Tag: Boston Globe

What’s bugging Tim Cahill

State Treasurer Tim Cahill is very upset that U.S. Customs agents harassed his family when they flew home from Italy recently because one of his daughters was found carrying peaches (Globe story here; Herald story here). “As a citizen who cares about security, I think that the time needs to be spent better and maybe on less serious issues than peaches,” Cahill is quoted as saying.

Both papers report having made unsuccessful attempts to get government officials to comment (the Globe’s Andrea Estes appears to have tried quite a bit harder than the Herald’s Dave Wedge), and then leave it at that. But about three seconds of Googling would have revealed what their intuition should have told them in the first place — that fruit can carry non-native insects and other nasties that could wreak havoc if they get loose in the United States.

Here’s part of a press release on a food-sniffing dog that works for the Houston Airport system:

During their training, these canines are taught to alert their human counterparts when they sniff five primary odors: apple, citrus, mango, pork and beef. Plants and flowers are also at the top of the dogs’ target items list.

These target items are foreign to the United States and may contain certain diseases and insects that are not currently present in the country. The function of CBP [Customs and Border Protection] is to prevent these potentially dangerous items from entering the country and, by the same token, to prevent foreign items from the U.S. entering other countries.

Meats can carry livestock diseases, such as swine fever and mad cow disease that can kill American livestock. Fruits and vegetables, on the other hand, can carry insects or diseases, such as the Mediterranean fruit fly or citrus canker, which can wipe out hundreds of acres of the U.S.’s agriculture.

Or maybe we could review how Dutch elm disease, spread by bark beetles, came to wipe out the graceful elm trees that used to line the streets of Boston and other American cities. According to this Wikipedia entry (corroborated by the Encyclopedia Britannica):

The disease was first reported in the United States in 1928, with the beetles believed to have arrived in a shipment of logs from the Netherlands destined for the Ohio furniture industry. The disease spread slowly from New England westward and southward, almost completely destroying the famous Elms in the “Elm City” of New Haven, reaching the Detroit area in 1950, the Chicago area by 1960, and Minneapolis by 1970.

Maybe the agents who stopped the Cahills acted unprofessionally and didn’t bother to explain themselves. Maybe they were unnecessarily rude, the default mode for too many government officials with a little bit of power. But certainly they had a legitimate reason to confiscate the peaches. Too bad the papers didn’t make more of an attempt to find out why.

Even better: Steve finds the notice at left on the Customs Web site. It begins: “We regret that it is necessary to take agricultural items from your baggage. They cannot be brought into the United States because they may carry animal and plant pests and diseases. Restricted items include meats, fruits, vegetables, plants, soil, and products made from animal or plant materials.”

Teasing the Globe

Joe Keohane, Jeff Keating and Adam Reilly are all quite taken with the Boston Globe‘s new “In the news” front-page teasers, which run the length of the left-hand column. Joe even goes so far as to call the feature “a web-influenced sidebar.”

Well, pardon me, but there’s nothing even remotely new about what the Globe is doing. Certainly it’s no different from the “Newsline” column that appears on the front of USA Today (left). The Boston Herald ran similar teasers following its sparkling 1999 redesign, but gave them up after its New York Post-ification a few years later. (Unfortunately, Ron Reason, the consultant who oversaw the redesign, has removed the sample Herald fronts from his Web site.)

That’s not to say the Globe teasers aren’t a good idea. They are. They’re also intriguing from a strategic point of view. The vast majority of Globes are sold via home delivery, but there’s no need to flog the inside content for customers who are retrieving the paper from their front porches.

The teasers say that Globe executives have decided there’s circulation to be gained by persuading more people to buy a copy on their way to work. But aren’t these the same people who are reading the Globe online, for free, once they get to work?

That’s the 50-cents-per-copy question.

Menino’s and/or the Globe’s faux pas

Sharp-eyed Media Nation reader R.S. passes this along, from Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker’s piece on the fire in West Roxbury that claimed the lives of two firefighters:

“They always put their needs before our own,” Mayor Thomas M. Menino said at a press conference. “But it doesn’t make it any easier to deal with the tragedy.”

