The editorial pages of the three national newspapers are calling on President Biden to end his re-election campaign or to strongly consider it. The most forthright of the three is the liberal New York Times, which argues that Biden’s disastrous debate performance on Thursday shows that he’s no longer the strongest candidate to stop the threat (free link) that Donald Trump poses to democracy should Trump win election this November:
As it stands, the president is engaged in a reckless gamble. There are Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency. There is no reason for the party to risk the stability and security of the country by forcing voters to choose between Mr. Trump’s deficiencies and those of Mr. Biden. It’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.
The Times does say that it will endorse Biden if he persists with his candidacy: “If the race comes down to a choice between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, the sitting president would be this board’s unequivocal pick.”
The Washington Post, more centrist than the Times but just as anti-Trump, begins its editorial (free link):
If President Biden had weekend plans, he should cancel them in favor of some soul-searching. His calamitous debate performance on Thursday raises legitimate questions about whether he’s up for another four years in the world’s toughest job. It’s incumbent on this incumbent to determine, in conversation with family and aides, whether continuing to seek reelection is in the best interests of the country.
Unlike the Times and the Post, the right-wing editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is more concerned that an enfeebled Biden might actually win (free link) and prove that he’s not up to a second term:
Well, that was painful — for the United States. President Biden’s halting, stumbling debate performance Thursday night showed all too clearly that he isn’t up to serving four more years in office. For the good of the country, more even than their party, Democrats have some hard thinking to do about whether they need to replace him at the top of their ticket.
Closer to home, The Boston Globe has not weighed in. But three of its columnists have. Adrian Walker, Scot Lehigh and Brian McGrory all write that the time has come for Biden to step aside in favor of a Democrat who might stand a better chance of beating Trump. Walker has the line of the day in describing the president’s excruciating debate performance: “Biden was not merely bad. He was bad in a way people running for president are never bad.”
Biden could have pulled out a year or two ago but chose not to. The argument in favor of his staying in the race is that the chaos that would be unleashed by throwing the nomination to an open Democratic convention would be a greater risk than keeping him at the head of the ticket. Now it seems likely that the greater risk is to stick with Biden, a good and decent man and a successful president who just may not be up to the task of stopping the authoritarian menace that looms this fall.
I just finished listening to the 10th episode of the podcast “Murder in Boston,” produced by The Boston Globe and HBO, which revisits the infamous 1989 Charles Stuart case. The podcast and the Globe series had concluded, but Globe columnist Adrian Walker, who narrates the podcast, explains that the decision was made to release one more episode after Mayor Michelle Wu publicly apologized to the Black community for the city’s and the police department’s racist response. And here’s a good overview of the Globe’s reporting by Sarah Scire of Nieman Lab. Both are well worth your time.
It’s time once again to take a look at the state of Media Nation and share the most-read posts of the past year. It’s a little complicated this year — in late July, I moved the blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, and the numbers for January through July look different when compared to August through December. It seems to be an apples-and-oranges problem, but I can’t put my finger on it. Given that, I’m going to list the top five for the first seven months and the top five for the last five months. Presumably it will be easier to figure it out next year.
January-July 2023
1. Andrea Estes has left the Globe following an error-riddled story about the MBTA (May 4). One of The Boston Globe’s top investigative reporters was fired after the paper erroneously reported that three top managers at the MBTA were living in distant locations when in fact they were in the Boston area. Six others really were working remotely. The Globe has still not disclosed what went wrong, and, by fall, Estes was working at the Plymouth Independent, a well-funded nonprofit with some prominent Globe alumni.
2. Liz Cheney for speaker(Jan. 3). With the dysfunctional House Republicans unable to agree on a speaker, I suggested that a bipartisan coalition turn to Cheney, a hard-right conservative who had nevertheless endeared herself to some Democrats with her service on the House committee that investigated the role played by Donald Trump and others in the failed insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021.
3. An ombudsman could have explained what went wrong with the Globe’s MBTA story(April 28). Following a lengthy correction to Andrea Estes’ story about the MBTA, I urged that the Globe, as well as other news organizations, bring back the ombudsman’s position, something that nearly all news organizations had abandoned over the past 10 years. Sometimes called the public editor, the ombudsman’s role is to act as a reader advocate and look into problems with coverage, standards, tone and other matters.
