Category: Uncategorized

I want to call your attention to a couple of stories in this week’s Boston Phoenix:

• On the new-media front, David Bernstein takes a look at the Boston Police Department’s blog, BPD News. According to Bernstein’s reporting, the police have used the blog to spin the local media with disinformation. BPD News responds with an admirably above-the-fray welcome to Phoenix readers.
• This week also marks the debut of a weekly column on how the media are covering this year’s political campaigns. Written by Boston University communications professor John Carroll, with whom I often appear on WGBH-TV/Channel 2’s “Beat the Press” edition of “Greater Boston,” the column features Carroll’s customary meld of wit and substance.

Former Modern Continental safety officer John Keaveney now confirms that he was the tipster who sent to the Boston Globe’s Sean Murphy the memo he’d written about safety problems, thus admitting that the Big Dig contractor was right in asserting that the return address on the envelope was in his handwriting.

Keaveney is otherwise sticking by his contention that he warned of safety problems in May 1999, but it doesn’t look good. In “A note from the editor,” Globe editor Marty Baron says that “the admission that he misled the Globe about the mailing of the memo raises concerns about credibility.”

Moreover, the Boston Herald today reports that Keaveney appeared unconcerned about safety problems later in 1999 even as they were unfolding right in front of him. That lends further credence to the possibility that Keaveney wrote his memo warning of safety problems not seven years ago but, rather, a little more than a week back.

Today, a few questions as this story continues to unfold:

1. Who is Jeff Gram? A number of observers, including Media Nation, have said that the Globe had reported receiving the memo from an anonymous tipster. But, in fact, Murphy’s original July 26 story actually says this: “Keaveney’s letter was mailed to a Globe reporter without Keaveney’s knowledge. He was contacted and verified it was his letter.” In a carefully parsed sentence yesterday, the Globe reported, “It is unclear who sent the memo to the Globe; the return address was not Keaveney’s.” Other stories contain similar wording. So I was mistaken.

Today’s main Herald story (already linked) reports that Keaveney “last night admitted to the Globe he sent the letter using the name Jeff Gram, a Modern employee, in order to protect his family against ‘repercussions.’ ” (The Herald story also claims that the Globe had reported the memo had been sent “anonymously,” which, to repeat, appears to be a mischaracterization of what the Globe has actually said.)

Gram’s name, though, has not appeared in any of the Globe’s coverage. According to the Herald, the Globe contacted Gram and he denied having sent the memo. Baron tells the Herald: “We never reported that he had sent the letter, nor did we include his name in any of the stories. A key question was who had sent the letter. It made no sense to involve him in the controversy if he denied sending the letter and we had no information to the contrary.”

Good or bad call? Bad, with a caveat. Boston University journalism department chairman Lou Ureneck tells the Herald: “I think that information should be in the story, at least in descriptive terms. If there was a name on the envelope, and a check with that [person] got a denial, the plot thickens, the story complicates and the reader should know about that.”

Ureneck is absolutely right. The Globe didn’t have to name Gram. But it should have revealed that the person whose name and address were written on the envelope had denied ever sending it.

2. Was Modern Continental given adequate time to respond? This really goes to the heart of the matter because, ultimately, the mess the Globe finds itself in isn’t about a document — it’s about a source and his credibility. Despite the attempts of some, like the Herald’s Howie Carr, to compare this to Dan Rather and the National Guard documents, the Globe has an on-the-record source who says he wrote the document in question and stands by it. It’s a classic “he said/he said” situation.

Except that, in the initial story, it was “he said/he couldn’t reached for comment.”

Remember, that story asserted that no one from Modern Continental could be reached “last night,” which shows that Murphy’s story was on the fast track. As I wrote yesterday, I think the Globe should have waited a day, even if it risked losing its exclusive. But would it have made a difference?

When CBS News showed the phony National Guard documents to the White House hours before its story ran, the non-response it received appeared to confirm their authenticity. Only later was it revealed that the documents, supposedly from the early 1970s, were almost certainly of more recent vintage.

Likewise, if the Globe had managed to obtain a statement from Modern Continental “last night,” what would we have learned? My guess is that the spokesperson would have said one of two things:

• “We can’t comment until we have had a chance to investigate the authenticity of this memo.” Or —
• “We question the authenticity of this memo.”

