Tag: Boston Phoenix

Trying to track down an old Gingrich outburst

Newt Gingrich

I had hoped to stir up a little controversy this week over something Newt Gingrich said a long time ago. But unless someone out there in Media Nation has better documentation than I do, I’m afraid I’m going to fall short.

Here’s what I’m talking about. On Friday and Saturday, May 13 and 14, 1994, I was among three reporters from the Boston Phoenix who covered the Republican State Convention in Springfield. (Also on hand were Al Giordano and Bob Keough.) On Saturday, Gingrich, then well on his way to becoming speaker, delivered the keynote address.

I recall sitting in slack-jawed amazement as Gingrich offered some hate-filled words about disease-ridden Haitians invading our shores while Bill Clinton did nothing about it. (The AIDS epidemic seemed to be centered in Haiti in its early days.) Unfortunately, no one wrote it up according to the online archives I searched.

As best as I can tell, neither the Boston Globe nor the Boston Herald bothered to cover Gingrich’s speech. Neither did the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, though it did quote then-congressman Peter Blute, who introduced Gingrich, as saying, “He energized the base of the party to get out there and work hard for the candidates.”

The Springfield Sunday Republican offered up a few soundbites from Gingrich — but nothing on Haiti and AIDS, as the story focused mainly on Gingrich’s praise for then-governor Bill Weld. “What makes Gov. Weld so different is he understands the obligation not to repair it, not to raise taxes to pay for it, not to prop it up, but to replace the welfare state,” the Republican quoted Gingrich as saying.

The Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton got a little more incendiary, with this:

Gingrich also attacked congressional Democrats for what he called, “a provision in the crime bill that establishes a racial quota for murderers,” referring to a section seeking to determine if members of one racial group are being convicted for murder more than others.

But alas, still nothing on Haitians.

I thought I must have written something. So last week I visited the Boston Public Library, where I looked up the issue of the Phoenix that was published the Thursday after the convention. And there was not a word about it. Apparently we had made the decision to cover the event for background purposes on the grounds that no one wanted to read what we had to say five days after the fact. Of course, this being 1994, we weren’t blogging the convention. So if it didn’t appear in the paper, well, it didn’t appear.

In an ironic twist — as Gingrich and Mitt Romney battle it out for the Republican presidential nomination — is that one of the stars of the convention was Romney, who was just beginning his campaign against Sen. Ted Kennedy.

It’s possible that I’ve got a notebook in the attic. But finding it would be a huge challenge, and then I’d have to decipher my handwriting from more than 17 years ago. It’s also possible that I did something with it later in the campaign. But I doubt it, and eliminating that possibility would require several hours with microfilm.

So there you have it — a tantalizing tidbit about Gingrich, just out of reach, less than a week before the Iowa caucuses. If anyone remembers this or has a newspaper clipping, I would love to hear from you.

Photo (cc) by Gage Skidmore and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Why small cities may hold the key to the future

There’s nothing quite listening in on a smart conversation by two old friends. In this week’s Boston Phoenix, Catherine Tumber talks with Jon Garelick about her new book, “Small, Gritty and Green: The Promise of America’s Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World.”

Cathy’s big idea is that down-on-their-luck cities like Lowell and Springfield may be due for a revival as economic and environmental constraints make urban living more appealing. And unlike major metropolises such as New York or Los Angeles — or Boston, for that matter — small cities have the capacity to develop their own self-sufficient ecosystems, including locally grown food.

The book is based on an essay Tumber wrote for the Boston Review in 2009 titled “Small, Green and Good.”

I read “Small, Gritty and Green” in galleys last spring, and I recommend it highly. Cathy also has given me invaluable advice for my own book-in-progress on the New Haven Independent and other community news sites, tentatively titled “The Wired City.”

Violence, art and the media’s responsibilities

Journalists from a number of Boston news organizations will gather this Thursday evening for a panel discussion about the media’s role and responsibilities in covering urban violence.

Part of the exhibit “Anonymous Boston,” which documents the lives of young murder victims and how the media covered their deaths, the discussion will be held at the Fourth Wall Project, near Kenmore Square, at 132 Brookline Ave. The panel is titled “If It Bleeds, It Leads: The Role of Media in Urban Violence.” I will have the honor of moderating.

The exhibit is the subject of this week’s cover story in the Boston Phoenix by Chris Faraone. As you will see, the families of murder victims say the loss of their children is often compounded by sensational, inaccurate media coverage and by hateful online comments.

The Boston Herald is singled out by several people as a particularly egregious offender. Morever, Joanna Marinova-Jones, the community activist who has overseen the exhibit, is in the midst of a libel suit against the Herald. Despite those facts (or maybe because of them), I’m hoping the Herald will accept our invitation for what is intended as a substantive, civil conversation.

Participants who have already confirmed include Boston Globe city editor Steve Smith, Bay State Banner executive editor Howard Manly, WGBH Radio (89.7 FM) senior investigative reporter Phillip Martin, El Planeta managing editor Marcela Garcia, pioneering African-American television reporter Sarah Ann Shaw and Faraone.

The event will take place from 6 to 8 p.m., and is free and open to the public.

Catching up with Occupy Boston

If you really want to know what’s going on with Occupy Boston, then you have to check in with my friends at the Boston Phoenix. Anchored by the redoubtable Chris Faraone, the Phoenix has been providing non-stop coverage of the burgeoning protest movement for the past week. You’ll find the latest here, and a link to past coverage here. Essential stuff.

Meanwhile, there’s a fascinating story in the New York Times on the growing alliance between organized labor and Occupy Wall Street, of which Occupy Boston is a part. Things should start to get interesting right about now.