5.Why the Internet Archive’s copyright battle is likely to come to a very bad end(March 21). We all love the Internet Archive. In my view, though, it’s heading down a very bad road, claiming the right to copy and lend books without first reaching a licensing agreement with the publishers, as every other library does. Early indications were that the courts would not look kindly upon the Archive’s arguments, and I doubt that’s going to change. There are many negative observations I could make about copyright law, but it is the law.
August-December 2023
1. The late Matthew Stuart’s lawyer blasts the Globe(Dec. 6). After The Boston Globe published its massive overview of the 1989 Carol Stuart case, Nancy Gertner, who had been the late Matthew Stuart’s lawyer, took to GBH Radio (89.7 FM) and blasted the Globe for suggesting that Matthew may have been directly involved in fatal shooting Carol Stuart, the wounding of her husband, Charles Stuart, or both. (A brief synopsis: Charles Stuart, who had planned the murder, blamed the shootings on “a Black man,” turning the city upside-down for weeks, and then finally jumped to his death off the Tobin Bridge as police were moving in.) Several days after Gertner’s remarks, Globe columnist Adrian Walker, who worked closely on the project and narrated the accompanying podcast, appeared on GBH to defend the Globe’s reporting and assert that the paper did not draw any conclusions about Matthew Stuart’s role.
2. The Globe announces expanded regional coverage of Greater Boston(Sept. 6). The Boston Globe is among a tiny handful of regional newspapers that are growing and hiring — and the paper took another step in September by announcing more coverage in Cambridge, Somerville and the suburbs. The Globe already has bureaus in Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Good news all around, although it’s no substitute for detailed coverage of local government, schools, development and the like. Some communities are now being well-covered by startup news outlets, most of them nonprofit; others, though, have little or nothing.
3. A devastating portrayal of Elon Musk raises serious questions about capitalism run amok(Aug. 23). The world’s richest person was unavoidable in 2023, mainly for his destruction of Twitter, the plaything he bought the previous fall. Ronan Farrow, writing in The New Yorker, took a deep dive into Musk’s life and career, describing him as an out-of-control egomaniac with scant regard for safety at SpaceX and Tesla, his grandiosity fed by what may be his overindulgence in ketamine. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk got more attention, but Farrow delivered the goods.
4. More evidence that Woodrow Wilson was among our very worst presidents(Oct. 9, 2022). Why this post from 2022 popped up is a mystery to me, but it’s nevertheless heartening to see that Wilson’s reputation continues to disintegrate. I shared a New York Times review of a Wilson biography by Adam Hochschild. The reviewer, Thomas Meaney, wrote that the book deals mainly with Wilson’s “terror campaign against American radicals, dissidents, immigrants and workers makes the McCarthyism of the 1950s look almost subtle by comparison.” And lets not forget that Wilson was also a vicious racist.
5. Nobel winner weighs in on a shocking police raid against a newspaper: ‘It’s happening to you now’(Aug. 12). One of several posts I wrote about a police raid of the offices of the Marion County Record in rural Kansas as well as the homes of the publisher and a city official. Publisher Eric Meyer’s mother, Joan Meyer, still involved in the paper at the age of 97, died the next day, apparently because of stress. “It’s happening to you now,” said Maria Ressa, the Filipino journalist who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her courageous resistance to her own country’s authoritarian regime. The ostensible reason for the police department’s thug-like action involved supposedly confidential driver’s records belong to a local restaurateur; more likely, it involved the paper’s investigation of Police Chief Gideon Cody’s alleged misconduct at his previous job. Two months after the raid, Cody resigned.
This might be my final post of 2023. Thank you, as always, for reading. And I wish all of you health and happiness in the year ahead.
Earlier this week I finished listening to the nine-part podcast that accompanies The Boston Globe’s series on the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart and her unborn child, Christopher Stuart. The last two episodes of the podcast were the most interesting from a media standpoint.