The statement would have been tossed into the Globe’s story, and our perception of what had happened would not have changed one bit.

As we’ve seen, it actually took Modern Continental executives a week to vet their files and issue their statement that they believe the Keaveney memo had been fabricated. No news organization would have given a company a week to respond on such an important, fast-moving story as the Big Dig.

But would a day have been enough for Modern Continental at least to raise some serious questions? We’ll never know.

3. Did the Globe violate its own policies? In 2003, the Poynter Institute’s Jim Romenesko posted the draft of a memo written by Globe editor Baron on an ethics policy he and other editors were formulating. (Click here and scroll down.) In a section titled “Fairness,” Baron wrote:

One of the most common complaints from the subjects of our stories and our columns is that they are not given ample opportunity to respond to accusations against them. Some say they were not called at all for a response. Others say they were called at the last minute without being provided ample time to respond thoroughly or knowledgeably. Many times, they say they were called for a general comment but never alerted to very specific allegations that would be made against them by others we interviewed.

In the cause of fairness, we must allow principal subjects of our stories a reasonable period of time to respond to any allegations against them. They should not first learn of allegations when they read our paper in the morning. During a major breaking story, the response time obviously becomes abbreviated. However, when stories are in development over several days or weeks, we should allow more time for a response.

We also should be open to the possibility that a response may be sufficiently persuasive to justify significantly changing, holding, or even abandoning a story.

This is not to suggest that we soften our stories or columns or hold back when we have assembled sufficient documentation and conducted all appropriate interviews. It only means that our stories and columns need to meet basic standards of fairness.

If the subjects of our stories cannot be reached, we should make every effort to explain why. For example, if someone could not be reached because he was traveling, we should say so. If they were called only late at night, we should say so.

I quote it at length because Baron seems to have covered every contingency. No doubt the Globe had on its hands a “major breaking story” in which “the response time obviously becomes abbreviated.” What also seems clear, though, is that Globe editors were not “open to the possibility that a response may be sufficiently persuasive to justify significantly changing, holding, or even abandoning a story.”

There are several reasons that news organizations obtain comment from the targets of their reporting. One is fair play. But another, more important, reason is that reporters know they might be wrong.

Yet there are times when a reporter is absolutely convinced that he’s right, and that giving a source too much time to respond will risk diminishing the impact of the story. Sometimes, for tactical reasons, a news organization will give a source almost no time to respond so that he can’t spin it ahead of time. I’ve been in that situation myself, and it’s something that has to be thought through with the top editors. Always, the overriding concern is: Is there any way we could be proven wrong on this? Obviously Murphy, Baron and company didn’t think there was. And they got burned.

But we all know that you could plug up the Big Dig tunnels forever with copies of the Globe and the Herald that contain the phrase “could not be reached last night for comment” or some variation thereof. It’s not pretty, but it’s part of journalism as it’s actually practiced.

I think the Globe violated at least the spirit of Baron’s draft by giving Modern Continental so little time to respond. But if the Keaveney memo’s authenticity had not been challenged, no one ever would have noticed.

Romenesko has already got the documents online, so I’ll just link. Here is Northeastern University’s announcement that Boston Globe Spotlight Team editor Walter Robinson is joining the faculty. Here is Globe editor Marty Baron’s memo to the staff.

Baron sums up what this means pretty succinctly: “Northeastern, his alma mater, could not hope for a more stellar recruit to its faculty, and I can’t imagine a more gut-wrenching loss for the Globe.” Robinson, though, will continue to have an affiliation with the Globe.

Robinson is a legendary reporter, with notches in his belt going back at least to Ed King, who served one scandal-plagued term as governor from 1979 to ’82. Robinson goes out with a bang, overseeing this week’s “Debtors’ Hell” series. He’s probably best known for his work on the Catholic priest sex-abuse scandal, for which the Globe won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003.

