Patrick and the press

I’ve been holding my fire on Gov. Deval Patrick’s personal spending spree (with our money) because I’m not sure exactly what to think. I thought the story about his helicopter rides to official events was genuinely stupid, but my ears perked up over his state-funded Cadillac. Since then, we’ve learned that he spent a fortune redecorating his office, and — most egregious, IMHO — has approved a $72,000-a-year chief of staff for his wife, a downtown lawyer.

And it’s not as though all this is obscuring the great news Patrick is making on other fronts. Indeed, as this was unfolding last week, he was quietly floating two ideas to raise taxes. This from a guy who said during his gubernatorial campaign that he had “no plans” for a tax increase. Well, not then, anyway.

I’m still not sure how big a deal any of this is. Faux-populist stories like these are a dime a dozen, and if Patrick’s tastes are more expensive than those of his predecessors, such is life. But his news conference yesterday is another matter. Patrick demonstrated such a just-doesn’t-get-it streak — and not for the first time — that it makes you wonder whether he has the basic political instincts needed to be an effective governor.

Essentially, Patrick apologized, even going so far to say he’d “screwed up”; announced that he would return some of the money; and then undid all the good he might have done by blaming it on the media. (Globe coverage here; Herald coverage here.) By all means, take a look at Jon Keller’s report on WBZ-TV (Channel 4). I also recommend Adrian Walker’s column in today’s Globe, which includes this:

I’m on record as not giving a hoot what the governor gets driven around in. I still think people place too much emphasis on symbols over substance. At the end of the day, a leased Cadillac is a ridiculous barometer to measure Patrick by.

What is troubling, though, is Patrick’s inability to think any problem of his has anything to do with him. If everyone could just be as high-minded, as substantive as he is, everything would be fine.

Over at Patrick headquarters, a.k.a. Blue Mass Group, Charley Blandy wags his finger at the media:

All of the local media geniuses who have smelled blood on the caddy stuff need to get a clue, and start focusing on things that matter. This is page B3 stuff at best. Media outlets aren’t struggling just because of their business model; they’re struggling because they’ve abdicated their vitality and relevance, and become just as focused on gossipy crap like the DeVille, or whether Scott Brown has a potty-mouth, or whatever. [Blandy’s emphasis.]

Blandy also denounces “the obvious racial subtext to all of this: Deval as Pimp.” Well, you know what? I’m not going to say there’s no racial subtext. There always is when you’re talking about an African-American in a position of power. But let’s not get carried away here.

Patrick needs to understand that, yes, he ran a mistake-free campaign for governor, but he also had plenty of luck, beating two extremely weak candidates in the Democratic primary and running virtually unopposed in the general election. For all his smarts and knowledge, he’s still got a lot to learn about politics.

Are the media pushing all this too hard? Probably. Yesterday, though, Patrick had a chance to put this string of stories behind him. He only partly succeeded — at best.

Elsewhere: The Massachusetts Liberal is more impressed with Patrick’s apology than I am. Jay Fitzgerald: “Individually, the various stories don’t push my outrage buttons. Collectively, well, they add up.” And the Herald’s Inside Track has a hilarious account of a dust-up between two reporters for WHDH-TV (Channel 7), Andy Hiller and Sean Hennessey, as they were jockeying for position at Patrick’s news conference.

More: Emily Rooney comes to Patrick’s defense.

I saw the lite

I was at that Los Angeles breakfast meeting in 2000, sitting next to Seth Gitell, when John Edwards was making the non-impression on Massachusetts Democrats that Seth so accurately describes. Based on that encounter, I never would have thought Edwards had much of a future. Actually, I still don’t.

A few days ago, Rick Klein, writing in the Boston Globe, reported that veterans of John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign dispute Edwards’ recent claims that he wanted to get tough on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but that the Kerry people wouldn’t let him. It’s a classic he said/he said, but I believe the Kerry folks. Edwards was a terrible running mate. Even an unexciting choice like Dick Gephardt might have enabled Kerry to win Missouri and, thus, the presidency.

Mind you, I’m not getting into what Edwards said or didn’t say about Israel. I’m just unimpressed with the guy, that’s all.

Merger musings

Satellite radio is transitional technology, which is why I’m not all that concerned about yesterday’s announcement by XM and Sirius that they intend to merge.

In a few years, if federal regulators don’t mess it up, the wireless, ubiquitous, high-speed Internet will be a reality, which means that we’ll no longer be dependent on the likes of Mel Karmazin to bring us audio programming that’s more daring than commercial broadcast radio. It will be like podcasting, except that you’ll be able to get it when you want, where you want — in your car, on your cell phone, whatever.

Besides, news reports of the proposed merger, including this one in the New York Times, make it clear that FCC approval for the XM-Sirius merger is no sure thing.

Still, there’s one aspect to this that bugs me. The reason that an XM-Sirius merger sounds at least mildly attractive is that the two services are technologically incompatible. If you want to listen to Howard Stern on Sirius and Bob Dylan on XM, you don’t just have to pay two bills a month — you also need two separate radios. That’s ridiculous, and I’m sure it explains why there are still only 14 million satellite radio subscribers. (Media Nation subscribes to neither service, choosing instead to scour the Internet for MP3s of Dylan’s “Theme Time Radio Hour.”)

