The coffee shop chain that refused service to retired GBH News reporter Phillip Martin at one of its stores recently will bolster its “anti-discrimination and harassment training,” according to its chief operating officer.
Caffè Nero COO Paul Morgan was quoted in an update published Wednesday afternoon by Boston.com. Reporter Abby Patkin writes that Martin met with company officials earlier this week for what he described as a “very cordial, pleasant conversation.” He added that he accepted their apologies, saying, “I told them I had no interest whatsoever in anyone being fired over this.”
Although Martin, a former colleague of mine at GBH, handled the situation with his customary class, what happened to him raises some troublesome issues. The facts as originally laid out in The Boston Globe were that a barista thought Martin resembled someone (sub. req.) who had recently caused trouble at the Central Square store recently, even relieving himself inside.
Yet Martin now says he’s seen a photo of that person, and he was “befuddled,” adding, “I looked at the photo, and I told them, ‘He looks nothing like me.’” Patkin reports that Martin says the person in the photo was a much younger, light-skinned Black man.
Neither the original Globe story nor the Boston.com follow-up reports whether the barista is white, although it’s clearly implied that she is given that Martin filed complaints with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination and the Cambridge Human Rights Commission, and that Caffè Nero is going to double down on training.
Those of us who are white have an obligation not to fall into the trap of confusing one person of color with another. If the barista had paused for a moment and thought about whether Martin truly resembled the person who’d gone off in her store earlier, she almost certainly would have realized that he didn’t.
Phillip Martin at Boston University earlier this year. Photo (cc) 2025 by Dan Kennedy.
A former GBH News colleague of mine has gotten caught up in a mess involving a Cambridge coffee shop in which he was told he’d been mixed up with another Black man who’d reportedly caused trouble.
Phillip Martin, an award-winning journalist who retired earlier this year, told The Boston Globe (sub. req.) that he was refused service at a Caffè Nero in Central Square last Thursday after he attempted to order a cup of tea. Martin said he was there to meet another journalist. Globe reporters Nick Stoico and Alexa Coultoff write:
A woman working at the counter told Martin that her boss instructed her not to serve him if he came into the cafe again, according to Martin. He said he told her she must be mistaking him for someone else, but the woman insisted, “No, we have you on video.”
Martin and the employeeeach called police, he said. After officers spoke with Martin and the cafe worker separately, they told Martin that he was allowed to stay.
In addition to his work as an investigative reporter for GBH Radio, Martin would also pop up on various GBH-TV shows, including “Basic Black” and “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” on which I was a regular panelist until it was canceled in 2021. I thought Phillip brought a particularly erudite sensibility to the program.
More recently, I spoke with Martin this past summer for a story he was working on about the dangers posed by so-called pink-slime news outlets — that is, websites that appear to be legitimate sources of local news but that are actually part of a politically motivated network, and that are increasingly powered by AI.
I posted about the Caffè Nero incident on Facebook Sunday evening, and Martin added a comment that I quote here with his permission:
I’m not personally boycotting Caffe Nero or encouraging anyone else to. It’s not my favorite coffee but that’s not the point. The only thing I was trying to accomplish is for the cafe to be held accountable and aware of potentially discriminatory practices and policies. Distributing a video of someone who is identified as a miscreant without some type of training about racial and other common forms of misidentification is a recipe for disaster. And I also thought it important to emphasize that no one should be fired over this.
According to the Globe, a Caffè Nero spokesperson said by email that a person closely resembling Martin had recently been “abusive to the staff” and had relieved himself inside. “While it is not acceptable to confuse any customer with another, the prior incident was traumatic for the barista involved and it triggered her response,” the spokesperson was quoted as saying. “Everyone at Caffè Nero is deeply sorry for the behaviour towards Mr. Martin, which should not have happened, even though it was a genuine error driven by a recent prior experience.”
Martin has reportedly filed complaints with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination and the Cambridge Human Rights Commission.
In 2021, The Boston Globe Magazine published a personal essay (sub. req.) by Phillip in which he recalled the culture shock of coming to Boston in the 1970s to fight racism. He was so bruised and battered by the experience that he returned home to Detroit — only to come back a year later and stay. He wrote:
Boston was a 1970s version of 1960s Birmingham, Alabama, in my view, with white grievance over desegregation and voting rights updated as white protests over school desegregation through court-ordered busing. That history was precisely why I enlisted, somewhat naively, to go to Boston in the summer of 1975: to fight against racism.
We like to tell ourselves that Boston has come a long way since then, and perhaps it has. But Phillip’s encounter at Caffè Nero shows that we still have a long way to go.
A network of more than 1,200 websites better known for publishing so-called pink slime designed to look like legitimate local news is now branching out.