Robinson had this to say in an e-mail:

To my friends and colleagues:

When I started at the Globe in 1972, all fumblefingers and fearful that I would be broomed out the door as soon as it became apparent that I couldn’t really type, the city editor who hired me, Matt Storin, gave me a desk and a chair next to a City Room veteran with a good B.S. detector. And my desk-mate quickly concluded that Matt had made a bad hire. “Kid,” is what he called me, as he did one day when he told me that I wasn’t going to last very long.

So I’ve fooled them for longer than I thought possible. After 34 years, it’s time for me to try my hand at something else. I’ve had enormous good fortune to have worked at such a great newspaper, and to have had far more great assignments than anyone deserves in a career. It’s time for me to make an effort to give something back, for all that has been given to me. So, starting in January, I will join the journalism faculty at Northeastern University, where I will be teaching reporting techniques, with a focus on investigative reporting.

Which is not to say that I am leaving the Globe entirely. I will remain as a part-time consultant to Marty Baron, our editor. I will continue to do some reporting and writing. But my primary focus will be to work with other members of the staff who have investigative reporting ideas.

That’s the headline. The text of the story is in Marty’s note to the staff; and the Northeastern announcement, attached.

With regards,

Robby

With the “Debtors’ Hell” series out of the way, perhaps Robinson can spend his remaining time at the Globe riding herd on the Big Dig story — and help the paper overcome the institutional embarrassment it’s now going through over that apparently phony memo.

A personal note: Early in his career, Robinson taught a few journalism classes at Northeastern while working at the Globe. I just missed out on having him as a professor, and I’m sure I’d be a better journalist if I’d wound up in his classroom. Now, more than 30 years later, we’ll be colleagues.

If you go back and read the Boston Globe’s July 26 report on the John Keaveney memo, you’ll see details that no doubt led reporter Sean Murphy and his editors to let down their guard.

Keaveney, a former safety officer for Big Dig contractor Modern Continental, supposedly issued an internal warning about those death-dealing concrete panels in 1999. It now appears that the memo may have been faked. But it’s not hard to see why Murphy set aside his customary journalistic skepticism. Consider a couple of excerpts:

— “Keaveney’s letter was mailed to a Globe reporter without Keaveney’s knowledge. He was contacted and verified it was his letter.” This speaks to what might be called the chain-of-custody issue. Murphy apparently believed that some anonymous whistleblower mailed him the memo. Thus, when Keaveney verified its authenticity, it looked like an anonymous tip had been confirmed by an on-the-record source — the best on-the-record source, given that Keaveney was the guy who actually wrote the memo.

— “Keaveney said he blames himself. ‘I am part of the problem,’ he said. ‘I failed to open my mouth. I failed to push the letter I wrote for results. I am partially responsible for the death of this mother…. Oh, yeah, it has been very difficult,’ he said, his eyes welling up with tears.” This, obviously, is pretty compelling stuff. It doesn’t prove anything. But reporters are constantly in the position of having to judge the character of the people they interview. Given what Murphy already believed about Keaveney — that he had not sought the limelight but, rather, had been outed by an anonymous whistleblower — this must have been the clincher.

Now, of course, the Keaveney memo has turned into an embarrassment for the Globe. By the next day, metro editor Carolyn Ryan was declining to provide a copy of the memo to Slate’s Timothy Noah. On July 29, we learned that the memo’s authenticity was being investigated. And, yesterday, Modern Continental announced that it believed the memo had been fabricated. Though the memo’s authenticity has not been definitively disproven, Modern Continental offered some compelling details about dates and letterheads. (Herald story here; Globe story here.)

So what does this mean for the Globe? Surely this is embarrassing, but is it a scandal? Based on what we know so far, I’d have to say “no.” Murphy acted in good faith, and his editors went with a story they had good reason to believe was genuine. They didn’t dot every “i” and cross every “t,” and I’m sure they’re kicking themselves now. But I think this is a story that most news organizations would have gone with.

A few observations:

1. It’s never the initial wrongdoing; it’s always the cover-up. That obviously applies to Keaveney, who, as far as I can tell, was in no legal hazard before July 26 — but who’s up to his neck in it now. But it applies to the Globe as well, and editor Marty Baron seems to be aware of that. Baron is not doing a Dan Rather, raving about the memo’s authenticity long after we all know it’s a fake. Instead, he seems determined to get to the bottom of it. And, to his credit, he’s keeping Murphy on the story. Murphy’s done as much as any journalist over the years to expose problems with the Big Dig. It would be ludicrous to pull him off the story now.

