Category: Uncategorized

The opposite of independent

If there’s one thing I think we could all agree on, it’s that the recently released Spectrum Gaming Group report on Gov. Deval Patrick’s moribund casino-gambling proposal is not independent. So why does a Boston Globe editorial today refer to Spectrum as “an independent research firm”?

Spectum’s close ties to the gambling industry were the subject of a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago. And there’s more. For instance, check out the credentials of some of its top executives:

  • Harvey Perkins, senior vice president, “has thirty years of casino gaming industry experience and has held high-level positions at major gaming properties in Atlantic City and New Orleans.”
  • Tina Ercole LoBiondo, vice president for analysis, “has worked in the casino resort industry since 1988, having held various analytical, operational and developmental roles in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, and was instrumental in the opening of three major gaming resorts.”
  • Bill LaPenta, director of financial analysis, “is a casino and hotel industry professional with more than 20 years of operations management and analysis experience, providing critical business decision support, planning, analysis, and performance management tools to casino hotel and resort operators.”

Not everyone who holds a top position at Spectrum has a gambling background. And the two managing directors, Fredric Gushin and Michael Pollack, come from the worlds of law enforcement and government regulation, respectively.

But Spectrum officials clearly see themselves as part of the gambling industry. They may be nice people. They may sincerely believe there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it, and they may be dedicated to the right way.

In reality, though, the right way is not to do it at all, and that simply isn’t part of the Spectrum mindset. The fact is that Patrick hired the casino-gambling industry to report on whether casino gambling would be a good thing. The opposite of independent, in other words.

Here you go, Your Honor

U.S. District Judge George O’Toole yesterday continued the restraining order against three MIT students who had been prevented from telling what they know about security problems with the MBTA’s automated fare system.

Among other things, O’Toole demanded that the students hand over a paper they wrote for class by today at 4 p.m.

Well, I don’t know if this will expedite matters, but here’s the slideshow (PDF) they were planning to use during their presentation in Las Vegas last weekend. Does that help?

Ridiculous. And good for The Tech for putting it online.

Tony Mazz jumps to the Globe

Two developments coming out of the Boston Globe sports department, courtesy of Adam Reilly.

In the non-surprise department, Amalie Benjamin succeeds Gordon Edes, now with Yahoo Sports, as the Globe’s Red Sox beat reporter. Interesting and good that the Globe would put a woman in that high-profile slot. Even better, it represents a long-overdue generational shift. If this Wikipedia bio is accurate, Benjamin is 26 years old.

In the big-surprise department, the Boston Herald’s Tony Massarotti is leaving One Herald Square to join a beefed-up Boston.com sports operation. Massarotti is a leading reason to read the Herald, so this is a huge, huge loss. It also tells me that Globe sports editor Joe Sullivan is at least as concerned about competing with the newly ascendant WEEI.com as he is with the Herald. (Sullivan is also promoting part-time copy editor Chad Finn to a new job as a sports reporter for Boston.com.)

Unless the Globe loosens its WEEI ban [see tweak below] , it also means one of the station’s most recognizable voices will no longer be heard. Of course, now Massarotti can appear on New England Sports Network, a corporate cousin to the Globe.

The best news about all of this is that job creation continues at 135 Morrissey Boulevard, shifting from the print edition to the Web site.

Friday tweak: According to the Joan Vennochi column I linked to last night, as well as to a piece I wrote in April 2001, I glossed over the ban just a bit too glibly. Former Globe editor Matt Storin banned his people from appearing on “The Big Show,” in the afternoon, and later extended it to “Dennis & Callahan” as well. WEEI retaliated by announcing that Globe writers had been banned from all of its programs. So it’s kind of a mutual ban.

Russian sniper reportedly shoots journalist

This just in. The headline on this YouTube video is “Journalist gets injured in Georgia by the Russian sniper.” Go ahead and watch — it’s not particularly graphic, and the journalist was not seriously injured; it’s more shocking than anything.

I have no verification or information on what this is, but it was clearly taken of a television reporter in the midst of a newscast. Toward the end, an anchor appears. This was posted on Twitter by Andrew Dunn, a journalism student at the University of North Carolina.

More: CNN, in describing the video, says, “While on-air, a reporter is grazed by a bullet and goes on to say the shot was fired from the Russian-controlled area.” The source is listed as Georgia’s state television service.

Beyond convention wisdom

Jack Shafer of Slate and Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine are both arguing that the media ought to stop covering the national political conventions.