Kirk Carapezza reports for GBH News that Metric Media is flooding public colleges and universities in Massachusetts with public-records requests in order to find what its founder, Brian Timpone, calls “anti-American” classroom materials. The company is also seeking to learn the number of Chinese nationals enrolled as students at those institutions.
“There’s great public interest in what public universities are teaching students,” Timpone told Carapezza. “We want to see what they’re teaching and why.” Among the institutions that Metric Media has targeted are Salem State University, UMass Boston and Bridgewater State University.
I was one of the people who Kirk interviewed, and as I told him, I was surprised to see Metric Media taking such a pro-active role. Timpone’s various media ventures over the years have been involved in passive, money-making operations such as publishing alleged local news produced by distant employees, some in the Philippines, as the public radio program “This American Life” reported way back in 2012.
In recent years, Metric Media pink-slime sites such as North Boston News (a travel tip for those of you who aren’t from around here: North Boston is not a place that actually exists) have been publishing weirdly irrelevant slop, perhaps produced by AI. If you look right now, for instance, North Boston News features repetitive pseudo-stories on school test scores, high school sports and gas prices.
In 2021, the Columbia Journalism Review published the results of an investigation that showed Metric Media has ties to a variety of right-wing interests.
The public-records law in Massachusetts is notoriously weak, yet teaching materials such as syllabuses and reading lists at public institutions are arguably covered by it. Since I teach at Northeastern University, a private institution, it’s not something I have to be concerned about. On the face of it, I’m not sure why the two should be treated differently.
In any case, it will be interesting to see what Metric Media does with this material. And by “interesting,” I don’t mean to suggest that it will be anything good.
Ellen Clegg and I are excited to report that Rozzie Bound Co-op, an independent bookstore in Roslindale, Massachusetts, is hosting a GBH Listening Session on Thursday, Aug. 21 — and it’s designated our book, “What Works in Community News,” as the recommended read.
“Magdeila Matta, a community producer with GBH News, is looking to engage with folks and learn how they engage with the media, as well as open up space for people to share what’s going on in their communities,” according to the announcement. “Come to this session to talk to Magdeila about what news matters to you.”
“What Works in Community News,” a close-up look at successful independent news in nine different parts of the country, has been longlisted for a Mass Book Award by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
Rozzie Bound Co-op is located at 739 South St. The listening session will be held from 5:30 to 7 p.m. And here’s a GBH News article on the story behind the bookstore.
Hulk Hogan poster. Photo (cc) 2009 by Tom Hodgkinson.
The professional wrestler Hulk Hogan died Thursday at 71. Among other things, Hogan’s death has prompted reminders that he, with the help of secret financing from Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, pursued a lawsuit that destroyed Gawker, a website that trafficked in gossip, sleaze and occasionally important investigative reporting. In 2016 I wrote a commentary for GBH News arguing that Hogan and Thiel weren’t quite the bad guys they seemed, and that Gawker’s behavior truly was reprehensible. Here is that column again.
***
Sympathy for the Devil: Billionaire Peter Thiel versus Gawker versus the First Amendment
GBH News | June 1, 2016
Does Hulk Hogan’s invasion-of-privacy suit against the news-and-gossip site Gawker threaten the First Amendment? No. But the way his case is being paid for might.
Last week we learned that Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire, had provided about $10 million to help fund Hogan’s case. Such third-party financing is legal, and it proved to be a sound investment: in March, a Florida jury found that Gawker had invaded Hogan’s privacy by publishing a video of him and a friend’s wife without permission and awarded him $140 million.
Lyndon Johnson on the campaign trail in 1954. Photo via the LBJ Library.
The IRS has ruled that religious leaders can endorse political candidates from the pulpit, thus overturning a ban that had been in place since 1954. The New York Times broke the story, but in case you can’t get around the paywall, here is The Associated Press’ version.
The news is sure to be greeted with consternation among many observers, especially on the left. But the ban was, in fact, an unintended consequence of a move by Lyndon Johnson to silence a tax-exempt political group that opposed his re-election to the Senate. Johnson’s chief aide, George Reedy, told an interviewer years later that he believed LBJ had not intended to include religious organizations in the ban.
The IRS action comes just days after the presiding bishop of our denomination, Sean Rowe, wrote a powerful commentary in which he called on the Episcopal Church to be an engine of the resistance to Donald Trump’s authoritarian rule. (You may recall that Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budd got Trump’s second term off to a rousing start by admonishing him from the pulpit on Inauguration Day.) It sounds like it just became easier for our church to speak out and not have its tax status threatened, although who knows if the regime will try to punish religious liberals? Here is part of what Bishop Rowe wrote:
Churches like ours, protected by the First Amendment and practiced in galvanizing people of goodwill, may be some of the last institutions capable of resisting this administration’s overreach and recklessness. To do so faithfully, we must see beyond the limitations of our tradition and respond not in partisan terms, but as Christians who seek to practice our faith fully in a free and fair democracy.
