

How the media covered Scott Brown’s rise

Meet the press: Scott Brown speaks with reporter following Senate debate in December at WBZ-TV.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism and Boston University have published a study on how the media covered the race to succeed the late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, a race that culminated in Republican Scott Brown’s surprising victory over Democrat Martha Coakley.

Among the authors of the report, “Hiding in Plain Sight, From Kennedy to Brown,” was my old friend Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the project, with whom I worked at both the Boston Phoenix and “Beat the Press.”

The findings of the study — which mainly focuses on the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, and to a lesser extent on the Associated Press and the New York Times — are not surprising. Essentially we learn that the media devoted precious little attention to Brown during the primary and general-election campaigns until Jan. 5, when Rasmussen released a poll showing that Brown was within striking distance.

From that point on, according to the report (verified by anyone who was paying attention at the time), the media went into overdrive, covering the campaign relentlessly but devoting far more resources to the horse race and strategy stories than to the issues. You will also not be surprised to learn that the Globe was more favorable to Coakley and the Herald to Brown.

“In the end, a campaign that first seemed to lack drama and star power was the most important and intensely covered political story in the country,” the report says. “And while they were certainly not alone, the press never saw it coming.”

I have a few quibbles with what was looked at. The authors, for example, criticize the Globe and the Herald for rarely getting outside of the Boston area, arguing that they might have picked up the Brown surge earlier if they had pushed themselves outside their geographic comfort zone. A fair point, but it’s too bad the folks who did the study couldn’t find a way to incorporate coverage from other news outlets around the state.

Then, too, talk radio, which formed a near-monolithic cheering section for Brown (and jeering section for Coakley), doesn’t even get a mention. Granted, newspaper stories can be closely analyzed in ways that talk radio can’t. But right-wing talk may have been the single most important factor in Brown’s rise.

Still, “Hidden in Plain Sight” is a revealing and valuable look at how Boston’s two daily newspapers covered the state’s biggest political story in many years, and is well worth reading in full.