FCC officials can’t know whether satellite competition would work because no one has ever tried it. If XM and Sirius had to go head to head using the same technology, rather than existing in their own separate universes, consumers might benefit even as the two services save costs. That ought to be the direction in which the FCC encourages them to move.

On supporting the troops

There’s a bumper sticker I’ve seen that says, “Support the Troops. Bring Them Home.” I disagree. Even though I opposed the war, I still harbor some hope that Iraq can be more or less stabilized in the next year or two. Chaos will serve no one’s interests except the forces of radical anti-Western Islamism. And the rise of Gen. David Petraeus is cause for at least some optimism.

But do I understand the sentiment behind that bumper sticker? Absolutely. This isn’t hard. The war has been an utter disaster. If you think there’s no hope, well, what better way to support the troops than to make sure no more of them are killed or injured in a futile cause?

So why doesn’t Jeff Jacoby understand that?

Citizen-journalism hype

Vin Crosbie says he’s heard enough about citizen journalism — or at least about the fantastical claims that are sometimes made for it:

It’s hard enough to find a professional journalist who can sit through 52 weeks of zoning board hearings and write intelligently about that, nonetheless finding an amateur who doesn’t have a vested interest or axe to grind and who can sit through and objectively write about those hearings….

[D]on’t get me wrong. I think that technologies via which readers can comment, help report, eyewitness, tip off, and otherwise supplement, amplify, or redirect newspaper coverage are absolutely needed. These are tools that every news organization should begin using (oops, I should have used the politically correct phrase: ‘begin sharing’) with people. I applaud BlufftonToday.com and other well conceived applications of this. And I support my friends who are helping to teach citizen journalism to the few citizens who do want to report.

But citizen journalism is a supplement, not a panacea. Citizen journalism itself isn’t going to reverse the declines in news readership, listernership, and viewership. Not by a longshot.

I agree. Citizen journalism is well worth trying, and could definitely be part of the mix that one day revives the news business. But there is nothing that brings more value to the table than reporting by professional journalists. It’s expensive, and there are no shortcuts.

Anti-Semitism in Portland

The Boston Herald’s Laura Crimaldi reports that the Portland Press Herald published an ad placed by a credit union that’s straight out of the early Nazi era. And this from a newspaper that’s still red-faced over an ad for a sermon by a Baptist minister titled “The only way to destroy the Jewish race.”

Not only did Press Herald publisher Charles Cochrane decline to speak with Crimaldi last night, but there doesn’t seem to be anything on the paper’s Web site by way of apology today, either.

No word on when the Press Herald intends to begin serializing “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Update: An alert Media Nation reader found this. Here’s how it begins:

Leaders of Southern Maine’s Jewish community, executives at the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram and the creators of a newspaper advertisement criticized as anti-Semitic met this morning at the paper’s Portland headquarters and issued a joint statement about the controversy.

The statement said that the ad in Wednesday’s newspaper developed by PeoplesChoice Credit Union and a Freeport marketing firm was not intentionally anti-Semitic but it’s [sic] portrayal of a bearded “Fee Bandit” eager to collect fees from bank customers “perpetuates a negative stereotype that has been used to defame Jews for centuries.”

Not to parse this too finely, folks, but the reason the ad was “criticized as anti-Semitic” was because it was, well, anti-Semitic.

The taxman cometh

Media Nation, Sept. 20:

Is [Deval] Patrick a tax-and-spend liberal? That’s not my impression. But the notion that he and the Democratic-controlled Legislature might go on a spending spree and then have to find a way to pay for it is not unreasonable.

The Boston Phoenix, Sept. 21:

You [Patrick] need to make it clear that you won’t raise taxes. You need to take the pledge.

Media Nation, Nov. 8:

His [Patrick’s] repeated assertion that he has “no plan to raise taxes” is a classic example of keeping your options open.

Joan Vennochi, the Boston Globe, Jan. 11:

Patrick attributes the hedging [on property-tax relief and 1,000 new police officers] to tighter than expected budget considerations. However, the fiscal writing was on the wall, not to mention the front page of this newspaper, long before he won election last November.

“The budget right now is very precariously balanced,” Noah Berger, executive director of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, a liberal think tank, warned in an article published on Sept. 16. “Any proposal to cut taxes or increase spending should acknowledge that they’ll likely require other tradeoffs.”

The Boston Globe, Feb. 16:

Two senior Patrick officials said that the administration is looking seriously at a wide range of corporate tax changes to help close what is now projected to be a $1.3 billion budget gap for the coming fiscal year, which begins July 1. One of the officials said that the tax changes could raise between $350 million and $400 million annually.

The Boston Globe, Feb. 16:

Governor Deval Patrick’s plan to help cities and towns ran into immediate resistance in the Legislature yesterday, with the House speaker characterizing portions of it as “absolutely” tantamount to raising taxes and cautioning that it would not benefit all communities equally.

The Boston Herald, Feb. 16:

It’s difficult to grasp how new local taxes could possibly translate into local tax relief. The most we can say about Gov. Deval Patrick’s package of municipal reforms released yesterday is that we won’t be shocked when property taxes don’t exactly plummet next year.

Kerry Healey must be wishing she’d actually run for governor instead of doing whatever the heck it was she thought she was doing last fall.