R.S.’s take: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Menino said it, but Walker and the Globe copy editors thought it was OK???”

Not OK.

Saturday afternoon update: Given the amount of interest sparked by this item, I went searching for video of Menino speaking. No luck so far. For what it’s worth, the city’s official Web site has Menino saying that “they always put our needs before their own.”

A teaching moment (II)

Today’s Globe editorial on lagging test scores among minority teaching candidates takes a sensible approach:

Inadequate preparation, not cultural bias, is the most likely explanation for the high failure rate among black and Hispanic candidates. Similar to the achievement gap problem between white and minority students, a solution requires educators to target the academic deficiencies of prospective teachers and provide them with remedial support.

No talk of doing away with the test, which was one of the subthemes of the Globe’s Sunday story. Good.

A teaching moment

This, from the top story in today’s Boston Globe, is a very strange lede:

More than half the black and Hispanic applicants for teaching jobs in Massachusetts fail a state licensing exam, a trend that has created a major obstacle to greater diversity among public school faculty and stirred controversy over the fairness of the test.

Are diversity and fairness really the first things we ought to think about when we encounter such information? No, I didn’t think so.

Monday morning quarterbacking: An anonymous commenter thinks I’m being unfair to the Globe because the news hook was, in fact, a state investigation into why minority teaching candidates are faring so poorly on the test. A fair point, but in the main I disagree. In this case, the Globe shouldn’t have bought into the state’s notion of what’s newsworthy.

What’s news is that many teaching applicants are failing a basic state licensing test — and that, in the case of black and Latino applicants, at least some advocates are saying we should do away with the test. If all the questions are as easy as the two examples offered by the Globe, then blaming the test is ludicrous.

You go first, Mr. Cohen

Don’t you feel completely reassured now that the state has told us the feds are wrong about the Zakim Bridge‘s being on the verge of collapse?

OK, I exaggerate — but not by nearly as much, I suspect, as state transportation secretary Bernard Cohen was when he told the Globe’s Scott Allen, “It is not a safety issue, but rather a defect associated with the installation.”

Of course, the loose bolts in the tunnel were not a safety issue unless you happened to be driving through it when one of them let go.

This is exactly the kind of story that can have a far bigger impact now, following the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis, than it normally would. Bridge- and road-safety stories can have a quality of abstractness to them unless readers have a clear picture in their minds of people plunging to their death.

I assume — I hope — that the Globe is going to keep hammering away at this. No doubt Cohen and his boss, Gov. Deval Patrick, are freaking out at the prospect of another multizillion-dollar repair job. But people will have to understand that it wasn’t the Patrick administration who oversaw this shoddy project, and that it’s worth any price to prevent what happened in Minneapolis from happening here.

Yesterday, the Outraged Liberal argued for a higher gas tax instead of an increase in tolls. Unfortunately, we may need both. As well as lawsuits against the responsible contractors from here to eternity.

Photo of Zakim Bridge (cc) by Ron’s Log. Some rights reserved.

Darkness falls

Ugh. I’ve already made my thoughts known about Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, both here and in the Guardian. So I’ve really got nothing new to say now that he’s finally pulled it off. (Indeed, this has gone on so long that opinion-slingers like me have run through our ammo two or three times already.) But the Journal is well on its way from being a great, independent paper to a very good paper with a grasping, interfering owner.

I love Eric Alterman’s take in The Nation. Alterman argues that because the Journal’s news pages will be seen as less serious under Murdoch, so will its nutty right-wing editorial page. Alterman writes:

The silver lining of this takeover is that when Murdoch destroys the credibility of the Journal — as he must if it is to fit in with his business plan — he will be removing the primary pillar of the editorial page’s influence as well. In this regard his ownership is a kind of poisoned chalice.