2. The Globe should have tried harder to contact Modern Continental. The Kennedy School’s Thomas Patterson tells the Herald that the Globe’s failure to quote anyone from Modern Continental may have amounted to “a rush to publication and an unwise one at that.” It’s hard to disagree. According to Murphy’s initial story, he couldn’t reach anyone from Modern Continental “last night,” indicating that the story was, indeed, rushed. (Among other things, that haste led the Globe to overstate Keaveney’s credentials, as it acknowledges today.) But would it have made any difference? Consider that it took a week for Modern Continental to go through its files in order to issue the statement it made yesterday. No news organization was going to wait a week. Still, the Globe certainly could have waited a day in order to get someone on the record, even though it might have lost its exclusive.

3. The memo might be genuine. Keaveney’s lawyer continues to insist that the memo is authentic. Yes, yes, that’s what lawyers are supposed to do, but surely it’s of some significance that he’s staking out an absolutist position for his client rather than trying to cut some sort of deal. And according to today’s Globe story, by Jonathan Saltzman and Murphy, there’s little doubt that Keaveney had been concerned about the safety of the tunnels for quite some time:

In recent days, several colleagues and friends of Keaveney, said they had heard him express doubts about the safety of the epoxy-and-bolt ceiling hanging system as far back as 2003.

Edward Hawthorne — a safety officer for Bond Brothers Inc., an Everett-based construction company — said he recalled Keaveney sharing his concerns with him last October at a training session for safety officers sponsored by Associated General Contractors, a trade group.

When he heard of the July 10 ceiling collapse, Hawthorne said, he thought, “Wow, Johnny was right.”

Two Norwell neighbors — James Dakin and Timothy Foley — said Keaveney had on numerous occasions expressed misgivings about the quality of work on the Big Dig, including at a 40th birthday party for Keaveney in 2003.

Foley said he recalls Keaveney telling him long ago “to floor it when driving through the tunnel.”

If this is all true, I wouldn’t give up just yet on the possibility that Keaveney’s memo was authentic, despite some problems with dates that cast it in serious doubt.

If you heard me on WRKO Radio (AM 680) this morning with Scott Allen Miller, these are the points I was trying to make. No, the Globe hasn’t covered itself with glory. But every honest journalist who looks at this would have to conclude that it could have happened to any of us. Not every mistake is a scandal.

I don’t know who’s behind Massachusetts GOP News, but today it advances a breathtakingly stupid notion — that the way for the Republican Party to reestablish itself in this bluest of blue states is for a Democrat to win the governorship this November. Here’s a taste:

Let’s allow the Democrats to win the corner office therefore removing their argument that real progress has been stymied by the Republican Governor. Once they have control of the corner office they own the explanations for a poor economy, escalating crime rate, low education results, unemployment, continuing exodus of jobs, people and companies from the commonwealth. They own it and they will have to explain why their plan doesn’t work. They will have to stand up and say time and again how they need more of your money to make things work. The Democrats will have to look people in the eyes at the “state of the state” address and talk about how they have supported the Lawyers, big unions and special interests over the taxpayers one more time. Democrats will have to explain why good legislation like Melanie’s Law didn’t get passed under their leadership. It is a Jujitsu approach that uses their own mass and momentum against them.

Apparently “jujitsu” is Japanese for “suicide.”

There are two reasons that Republicans consistently win the governor’s race in Massachusetts. One is that the Democrats control everything else, and voters naturally want someone to keep an eye on them. That would appear to be the Mass. GOP argument. It certainly worked for Mitt Romney four years ago.

But that wouldn’t be enough without a second factor: Only the governor’s race is big enough for voters to focus on and not just automatically vote for the Democrat. Only the governor’s race features two major-party candidates who’ve gotten enough media coverage that they’re equally well-known. Only the governor’s race attracts Republican candidates who are well-funded enough to compete on a level playing field.