Their reasons are obvious. The nominees have been chosen entirely through the primaries since the 1970s, so there is literally no news coming out of them except for the acceptance speeches of the vice presidential and presidential candidates. I understand the point. But I would make two counterarguments.

First, what better place is there for the three cable news networks to be? The prime-time line-ups of Fox News, CNN and MSNBC consist mainly of talk shows with a heavy political bent. The conventions give them a chance to do what they do, only at a higher level and with a larger audience. Nothing wrong with that.

Second, the conventions are filled with interesting stories, though very few of them take place inside the hall. Yes, I’d agree that having 15,000 reporters on hand to cover the same thing is nuts, but that’s not what they ought to be doing. Maybe 10,000 of them ought to go home (perhaps I don’t disagree with Shafer and Jarvis after all), but the other 5,000 ought to get outside and look for stories.

In 2000, I was at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, on assignment for the Boston Phoenix, when similar complaints arose about the news-free nature of the event. I wrote about what the media should have been covering rather than whining about the dullness of the proceedings. I’d say the same thing today.

Callahan says he had throat cancer

WEEI Radio (AM 850) morning-show co-host Gerry Callahan today confirms longstanding rumors that his months-long absence in 2007 was due to serious illness. In his Boston Herald column, Callahan writes that he was being treated for throat cancer.

Bruce Allen notes that Callahan timed his announcement to coincide with the annual WEEI-NESN telethon for the Jimmy Fund. Good move — it will raise interest and could well result in more money for the Jimmy Fund.

Media Nation is no fan of “Dennis & Callahan,” with its snide putdowns of everyone to the left of Dick Cheney. But I wish Callahan well.

Gloucester story remains incomplete

I find it interesting that Time magazine’s Web site today carries only an Associated Press story on the resignation of Gloucester High School principal Joseph Sullivan, who blasted Mayor Carolyn Kirk for having “slandered” him. Time hasn’t run an update since June 26, when one of the magazine’s reporters, Kathleen Kingsbury, wrote an item that carried the possibly misleading headline “Gloucester Principal Stands by Story.”

Sullivan, you may recall, was the primary source for Kingsbury’s startling claim that a group of female students at Gloucester High School had made a “pact” to get pregnant and raise their babies together — a story that included such lurid details as girls’ high-fiving each other when they learned they were expecting, and one student being impregnated by a 24-year-old homeless man. Sullivan said in Kingsbury’s June 26 piece that he didn’t recall having used the word “pact,” but that he stood by what he’d told Time.

But as I wrote in June, Sullivan declined to take the additional step of endorsing Kingsbury’s reporting. To this day, we have not heard from a single Gloucester High School student who says she was part of any such agreement with other students, regardless of whether you call it a “pact.” Essentially we know nothing more than we did way back on March 7, when the Gloucester Times reported that officials were worried that some girls were getting pregnant deliberately. That is sufficiently serious to warrant community-wide concern; but it was the notion of a “pact” that made this a national story, and that remains unverified.

From the beginning, Kingsbury has strongly suggested in her reporting and in interviews that she knows who at least some of the pact members are, and that they have declined to go public. I hope she’s working on a follow-up.

Still, it has struck me as exceedingly odd that here, in Oprah Nation, not one of these young women would step forward. Let’s not forget, too, that one pregnant 17-year-old Gloucester High student appeared on national television and denied there was any such pact. Rather, she said some of the students became close after they got pregnant, a claim that comports with some inside knowledge I had picked up around the same time.

Time magazine shouldn’t just be given a pass on this.

Hillary Clinton’s very bad campaign

Everybody’s talking about the Atlantic’s piece on how Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign fell apart, so I’ll keep my comments to a minimum.

What mainly struck me was this: In the most important professional undertaking of her life, Clinton surrounded herself with a staff full of miserable, backbiting leeches. And even to the degree that they had any talent, she showed little inclination or ability to manage them.

Given that she ran as the candidate of experience, it’s telling that she wasn’t even close to being ready for prime time.

Photo (cc) by the World Economic Forum and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Necessary but insufficient

Gov. Deval Patrick deserves credit for vetoing an unaffordable pension increase for retired teachers and state workers. The Outraged Liberal calls it “one of the more courageous political acts I’ve seen around here in a long time.”

But the larger issue is that people in the private sector, with rare exceptions, don’t receive pension benefits, and haven’t for some time. There are few things people resent more than paying taxes for employee benefits that go well beyond what are available to them.

It seems pretty obvious that Massachusetts needs to move gradually (but not too gradually) toward an employee-contribution system for current and future state and municipal workers — a 403(b), which is the government/nonprofit equivalent of a 401(k).