Locally, meanwhile, let the outsourcing (and selling?) begin. Last week, the Globe’s Steve Bailey reported that Herald publisher Pat Purcell — who bought the Herald from Murdoch, his old mentor, in 1994 — would look to strike a deal for the Herald to be printed at a Dow Jones-owned plant in Chicopee should the Murdoch deal succeed. (Dow Jones is the Journal’s parent company.) Purcell confirmed his interest in a Herald story two days later the same day.

The Herald’s current property, next to the Southeast Expressway, is worth far more than its crumbling plant. A printing deal would presumably enable Purcell to sell the property and reduce his costs by vast sums, and might even ensure the long-term financial health of his paper.

Today the Globe reports that the Globe itself is in negotiations to print the Patriot Ledger of Quincy and the Enterprise of Brockton.

Now, follow the bouncing newspaper owners:

  • The Globe, of course, is owned by the New York Times Co., and Murdoch’s Journal is likely to emerge as the Times’ principal competitor nationally. If the Globe’s main print rival, the Herald, is getting help from Murdoch — well, I have no idea what to say except that it’s interesting.
  • Dow Jones, Purcell’s possible savior, owns several community dailies in the area through its Ottaway division, including the Standard-Times of New Bedford, the Cape Cod Times and the Portsmouth Herald. The Patriot Ledger and the Enterprise are owned by GateHouse Media, which also owns about 100 papers, mostly weeklies, in Eastern Massachusetts. So there’s an additional rivalry.
  • Except that Murdoch might sell off his community papers, which don’t seem to fit any grand strategy. And the most likely buyer would be GateHouse. Does it matter that James Ottaway positioned himself as Murdoch’s not-so-mortal enemy? Damned if I know.
  • Which would leave Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. (CNHI), better known as the Alabama state teachers’ pension fund, isolated and alone on the North Shore and in the Merrimack Valley. CNHI owns the Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, the Salem News, the Gloucester Daily Times and the Daily News of Newburyport. And guess what? Michael Reed, chief executive of GateHouse, used to be chief executive of CNHI.

Murdoch’s victory could be just the beginning for local newspaper readers.

Oh, my. Jim Cramer, the screaming loon of CNBC, hopes Murdoch will push the Journal so that it finally matches the relevance of, yes, the New York Post business pages. By the way, the Post’s business coverage is quite good. But come on.

Those golden days of last Thursday

Today’s Globe editorial on Middleborough keeps the string alive — there’s no mention of the second vote, to reject the casino itself. But if you look back to those golden days of, oh, last Thursday, you’ll see that at least one Globe reporter thought the second vote was very important indeed.

In a preview of the Middleborough town meeting for Globe South, Christine Wallgren wrote:

The first of the two ballot items authorizes selectmen to enter into an already-negotiated agreement with the Mashpee Wampanoag and their backers to build a casino complex.

The second item — placed on the warrant by the casino opposition — asks voters whether they want a casino built in town at all. While it is nonbinding, casino opponents hope a negative vote will show state and federal authorities that a casino is not welcome under any terms….

Rejection of the idea of a casino in town would send a message to state and federal officials who must act on other aspects of the tribe’s casino proposal.

“This way, people get to actually vote on whether they want a casino, rather than just voting on a flawed agreement,” said casino foe Richard Young. “This would send a message to the selectmen, and I think at least some of them would take it to heart. They could fight this. Other towns have fought and won.”

Another casino foe, Jacqueline Tolosko, said: “I’ve been told by [state] Senator Marc Pacheco and by [US Representative] Barney Frank that if residents of this town don’t want a casino, they will back us. I think the vote on this is very important.”

Opponents have said they hope a negative vote would have some impact on how state and federal authorities react when the tribe looks to put the land in trust and obtain a compact for expanded gambling.

Exactly. So why does the Globe continue to ignore this important wrinkle? Last Thursday, Wallgren got the nuances right: the first vote was on the agreement with the Wampanoags; the second vote was on the casino itself. Today’s editorial blasts past all that. When is the Globe going to get it right?