This may be a minority opinion, but I think Kerry Healey has the potential to be the most attractive Republican candidate since Bill Weld in 1990. Romney beat Shannon O’Brien by as narrow a margin as he did in 2002 because of well-grounded suspicions about his larger ambitions and his social conservatism. There are no such concerns about Healy. Nor does she bear the taint of insiderism that Paul Cellucci brought to the table, or the whiff of arrogance that undid Jane Swift.

I have no horse in this race, although I do think it’s important that Massachusetts become a two-party state. Mass. GOP would move us in the opposite direction. (Via Universal Hub. Also, see Jay Fitzgerald’s take.)

Four years ago I gave the Massachusetts Department of Education one of the Phoenix’s annual Muzzle Awards (scroll down to second item), arguing that its decision to prevent a prominent critic of high-stakes testing from giving a speech was an abridgement of his First Amendment rights.

Yesterday, according to this Boston Globe story, Superior Court Judge Hiller Zobel agreed, ruling that Alfie Kohn‘s rights were violated under both the U.S. Constitution and the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act. Zobel wrote: “The record makes clear that the government was attempting to dictate what Mr. Kohn could say and what his prospective listeners could hear.”

The lawsuit on Kohn’s behalf was brought by the ACLU of Massachusetts, which issued a statement yesterday. Here is the complete text:

BOSTON (August 1, 2006) — The Massachusetts Department of Education (DOE) violated the United States Constitution when it prevented a critic of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) standardized test from speaking at a public education conference because it did not like his viewpoint, State Superior Court Judge Hiller Zobel has ruled. The case was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts and cooperating attorneys at Boston’s Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks, P.C. on behalf of Alfie Kohn, a nationally known critic of high-stakes testing. Judge Zobel’s decision was entered on July 28 but released today.

Kohn, author of “The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools,” had been invited to deliver a keynote address at a May 2001 public education conference in Northampton, Massachusetts. The conference was sponsored by the DOE, area colleges including Smith, Mount Holyoke and University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and more than a dozen community groups committed to improving high school education in Massachusetts.

Although speakers’ fees, including those of Kohn, were to be paid by private funds, Susan Miller Barker of the DOE ordered shortly before the conference began that Kohn be barred from delivering the keynote. In an e-mail uncovered during the lawsuit and specifically cited in the Court’s decision, Barker wrote “It was stupid … to use state funds in a way … diametrically opposed to the state’s and the board of ed’s legislative and policy agenda.”

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Kohn and attendees at the conference who were denied the opportunity to hear him. The Court ruled that, by preventing Kohn from speaking because of his viewpoint, the DOE violated the federal Constitution and the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act.

“Here, the record makes clear that the government (through the DOE) was attempting to dictate what Mr. Kohn could say and what his prospective listeners could hear,” states Judge Zobel’s written opinion. “A person in Mr. Kohn’s position has a right to be heard without government interference, and people in the position of the other plaintiffs have a right to hear him. The First Amendment ‘necessarily protects the right to receive information.’ “

In response to the ruling, Mr. Kohn said, “It is gratifying to have the Court confirm what we knew — that the Department of Education is so committed to its agenda of high-stakes testing that it will violate the Constitution to silence those who disagree.”

Kohn and the citizen plaintiffs were represented by Boston attorneys Michael Rader and Michael Albert of Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks, who acted as cooperating attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. ACLUM staff attorneys Sarah Wunsch and William Newman also were co-counsel for the plaintiffs.

“The Court has put the Department of Education on notice that its political preferences must never again take precedence over the First Amendment,” said Rader.

The Court entered a declaratory judgment for the plaintiffs and ordered the parties to submit additional papers concerning the form of the final judgment within 14 days.

A copy of Zobel’s decision can be found here (PDF).

Media Nation’s advice to Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey: Drop this, if Mitt will let you. Censorship is always wrong. The Kohn case hasn’t gotten much attention. But if you fight it, it’s yours — and folks might start to notice.

Not that it should be any surprise, but Christopher Rowland’s take on Greater Boston’s newest newspaper behemoth is pretty chilling for anyone who cares about community journalism.

Writing in the Boston Globe, Rowland reports that Fairport, N.Y-based GateHouse Media — which, earlier this year, paid $410 million for the Boston Herald’s Community Newspaper Co. (CNC) as well as the Patriot Ledger of Quincy, the Enterprise of Brockton and those two papers’ affiliated MPG weeklies — has been built on a mountain of debt.