Episode 8 covers much of the same ground that’s explored in the epilogue, thought it’s more expansive. In episode 9, Globe columnist Adrian Walker, who narrates the series, talks about the dilemma posed by Joey Bennett’s demand that his family be paid for being interviewed about how their lives were upended by suspicions that Joey’s uncle Willie Bennett was the killer. In fact, the murderer was Carol’s husband, Charles, perhaps with the assistance of an accomplice. As Walker explains, the Globe is bound by ethical rules that forbid paying sources — but HBO, which co-produced the podcast as well as a documentary TV series, paid the Bennetts a licensing fee. Walker explains:
HBO says it is part of a standard archive licensing agreement for the use of family photos and audio materials and that the arrangement is in line with industry practices. That agreement includes a confidentiality clause.
This is a world my Globe colleagues and I don’t inhabit. We can talk about the ideals of truth and justice but our sources can’t use that to pay the rent. All told, this is an ethical dilemma that sits at the very heart of journalism today.
I don’t have all the answers. In this podcast, we used audio of Jason’s interview with Joey. It’s a great interview — it’s good tape. All we can do is be transparent.
Walker is referring to Jason Hehir, whose company, Little Room Productions, produced the film for HBO.
I also want to bring up something that I wrote recently about the series. There is no question that racism within the police department, the media and the city at large was a major contributing factor in Charles Stuart’s getting away with his crime for as long as he did, finally jumping off the Tobin Bridge to his death as the police were closing in. And yes, there were a number of observers even at the time who believed Chuck was the real killer, especially within the Black community. We all need to wrestle with the legacy of that racism.
And yet there is the fact that Charles Stuart’s own gunshot wound nearly killed him, and that the trauma surgeon who operated on Chuck was convinced he couldn’t have shot himself. Surely that had a lot to do with Chuck’s nearly getting away with it. That doesn’t excuse the police for embarking on what was essentially a wilding spree in Mission Hill as they targeted one Black man after another in an attempt to identify a suspect. Nor does it excuse the media for abandoning any pretense of skepticism. But the specific details of Charles Stuart’s wounds shouldn’t be overlooked, either.
Greg Moore: “In retrospect, I don’t trust anything or anybody.” Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
The Boston Globe, as promised, has published anepilogueto itsserieson the Carol and Charles Stuart case that takes on “the media’s sins.” That reckoning takes the form of a commentary by columnist Adrian Walker, one of four reporters on the project and the narrator of podcast version. Super-brief recap: In October 1989, Charles Stuart, a white man from the suburbs, murdered his pregnant wife in Mission Hill and was seriously injured himself. He blamed it all on a “Black man” and jumped to his death from the Tobin Bridge several months later while the police were closing in.
Not surprisingly, a good chunk of Walker’s piece focuses on former Globe columnist Mike Barnicle, who wrote several racist columns as well as a news story that turned out to be false about an insurance scheme Charles Stuart had supposedly concocted. As Walker observes, Barnicle was fixated on trashing the lead suspect in the case, William Bennett, even after Bennett had been exonerated following Stuart’s fatal jump. I quoted fromone of those columns last week, and Walker cites another in which Barnicle made much of Bennett’s seventh-grade report card. Barnicle wrote of Bennett:
The man’s pathetic, violent history is so much a part of the unyielding issues of race, crime and drugs tearing daily at America that it is amazing how any black minister or black politician could ever stand up and howl in public that his arrest was a product of police bigotry and a volley of discrimination aimed at all black residents of Boston.
Remember, this was published after Bennett had been cleared. But as Walker writes, Barnicle was carrying water for the Boston Police, including his brother, the late Paul Barnicle, a homicide detective. Barnicle, not surprisingly, refused to give a substantive interview to the Globe.
We also hear quite a bit from Renée Graham, who, like Walker, was a young reporter at the Globe in 1989 and is now a columnist. The perspective of two Black journalists, Walker and Graham, is fascinating, especially since Walker believes the city’s media coverage of race has improved more (but not enough) than Graham does. “I don’t know that journalism has gotten better since the Stuart case,” Graham said. “You know, I think that the media still is attracted to heat, not light. Like you always say, this is what changed everything. But it didn’t change anything. I mean, look, they couldn’t even write a damn correction, a change, nothing.”