We did not seek this predicament, but God calls us to place the most vulnerable and marginalized at the center of our common life, and we must follow that command regardless of the dictates of any political party or earthly power. We are now being faced with a series of choices between the demands of the federal government and the teachings of Jesus, and that is no choice at all.
In 2017 I wrote a commentary for GBH News in which I expressed agreement with Trump after he called for the Johnson Amendment to be overturned. Now that has happened. I’m posting the full piece after the jump.
Every year around this time, I take note of Independence Day by writing about outrages against freedom of speech that unfolded in New England during the previous year. It’s something I started doing in 1998 for The Boston Phoenix, and then later moved to GBH News after the Phoenix folded in 2013. (Here’s the complete archive.)
For the past several years I’ve been writing up Muzzles as they come in rather than waiting to do an annual roundup. I skipped writing a roundup altogether in 2023, so I guess this is the 27th annual edition of the New England Muzzle Awards.
This year’s Muzzle winners include Plymouth’s town manager, for attempting to intimidate and silence the nonprofit Plymouth Independent; the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, for muzzling the police chief and playing favorites with the press; and the mayor of Quincy, Massachusetts, for planning to install two religious statues on public property at the city’s new public safety building.
I’m especially pleased to be able to award a Muzzle to Trump’s shadowy top aide, Stephen Miller, for enabling the arrest of a Tufts Ph.D. student who helped write an op-ed piece for the student newspaper that he didn’t like.
Kudos, as always, to my friends Harvey Silverglate, who conceived of this annual feature all these years ago, and Peter Kadzis, who edited all 25 editions that appeared in the Phoenix and at GBH News. They were inspired by the Jefferson Muzzles, which no longer are awarded. Here in New England, though, their spirit lives on.
At a time when democracy itself is under threat, defending the First Amendment is more important than ever. The envelopes, please.
The Mississippi judge who ordered a newspaper to remove an editorial from its website has reversed herself. But this is hardly a victory for freedom of the press.
Judge Crystal Wise Martin rescinded her temporary restraining order after the owner of The Clarksdale Press Register and the board of commissioners in that city agreed to settle a dispute that had resulted in a libel suit being filed. The commissioners agreed to drop the suit while Wyatt Emmerich, president of Emmerich Newspapers, said the paper will publish a less incendiary version of the editorial, according to Michael Levenson of The New York Times (gift link).
That does not change the reality that Judge Martin leaped in to help city officials by censoring the newspaper, even though the First Amendment protects libelous materials from being subjected to prior restraint. Libel can, of course, be punished after the fact through a civil suit, although government agencies cannot sue for libel.
The editorial, headlined “Secrecy, Deception Erode Public Trust,” took city officials to task “for not sending the newspaper notice about a meeting the City Council held regarding a proposed tax on alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.”
Robert Mueller. Photo (cc) 2012 by the White House.
On this last day of 2024, I’m taking a look back before we plunge ahead into the new year. Media Nation’s 10 most viewed posts for the year range from my takedown of an intellectually dishonest critique of NPR, to CBS News’ reprimand of an on-air host for being too confrontational with a guest, to news that The Boston Globe is seeking to acquire Boston magazine. So let’s get right to it.
1. Fish in a barrel: Berliner’s case against NPR is based on false and out-of-context facts (April 11). Uri Berliner, a top editor at NPR, created a stir when he accused his employer of liberal bias in a long essay for The Free Press. The problem was that his examples didn’t hold up to scrutiny. To name just one: Berliner wrote that NPR failed to confess its sins after special counsel Robert Mueller found “no credible evidence” that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia, which isn’t even remotely what Mueller reported. There was a lot more disingenuousness where that came from. Berliner ended up resigning his post at NPR and going to work for — yes, The Free Press.
2. Less news, more happy talk: Why CBS News’ reprimand of Tony Dokoupil is so ridiculous (Oct. 8). Journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates popped up on the CBS morning newscast to promote latest book, “The Message,” and faced an unexpectedly tough grilling over his anti-Israeli views from co-host Tony Dokoupil. Among other things, Dokoupil told Coates that his book woudn’t be out of place “in the backpack of an extremist.” Coates gave as good as he got, and he probably sold a few more books than he otherwise would have. Nevertheless, CBS News management called Dokoupil on the carpet — probably because his attempt to commit journalism contradicted the light banter that defines the morning-news format.
