My latest for The Guardian recounts an earlier lawsuit involving Dan Rather that hinged on — yes — an apparently phony document that Rather waved in front of his CBS viewers.
Tag: Guardian
Social networks and news
My latest for The Guardian takes a look at a new Project for Excellence in Journalism study on Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us, which allow users to recommend their favorite stories. Can the power of social networks help save the news business?
Lessons from “The Bluest State”
My latest for The Guardian is a look at Jon Keller‘s smart and entertaining new book, “The Bluest State: How Democrats Created the Massachusetts Blueprint for American Political Disaster.”
“Magic” is coming; magic is gone
In my latest for The Guardian, I explain why I’m not looking forward to “Magic,” the forthcoming album by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.
Update: You can’t take on Bruce without having to fend off his hordes of fans. I have more to say here, complete with ratings for every one of his albums.
Glenn Marshall’s bizarre threat
Is the Boston Globe finally ready to engage on the matter of the proposed Middleborough casino? Sally Jacobs today weighs in with a 2,600-word overview that focuses on the dispute between disgraced former tribal chairman Glenn Marshall and a dissident group led by Amelia Bingham and her son, Steven Bingham.
Jacobs misses a few key points. Marshall’s handpicked successor, Shawn Hendricks, appears nowhere in the story. And she reports Marshall’s age as being 59. That’s not a small error, since his true age, 57, was a key to reports by Cape Cod Today and the Cape Cod Times that Marshall was in high school in the spring of 1968, not fighting in Vietnam, as he had claimed.
But all is forgiven, because Jacobs reports one of the most startling developments to date — that when a Globe reporter (presumably Jacobs) pressed Marshall about his background recently, he responded that people could die if she continued her line of questioning:
Marshall also angrily fended off questions about his job history, telling a reporter to “back off.” He was, at that point, still offering up a false account of his employment history including his claim to have once worked as an undercover officer. And his manner spoke to how he had succeeded in his deception for so long: He raised his voice and sought to intimidate.
“I have people that worked with me that are dead,” Marshall declared, “that died because of people like you asking questions like that.”
Very, very strange. (Note: At first blush, I read it to mean that Marshall was making Jacobs an offer she couldn’t refuse, as the Corleone family memorably put it. But after reading Steve’s comment, I’m not so sure, and I’ve rewritten this post.)
Anyway, surely Globe editors are beginning to realize that the casino story is a playground for journalists. Jacobs’ contribution should be just the beginning.
In other developments:
- At Cape Cod Today, Peter Kenney continues to follow the money. It’s complicated, but it appears that tribal funds may have been used to buy a $675,000 horse farm, and that ownership of the farm was never transferred to the tribe.
- My latest commentary for The Guardian offers an overview of what has unfolded to date, and of how Marshall’s downfall may save Middleborough officials from their own greed and naïveté.
Update: Kenneth Foster is spared
Kenneth Foster, whose death-penalty case I wrote about for The Guardian last week, has been spared by Texas Gov. Rick Perry. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports.
Alberto Gonzales, angel of death
My latest for The Guardian is up. It’s on the new death-penalty powers that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is about to receive, and why his record in Texas shows that he’s particularly unsuited to wield such powers.
Double standard
My latest commentary for The Guardian is up. This week I write about conservative outrage over The New Republic’s dubious reporting on American misbehavior in Iraq — and the right’s total silence on The Nation’s far better documented reporting on the same subject.