Boston University’s Lou Ureneck tells Rowland:

They’ve been piling up debt in order to grow. The danger from a public point of view is that the debt burden gets so high that the company begins to drastically reduce its expenditures on the coverage of news.

On Saturday, the Herald’s Jesse Noyes reported that GateHouse would likely cut jobs as it consolidates operations on the South Shore. (The Herald continues to have a content-sharing arrangement with its former CNC subsidiary.)

There have been suggestions that Kirk Davis, the chief executive for GateHouse’s 100-plus papers in Eastern Massachusetts, sees Web-based community journalism as the future. Wicked Local, a Plymouth site started by the Ledger/Enterprise chain before its acquisition by GateHouse, is seen as a model.

Wicked Local is indeed pretty intriguing. But there is no substitute for investing in local reporting.

To be sure, no one can blame GateHouse for paring down its overlapping operations on the South Shore, where in some towns the company now finds itself owning competing weeklies. Nothing terrible has happened yet. The company is also going public, which will allow it to raise investment money.

But this is an experiment in corporate giantism at the local level that bears close scrutiny.

Nicholas Lemann writes a thoughtful, measured article in the New Yorker this week on the rise of citizen journalism. He quotes the self-promoting buzz machine himself, Jeff Jarvis, at his most ludicrously nasty. And, naturally, Jarvis responds with a variation of his favorite theme: Lemann just doesn’t get it.

That said, I’m going to assign Lemann’s piece and Jarvis’ response to my “Journalism of the Web” students this fall. Lemann, a veteran journalist, is dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and what he has to say is therefore by definition important, even when he’s wrong. (I don’t think he is.)

Jarvis’ riposte is predictable and tiresome, but he still manages to score a few points.

Again: Why does anyone ever pitch to David Ortiz with the game on the line? We can only be glad that they do. Yes, Manny’s a terrific clutch hitter. But I’d rather take my chances with him than Ortiz. Wouldn’t you?

The Wikipedia may have some credibility problems. But its anonymous contributors have certainly kept the online encyclopedia up to date on the controversial term “tar baby”: Gov. Mitt Romney’s weekend faux pas has already been memorialized.

Is “tar baby” a racist term? Certainly some people think so, although there seems to be enough haziness that Romney deserves the benefit of the doubt. The Globe plays down the reaction to Romney’s remarks, relegating it to the lower-right-hand corner of the City & Region front. The Herald goes nuts, blowing out page one with a huge headline that reads, “THAT’S OFFENSIVE.”

Yet the definition of “tar baby” provided by the American Heritage Dictionary suggests no racial overtones, simply calling it “A situation or problem from which it is virtually impossible to disentangle oneself” — which is the connotation Romney was trying to convey in referring to the Big Dig.

The Encyclopedia Britannica describes a tar baby as a:

sticky tar doll, the central figure in black American folktales popularized in written literature by the American author Joel Chandler Harris. Harris’ “Tar-Baby” (1879), one of the animal tales told by the character Uncle Remus, is but one example of numerous African-derived tales featuring the use of a wax, gum, or rubber figure to trap a rascal.

We’re getting closer here, but the offensiveness has still not been established.

Perhaps the best explanation is that the term has taken on an offensive glow over time. The Wikipedia, for instance, says, “The term may also carry a negative connotation. It has been used as a derogatory term for dark skinned people (such as African Americans in the United States or Maoris in New Zealand). It can also refer to an especially dark skinned black person.”

Toni Morrison, who wrote a novel called “Tar Baby,” tells the Globe, “How it became a racial epithet, I don’t know. It was my attempt to rescue the phrase from its low meaning. I wanted to annihilate the connotation and return the meaning to its origins. Apparently, I haven’t succeeded.”

No, she hasn’t.

I don’t know whether Romney was speaking off the cuff, but if he was reading prepared remarks, well, shame on his staff. It was only a couple of months ago that White House press secretary Tony Snow took some heat for using the phrase “tar baby.” So it’s not as if this was a complete unknown.

Still, I’m inclined to give Romney a pass. Unless he says it again.