One of the first media pieces I ever wrote for The Boston Phoenix, in the mid-1990s, was on the shrinking Statehouse press corps. Among those I interviewed was a young reporter for The Patriot Ledger of Quincy named Carolyn Ryan.
Ryan went on to great success at the Boston Herald, The Boston Globe and The New York Times. She was recently named the Times’ Washington bureau chief, and Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post has written about what to expect. An excerpt:
Ryan … has managed large reporting staffs in New York and Boston and is known inside the paper as a fierce competitor who sets high expectations. Such attributes can benefit the the Times’ Washington operation, which appears to be stepping up efforts against Politico and others in driving the political conversation of the day. Ryan may help ward off the complacency that news outlets long at the top of the media pecking order can sometimes fall prey to.
Quite a rise for Ryan, a hard-working, talented journalist. She deserves this moment, and I have no doubt she’ll make the most of it.
The Boston Globe’s editorial page today endorses a terrible idea: tolls that rise or fall depending on the time of day and the amount of traffic congestion. The editorial describes “variable tolling” as “a technology that keeps traffic manageable by raising prices during busy periods, thus giving drivers an incentive to use the highway at other times.”
Well, I’m fortunate enough to be able to drive off-peak most of the time, so I would be able to take advantage of those low rates. But the vast majority of drivers do not have that luxury.
Far better to improve public transportation so that people have a positive incentive to get out of their cars. Sadly, the transit system gets worse and worse. The carrot is gone, and the stick grows longer.
In today’s Boston Globe, civil-liberties lawyer and friend of Media Nation Harvey Silverglate explains in chilling detail the constitutional underpinnings — or, rather, the absence of such underpinnings — in the 2012 conviction of Al Qaeda sympathizer Tarek Mehanna.
Mehanna’s conviction on charges related almost entirely to his labors as a propagandist and translator led to the first of two Muzzle Awards for U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz. (The second was for her unconscionable crusade against the young Internet visionary Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide while facing prison for downloading academic articles without permission.)
Silverglate and his associate Juliana DeVries write in the Globe that the First Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld Mehanna’s conviction and 17-year prison term on the basis of a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. That decision, Silverglate and DeVries write, “allows federal prosecutors to bring charges for a wide range of expressive activities that supposedly constitute ‘material support’ to terrorists.”
Such a standard would appear to fly in the face of rulings such as the landmark Brandenburg v. Ohio decision of 1969, in which it was held that even vile, hateful calls to violence (the case involved the Ku Klux Klan) were constitutionally protected unless they were likely to result in an immediate conflagration. Silverglate and DeVries put it this way:
With the Humanitarian Law Project decision, the civic life of our free nation took a radical, though under-appreciated, turn for the worse. “Material support” is now a top contender for the American equivalent of the Soviet (now Russian) “hooliganism” statute, a notoriously vague criminal law that enabled the imprisonment of any opponent of dictator Josef Stalin’s regime…. A “material support” charge is a product not of our nation’s legitimate anti-terror concern, but of its overreaction and paranoia.
The Mehanna case was not entirely clear-cut from a legal point of view. He was also convicted of seeking (unsuccessfully) to join Al Qaeda fighters in Yemen and of lying to the FBI. But Ortiz went out of her way to prosecute Mehanna for his expressive activities, and his loathsome rhetoric was given an ample airing before the jury.
Mehanna is no mere Sudbury pharmacist, as his supporters would have you believe. But it is a fact that he is serving a prison term today because he expressed what he was thinking — an activity that is supposed to be protected by the First Amendment under nearly all circumstances.
Several years ago the late Anthony Lewis wrote a wonderful primer on the First Amendment called “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate.” Sadly, that freedom is becoming more and more a part of the past.
Booking photo of Mehanna in 2009 from the Sudbury Police as published at Boston.com.
I give it six months before Lara Logan is hosting a talk show on Fox News and whining that she was done in by liberals. (See this New York Times report.)
The indispensable Boston Business Journal reports that John Henry may be close to selling the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, the “other” newspaper he acquired when he purchased The Boston Globe.
Craig Douglas writes that the T&G may end up in the hands of GateHouse Media, which recently implemented cuts at its two newest Massachusetts properties, the Cape Cod Times and The Standard-Times of New Bedford.