Also quoted is Greg Moore, who at the time was the Globe’s assistant managing editor for local news, later rose to become managing editor (No. 3 in the hierarchy), and still later became the top editor at The Denver Post — the most prominent Black editor in the country until Dean Baquet became executive editor of The New York Times. “In retrospect, I don’t trust anything or anybody,” Moore told the Globe. “You know, if somebody tells me something like that, I want to know exactly, what is that based on? And again, I think that’s another legacy of Stuart, at least for me.”
What struck me more than anything in reading the series was the disproportionate amount of attention given to the murder at a time when people of color were meeting the same fate on a regular basis. Indeed, Walker revisits a story that then-Globe reporter Eileen McNamara wrote explicitly to draw that contrast. As McNamara wrote: “James Moody, 29, was shot to death only a few hours after a robber attacked Carol and Charles Stuart outside Brigham & Women’s Hospital Monday night. But no calls were heard at the State House for tougher sentencing practices.”
Like the Stuarts, I’m white and I live in the suburbs, so I have no direct experience with the racism that people of color continue to experience every day. It seemsbetter, and I guess it is. If an incident similar to the murder of Carol Stuart happened today, I think the police and the media would be much quicker to ask questions about the husband’s role. And yet I’m sure that such incident would still draw outsize attention. Look at how quickly the Black Lives Matter movement that reignited after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor curdled into renewed fears of crime, even though statistics showed that there had been very little in the way of an upsurge.
Let’s give the last word to Walker: “For a time, the case sparked an unusual spate of self-examination in the press. But the questions it raised — about how to cover communities of color and about whose stories are valued — were never resolved and resonate to this day.”
Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker pushed back Friday at Nancy Gertner, the lawyer who represented the late Matthew Stuart and who appeared on GBH Radio (89.7 FM) on Wednesday. Gertner blasted the Globe for suggesting that her client may have been directly involved in the shootings that claimed the life of Matthew’s sister-in-law Carol Stuart and that severely wounded his brother Charles Stuart. The Globe recently published an in-depth overview of the 34-year-old case, a maelstrom of racism and malfeasance by the Boston Police and the media.
Walker, one of a team of four reporters and numerous other Globe journalists who worked on the series, told “Boston Public Radio” hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagan that, essentially, the Globe stands behind its reporting.
“Nancy Gertner talked to us at least five times over 20 months in the course of reporting this story. And her point of view is fully represented in the written story. And in the podcast,” Walker said. He added:
There have always been questions, completely legitimate and valid questions, despite what Gertner says, about Matthew’s role in this and whether it was more extensive than we’ve been led to believe. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong — in fact, we firmly stand by raising those questions. And it’s important to say that we don’t draw any conclusions.
You can listen to the interview with Walker by clicking here; his conversation with Eagan and Braude starts a little after the 50:00 mark and lasts about 19 minutes, although the exchange about Gertner is very brief.
The Boston Globe’s multimedia series on Charles and Carol Stuart, “Nightmare in Mission Hill,” is good and important work. Everyone who wants to understand Boston and its racist past (and present) should read it. Especially impressive is the layered approach: a deeply reported text-based story, audio clips, a podcast, a documentary film, photos, front pages and documents.
Going into it, I wondered what I could possibly learn given how much those of us who were here were immersed in the tragedy at the time. If you’re new to Boston, the Stuarts were a white couple from the suburbs who, in October 1989, were shot while they were driving home from a childbirth class at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Carol Stuart and her unborn child died; Charles Stuart lived and told police they had been shot by a Black man. The city’s Black neighborhoods were turned upside down until, finally, law enforcement identified a career criminal named William Bennett as the likely shooter. But they later came to believe that the actual shooter was Charles Stuart himself and, with the police likely to arrest him at any moment, he jumped off the Tobin Bridge to his death.
The case was one of the most notorious crimes in Boston history, up there with the Boston Strangler and Sacco and Vanzetti. And you might wonder why investigators didn’t alight on the most obvious suspect, Charles Stuart, right from the start. The series answers that question. First, the trauma surgeon who operated on Charles determined that he couldn’t have shot himself given the angle of the bullet’s entry; and second, he nearly died from his wounds.