Real Paper alumni get together this Thursday

Veterans of the Real Paper, a Boston-based alternative weekly in the 1970s, will get together in a Ford Hall Forum event this Thursday to discuss what they learned and what lessons that might hold for the future of journalism. The event will take place in Suffolk University’s C. Walsh Theatre from 6:30 to 8 p.m. You can find out more here.

As we old-timers well remember, the rivalry between the Real Paper and the Boston Phoenix was intense during the decade or so that they both published. The Real Paper was formed in 1972 after Stephen Mindich, the founder of Boston After Dark, bought the Phoenix, which was sometimes known in that earlier incarnation as the Cambridge Phoenix. Mindich called his new paper the Boston Phoenix.

The former staff of the Cambridge Phoenix, rather than going away, founded the Real Paper, which during its first few years operated as an employee-run collective. The paper ceased publication in 1981.

This Wikipedia article on the Real Paper strikes me as an accurate summary of those years.

The Ford Hall Forum event brings together a number of well-known former Real Paper staff members: Harper Barnes, Jan Freeman, Mark Zanger, Laura Shapiro and Paul Solman, assembled by Monica Collins, herself a Real Paper alumna who’s also vice president of the Ford Hall Forum.

Remembering George Kimball

I’m in California on a working vacation this week. But I want to break blog silence to pay tribute to the great George Kimball, a sports columnist for the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Herald who died on Wednesday at the age of 67.

I remember reading Kimball in the Phoenix when I was in high school. Kimball would sit in the bleachers at Fenway Park and write about the Red Sox from a fan’s perspective. His column was called “The Sporting Eye,” after his glass eye, which, as legend would have it, he would pop out in order to entertain and intimidate as the spirit moved him.

Eventually Kimball left for the Herald. I didn’t read him all that much after that because his beat was boxing, which interested me some when Muhammad Ali was fighting and not at all otherwise. But I do have one measly Kimball anecdote that no one else has.

At the beginning of the 1986 Woburn toxic-waste trial in U.S. District Court (the case immortalized in Jonathan Harr’s book “A Civil Action”), Judge Walter Jay Skinner ruled that the media could cover jury selection on the condition that they not report on what had happened until the jury was seated. The Boston Globe and the Herald refused to go along and boycotted the proceedings. I was covering the trial for the Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn, and saw no reason not to sit in. I got a pretty good story out of it, too.

Among the prospective jurors brought in for questioning was Kimball. He was polite and obviously very intelligent. He told the judge that the case would pose a significant hardship for him, since he had to travel to cover boxing for the Herald. (Indeed, the trial lasted five months.) I don’t think Kimball ever expected to be seated, but after he left the room, the judge and the lawyers expressed considerable interest. “Your Honor, he’s a great boxing columnist,” Neil Jacobs of Hale and Dorr, part of the legal team for the defendant Beatrice Foods, told Skinner. (Obviously that quote may be off by a word or two.)

There was quite a bit of discussion regarding the pros and cons of choosing Kimball. In the end, Skinner decided that the trial would, in fact, pose an unfair burden to him, and he was dismissed. But it was a close call. A year later I ran into Kimball at a New England Press Association function and told him about what had happened after he left the judge’s chambers. I don’t remember what he said, except that he appeared to be amused by the story, and glad he’d dodged the draft.

If you want to know more about Kimball (and I’ve told you very little), you must read this appreciation by Michael Gee, who followed Kimball as the Phoenix sports columnist and later joined him at the Herald. This Phoenix blog post by Sean Kerrigan hits the highlights of Kimball’s pre-Herald career. And the Phoenix has posted a classic Kimball story from 1976 on a boxing match between Ali and Ken Norton.

Finally, here’s a great story from the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World on Kimball’s early days as “one-eyed radical who once campaigned as a ‘two-fisted’ candidate for Douglas County sheriff.” I had no idea.

Presenting the 14th annual Phoenix Muzzle Awards

The 14th annual Boston Phoenix (and Portland Phoenix and Providence Phoenix) Muzzle Awards are now online and in print, pillorying New England enemies of free speech in Greater Boston, Maine and Rhode Island, from Max Kennedy to Tom Menino. But we begin with some tough words about President Obama.

My friend Harvey Silverglate has written a companion piece on free speech on college campuses.

Sadly, since I first began writing this Fourth of July feature in 1998, finding suitable recipients has only gotten easier.

Pulitzer winner Barry’s 1996 report from Russia

Ellen Barry

While the Boston Globe’s visual-arts critic, Sebastian Smee, continues to receive well-deserved accolades for his Pulitzer Prize, it is less well-known that another of yesterday’s Pulitzer winners has strong Boston ties, too.

Ellen Barry of the New York Times, who shared the award for international reporting with her Times colleague Clifford Levy, is a former reporter for the Globe and the Boston Phoenix. Ellen and I worked together at the Phoenix in the mid-1990s.

In 1996, she reported from Russia for the Phoenix on Boris Yeltsin’s re-election campaign — and wrote a classic story headlined “Generation Nyet.” The folks at the Phoenix have dug the story of their archives and linked to it anew. It is well worth your time, as is Phoenix editor Carly Carioli’s tribute.

Remembering Clif Garboden

The Boston Globe has published a wonderful obituary of Clif Garboden in advance of his memorial service, which will be held on April 9 at 2 p.m. at Framingham Friends Meeting. Clif, as readers of this blog know, was senior managing editor of the Boston Phoenix, and had been the heart and soul of the newsroom since the 1960s.

Globe obit writer Bryan Marquard’s observation that Clif “could do compassion and curmudgeon in a single sentence and write with equal eloquence about swan boats or the cancer that cut short his life” is a keeper.

Here is my earlier item on Clif’s untimely passing. And here is the Phoenix’s tribute to him.