I’d like to think that Henry would sell to local owners if he could find any. The T&G may be a tough acquisition at this point, and GateHouse may be among the few prospective buyers willing to take it on.
My hope is that GateHouse, which is going through a structured bankruptcy aimed at getting $1.2 billion in debt off its back, will prove to be a better steward of the T&G than we’ve come to expect.
GateHouse’s recent move at its weekly papers in Massachusetts — reallocating resources from weaker to stronger papers rather than engaging in out-and-out cuts — offers some reason for optimism.
Update: Henry has what sounds like good news, according to the T&G — no sale before 2014, plus he’s hoping for a local buyer.
Enough about Obamacare, which will be fixed. If you would like to be outraged at our president, there’s enough in this New York Times story to keep you screaming for the rest of the week. Here’s how it begins:
Standing on the marble floor just outside the House chamber, Faisal bin Ali Jaber looked lost in the human river of hard-charging lobbyists, members of Congress and staffers. It is not every day that a victim of American drone strikes travels 7,000 miles to Washington to look for answers.
Now he stood face to face with Representative Adam B. Schiff — a California Democrat who had carved out 20 minutes between two votes on natural gas policy — to tell his story: how he watched in horror last year as drone-fired missiles incinerated his nephew and brother-in-law in a remote Yemeni village.
Neither of the victims was a member of Al Qaeda. In fact, the opposite was true. They were meeting with three Qaeda members in hopes of changing the militants’ views.
Horrible and sickening. Twelve years of war, and what has it gotten us?
Filmmaker Emily Harrold visited Northeastern on Thursday for a screening of “Reporting on The Times,” which explores how The New York Times covered (and didn’t cover) the Holocaust. Her film is based on Northeastern journalism professor Laurel Leff’s book “Buried by The Times.”
Click here for my Storify on the screening and the panel discussion that followed.
There’s big news in the Boston public radio world, as Christopher Lydon returns to the airwaves tonight at 9 with “Radio Open Source,” the radio/podcast interview program he’s been doing for some years now. He’ll be on for an hour every Thursday, with weekend rebroadcasts.
And in a sign that times change, he’ll be doing it on WBUR (90.9 FM), from which he and producer Mary McGrath — who still works with Lydon — memorably departed in 2001. Lydon and McGrath got into a dispute with then-general manager Jane Christo over the ownership of “The Connection,” the show they helmed at the time.
Technically this is more of a ramp-up than a return: Lydon had been appearing regularly on Jim Braude and Margery Eagan’s show, “Boston Public Radio,” on WGBH (89.7 FM). I’m a paid contributor at WGBH, but I think it’s self-evident that the rivalry between the two public radio powerhouses has led to better local programming at both stations.
Here is what I reported for The Boston Phoenix in 2005 as “Open Source” was about to launch at UMass Lowell. (Lydon and company eventually affiliated with the Watson Institute at Brown University.)
Lydon is an on-air legend and McGrath knows how to do terrific radio. Best of luck to both of them.
Photo (cc) 2012 by Mark Fonseca Rendeiro and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Maybe it won’t matter much — the Independent covers nothing outside of New Haven, whereas the Register offers a lot of suburban coverage. Still, this is something to keep an eye on.
Digital First chief executive John Paton has long been a critic of paywalls, as he acknowledges in this blog post. “Let’s be clear, paid digital subscriptions are not a long-term strategy. They don’t transform anything; they tweak. At best, they are a short-term tactic,” he writes, adding: “But it’s a tactic that will help us now.”
Big news out of GateHouse Media today, but what happened isn’t entirely clear. From what I’ve been able to figure out, the struggling company has decided to close or combine some of its weaker weekly papers in Massachusetts and pump additional resources into about 10 stronger ones.
South of Boston, for instance, I’m told that the Norton Mirror will be folded.
And for an example of a combination: the Stoneham Sun, the Reading Advocate and the Wakefield Observer will be grouped. There will still be three separate papers, but most of their pages will be common to all three.
I also hear there will be no layoffs accompanying this particular restructuring, though some job descriptions may change.
GateHouse, based in suburban Rochester, N.Y., publishes about 100 weekly papers in Eastern Massachusetts as well as several dailies.