Given that 34 years have passed, it was hard for me to sort out what I learned from the series and what I might have known at one time but had forgotten. So I appreciate the Globe’s laying out its new findings in the eighth and final part. Among the revelations:
Police ignored evidence implicating Charles Stuart and sidelined two detectives who’d suspected him from the earliest days of their investigation.
The Stuarts and people around them couldn’t keep their mouths shut. By the time Charles Stuart finally jumped, more than 30 people knew that he had put together the plot himself. Yet the secret, such as it was, held, and at least two attempts to blow the whistle on Charles went nowhere.
Matthew Stuart, Charles’ brother, may have been more than an innocent dupe, as he had always been portrayed. The Globe found that “evidence points to Chuck’s brother, Matthew, playing a much larger role in the shooting than previously known, running counter to his claims he was tricked into helping get rid of the murder weapon.”
The series is not perfect. Matthew Stuart’s 2011 death from an overdose is relegated to a separate timeline, which a lot of readers aren’t going to see. More significant is that the Globe makes little effort to deal with the media’s shortcomings and failures. Certainly the media couldn’t solve the crime independently, and the severity of Charles Stuart’s wounds served to insulate him from closer scrutiny. Still, the press at that time, rather than serving as an independent monitor of power, went along for the ride.
I see that there’s an epilogue coming soon called “Media Sins.” I’ll be reading that closely. But even at the time it was clear that the media had failed in several ways, as Alex S. Jones detailed in The New York Times (free link) several weeks after Charles Stuart’s death. Jones’ explosive lead: “The tangled Stuart murder case has been a near-obsession for this city’s news organizations for the past three months, but the character and tone of their reporting coverage have prompted charges that the press has been racist, incompetent and reckless.”
Jones took on the Globe and the Boston Herald, then a much more robust daily paper than it is today, for running with anonymously sourced tips that didn’t pan out, such as a Globe report that Stuart had plotted his wife’s death as part of an insurance scheme so that he could start a restaurant and a Herald story that Stuart had been treated for cocaine addiction. Jones also wrote:
Critics have also said that the city’s news organizations allowed themselves to be manipulated by law enforcement agencies. For instance, during the investigation, two black men were identified at different times in news reports by anonymous police sources as the “primary suspect,” though there was no direct evidence against either one. Critics say this is a tactic investigators sometimes use to advertise for evidence.
Even after William Bennett’s exoneration following Charles Stuart’s death, then-Globe columnist Mike Barnicle wrote a column (available in databases but not on the open web) defending the police and blasting leaders in the Black community who were attempting to shine a light on the racism that undergirded much of the police response.
“Naturally, a pack of publicity hounds within the black community — a few ministers and headline-hunting politicians now passing themselves off as skilled homicide investigators — jumped on Bennett’s arrest as proof of a racist plot by the white power structure to make every black man, woman and child in Boston out as ruthless, bloodthirsty criminals,” Barnicle wrote in a column that appeared on Jan. 9, 1990, five days after Charles Stuart’s fatal jump. He added: “I guess they are upset because nobody thought to beat the truth out of Stuart that night in the hospital after he had shot and very nearly killed himself.”
As I said, I’m interested to see how the epilogue deals with this and other media failures.
“Nightmare in Mission Hill” is a tremendous contribution to Boston’s attempts to come to terms with its well-deserved racist reputation. The team that put this together deserve a lot of credit — including but not limited to reporters Adrian Walker, Evan Allen (the lead writer), Elizabeth Koh and Andrew Ryan. I just signed up for the newsletter, I look forward to dipping into the podcast, and I hope that the series serves to advance the ongoing conversation about how Boston can work toward becoming a better, more inclusive home for all of us.
Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker has been promoted to associate editor, according to an email sent to the staff by editor Brian McGrory, managing editor Jennifer Peter and managing editor for digital Jason Tuohey. I obtained a copy of the email from a trusted source a little while ago.
Walker, a longtime state and local government reporter and editor, has been a columnist since 1998, when the Globe’s star metro columnists, Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith, were forced out after they were caught fabricating and, in Barnicle’s case, plagiarizing as well. (McGrory himself was the other reporter who became a columnist at that time.)