3. A riveting Boston Globe story about a medical disaster with ties to the local news crisis (Jan. 29). A Globe report about the death of a new mother at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital had something in common with the same forces that have hollowed out much of the local-news business. The mother’s death may have been caused by the hospital’s lacking a basic piece of equipment that had been repossessed because its corporate owner, Steward Health Care, wasn’t paying its bills. Steward, in turn, had been pillaged by a private-equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, which is the same outfit that helped the notorious newsroom-gutting hedge fund Alden Global Capital acquire Tribune Publishing’s nine major-market daily newspapers in 2021.
Map of Plymouth, Mass., in 1882. Via the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center.
Mark Caro of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School has taken a deep dive into the media ecosystem of Eastern Massachusetts — the wreckage left behind by Gannett’s closing and merging many of its weekly papers, and the rise of independent startups, many of them digital nonprofits.
As Caro observes, the Gannett weeklies and websites that still exist are “ghost newspapers,” containing little in the way of local content.
What’s happening in New England is being echoed across the country as the local news crisis deepens. While the nation’s ever-widening news deserts have drawn much attention, the ghost papers represent another dire threat to a well-informed citizenry. Many areas don’t meet the definition of a news desert, but residents have been left with newspapers so hollowed out that they’re bereft of original local news reporting.
I was especially interested to see that Caro interviewed K. Prescott Low, whose family sold off The Patriot Ledger of Quincy and its affiliated papers in 1998 only to see their legacy torn apart in less than a generation. The Ledger was once regarded as being among the best medium-size dailies in the U.S.; today it limps along with a skeleton staff and no newsroom.
As Low tells it, he thought he had found a trustworthy buyer, but his former papers soon ended up in the hands of GateHouse Media, a cost-cutting chain that in 2019 merged with Gannett. “Conceptually it was a good idea,” Low told Caro. “Practically it didn’t work out because of the subsequent purchase by GateHouse and what has happened across the media.”
Caro and I talked about the lack of news coverage in Medford, where I live, after Gannett merged the Medford Transcript and Somerville Journal. He also interviewed my “What Works” partner, Ellen Clegg, about Brookline.News, the digital nonprofit she helped launch after Gannett closed its Brookline Tab.
As I told Caro, there are reasons to be optimistic, but affluent suburban communities are doing better at meeting their own news needs than are urban areas, and there’s a certain random quality to all of it. “You can have a community that has something really good,” I told him, “and right next door is a community that has nothing.”
Caro has written a good and important article, and I hope you’ll take a look.
WBUR cancels ‘Radio Boston’
There was some sad news on the local public radio front earlier today. WBUR is ending “Radio Boston,” a locally oriented program that airs on weekdays from 11 a.m. to noon and is repeated from 3 to 4 p.m.
It is WBUR’s only local news show and follows cuts at both of Boston’s major public broadcasters this years, as well as downsizing across the country. Earlier this year GBH News canceled three local television shows, “Greater Boston,” “Talking Politics” and “Basic Black.” That last program will return next month, possibly as a digital offering.
GBH Radio continues to offer four hours of local programming each weekday — “Boston Public Radio,” a talk and interview show hosted by Jim Braude and Margery Eagan, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and “The Culture Show” from 2 to 3 p.m.
The end of “Radio Boston” won’t result in any layoffs, according to the station, as the folks who worked on that show will be reassigned to pumping up the local segments on NPR’s two national drive-time programs, “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”
Alden’s tin cup
Alden Global Capital, the hedge-fund newspaper owner that has decimated community journalism from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Denver to San Jose, is trying something new: asking readers to give them money in order to offset some of the newsroom cuts they’ve made.
An alert Media Nation reader passed along an appeal sent to readers of Alden’s South Florida Sun Sentinel, asking for tax-deductible gifts to the nonprofit Florida Press Foundation‘s Community News Fund. The foundation appears to be legit, but it’s hard to imagine why they would agree to help prop up a paper that’s been slashed by its hedge-fund owner.
“Alden Capital is surrounded by small independents that continue to eat into their circulation area,” my informant says. “Key Biscayne Independent, the Bulldog Reporter, Florida Phoenix, Coastal Star … are just a few of the ‘independents’ started by former journalists to fill the news desert. Everyone competes for donations. So when a Wall Street PE [private equity] firm solicits for limited resources, they are actually starving their competition. I think this is sad and something that may be a harbinger of what’s to come under the new transactional administration.”
If you see any other examples of rattling the tin cup at papers owned by corporate chains, please let me know.
This year’s Muzzle winners include Plymouth’s town manager, for attempting to intimidate and silence the nonprofit Plymouth Independent; the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, for muzzling the police chief and playing favorites with the press; and the mayor of Quincy, Massachusetts, for planning to install two religious statues on public property at the city’s new public safety building.