As one of the more prominent Black journalists at the Globe, Walker’s increased clout should help with ongoing efforts to diversify the newsroom.
Walker has brought a reporter’s sensibility to his column, deftly combining news and opinion. According to the memo, he’ll continue to write his column. The full memo follows:
We’re delighted to share the news that Adrian Walker will ascend to the role of associate editor at the Globe.
Adrian is obviously an enduring voice in this community, having helmed a metro column for 22 years and running. More importantly, he’s a vital voice. Few columnists face the test of time with the spectacular success of Adrian. These days, he is at the peak of his relevance, with deeply reported pieces that time and again offer an authoritative look at what was, what is, and what needs to be. He knows Boston like few others — the people, the places, the problems, the possibilities. And he is at once logical, unpredictable, and fearless in his approach. When Adrian speaks, people listen. Before he speaks, they await his thoughts.
Same goes for inside the Globe. Adrian has been a valuable source of counsel to many staffers, including us, ever since he arrived here from Miami in 1989. He’s covered City Hall and the State House, served as a deputy political editor, written about four different Boston mayors and six governors, and was, of course, a key part of the Pulitzer-finalist team on the race project in 2017. He’s been a thoughtful colleague and an important mentor to hundreds of people over the years.
We look forward to many more columns from Adrian, with an even broader impact within our newsroom.
There’s a context for the racial taunts directed at Orioles centerfielder Adam Jones at Fenway Park during Monday night’s game. After all, we had just learned that a Trump supporter from Winchester, one of the wealthiest communities in the state, had written a letter to his community weekly complaining about those “Hate Has No Home Here” signs that have popped up here and there (including in front of our house).
“It is offensive to imply that the rest of us — who don’t have a sign and who don’t think the way you think we should — are haters,” wrote John Natale in the Winchester Star. “That’s insulting.” It was a breathtaking display of cluelessness and insensitivity. And we never would have heard about it if a seventh-grader’s righteous response hadn’t gone viral.
There has been an enormous amount of commentary about the Fenway Park incident in the past few days. Here are three you ought to take a look at.
In The Boston Globe (owned by Red Sox principal owner John Henry), columnist Adrian Walker wonders why more steps haven’t been taken to curb racist fans. “Bad behavior can be stopped,” writes Walker. Indeed. As we have been reminded, Boston is one of the most inhospitable cities in the country for visiting black players. It’s disgusting. I’m glad that fans gave Jones a standing ovation Tuesday night, but it shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place.
In the Boston Herald, sports columnist Steve Buckley gives Red Sox president Sam Kennedy high marks for acting decisively but criticizes him for blaming the problem on “an ignorant few.” Buckley’s response: “Every time the ignorant few do their handiwork, another episode of ‘Boston is a Racist City’ gets played out on the national stage.” It may be an ignorant few who drunkenly spew the N-word in public, but something is making them feel empowered to do it.
At WBZ Radio (1030 AM), Jon Keller draws a distinction between “real Bostonians” and “fake Bostonians.” The trouble is, though real Bostonians would never engage in racist taunting, they’re not doing enough to stop it, either. Says Keller: “Time for the real Bostonians to do more to see to it that the fakers are exposed, isolated and shamed.”
Tom Yawkey and his wife, Jean, at Fenway Park in the 1930s. Photo (cc) by the Boston Public Library
Excellent column by noted baseball fan Adrian Walker in today’s Boston Globe on the racism of the late Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey. Somewhere in the mists of my memory I seem to recall that when the Sox finally did sign their first black ballplayer, Pumpsie Green, Yawkey’s reaction was: “They really do have funny names, don’t they?”
Walker suggests that both Yawkey Way and the MBTA’s Yawkey Station be named for Ted Williams, who not only was “racially enlightened,” as Walker writes, but was also perhaps the greatest Latino player in major-league history.
Sounds like a good idea to me. But as an alternative, why not rename Yawkey Way for Williams and the T station for Jim Rice, a Hall of Famer and an African-American? Rice was the team’s best player at a time when Boston was considered the most racist city in America. Yet, incredibly, he was often criticized around here for his all-business demeanor and his frosty relations with the media.
Earlier this week I finished listening to the 
