By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

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Can both sides lose?

The infighting is so fierce because the stakes are so small: Far-right talk-show host Jeff Kuhner, embroiled in a feud with Trump-friendly Howie Carr, calls for a boycott of the Boston Herald. This story at Boston Broadside is unreadable, but Scott Van Voorhis summarizes it nicely at Contrarian Boston.

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Did Howie Carr turn on the former MassGOP leadership over unpaid bills?

Howie Carr and Grace Curley, a host on his radio network. Photo (cc) 2020 by Timothy Quill.

During the Massachusetts governor’s race in 2022, Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr strangely turned on his allies in the MAGA wing of the state party and began attacking them in his column and on his radio show. Howie being Howie? Well, maybe. Or maybe not.

Scott Van Voorhis, who writes the newsletter Contrarian Boston, reports that Carr’s motives may have been a lot simpler than that: the state GOP owed him money. With the Democratic candidate for governor, Maura Healey, coasting to victory, Van Voorhis writes that Carr began “savagely” attacking the then-head of the state party, Jim Lyons, and Healey’s Republican rival, Geoff Diehl.

It turns out that Lyons’ wrecking crew owed Carr more than $7,000 for ads on Carr’s radio program, which he owns. Lyons’ replacement as party chair, the slightly less MAGA-ish Amy Carnevale, is now paying back Carr at the rate of $500 a month. Van Voorhis is careful to note that it’s not clear if the dispute over those unpaid bills came about before or after Carr began attacking Lyons and Diehl.

And here’s a fun detail: Van Voorhis credits the MassGOP Majority newsletter for breaking the story. But when you click through, you learn that though that may be the URL, the actual name of the newsletter is Kool-Aid Kult Kronicles. Apparently that is some sort of joking reference to something Carr said. There’s more news, too, including WRKO Radio’s supposed decision to ban Diehl from its airwaves because of “the perennial candidate’s repeated, baseless claims that Howie Carr is being paid by the MassGOP to attack him and his slate of candidates for Republican State Committee.”

Now, let’s get serious for a moment. Van Voorhis describes Carr as “not exactly the kind of guy you want to piss off.” True enough. But how far can Carr veer from the ethics of journalism and still manage to write for the Herald? Journalists — even opinion journalists like Carr — are expected to maintain their independence. We don’t give money to candidates. We don’t take money from candidates. And we don’t criticize candidates and party officials who owe us money, whether there is a direct connection between those two facts or not.

Just grotesque stuff from someone who wrote a must-read column back in the 1980s and has long since devolved into a caricature of himself.

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‘The Big Dig,’ from GBH News, is a triumph of long-form audio journalism

The yellow is the path of what would become the Tip O’Neill Tunnel through the city. The red and blue are the Ted Williams Tunnel to Logan Airport. Photo (cc) from the 1990s by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.

Over the past few months, news organizations in Boston have unveiled massive projects that dig deeply into traumatic (for very different reasons) historical events — The Boston Globe’s series on the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart at the hands of her husband, Charles, whose claim that the killing was carried out by a Black man turned the city upside-down; and GBH News’ nine-part podcast on the Big Dig.

I approached both projects with some trepidation, wondering what more I could learn about such well-known events. Well, the Globe’s series and podcast were incredibly well done, and we did learn a few things we didn’t previously know; I did not see the Stuart documentary film made in conjunction with the series, but I understand it’s essentially a shortened version of the podcast. “The Big Dig” (that is, the podcast, not the tunnels) was outstanding as well. I just finished listening to it a couple of days ago.

Once I started “The Big Dig,” I got hooked because of the premise. We live at a time when it seems that we’re unable to build great public projects. They come in way over budget, they’re flawed and NIMBYs are able to keep them tied up for years. The way host and co-producer Ian Coss frames the podcast is that the Big Dig is among the earliest and most expensive examples of that phenomenon. As we all know, it cost far more than initial projections, it was years late, it was fatally flawed (literally) and opponents were able to tie it up in red tape.

It’s a dilemma that Ezra Klein of The New York Times has talked about a lot on his own podcast. Rather than liberalism that fetishizes process and empowers stakeholders (and non-stakeholders) in such a way that it makes it too easy to stop progress, he argues, we need a “liberalism that builds.” That will also be the topic of his next book, co-authored with Derek Thompson.

“The Big Dig” begins with an unusually righteous example of process liberalism — the fight to stop the Southwest Corridor, led by a bright young bureaucrat named Fred Salvucci and eventually embraced by Gov. Frank Sargent. Salvucci, whose voice holds together the podcast throughout all nine episodes (he’s now 83), rose to become secretary of transportation under Gov. Michael Dukakis and embraced the two projects that eventually became known as the Big Dig: the Ted Williams Tunnel connecting the city with Logan Airport and the Tip O’Neill Tunnel, which enabled Salvucci’s dream of removing the elevated Central Artery and knitting the city back together.

It makes no sense for me to summarize the podcast except to say that Coss does a masterful job of including a tremendous amount of detail and human-interest stories while keeping it moving. We learn all about Scheme Z, a phrase that I thought I’d never hear out loud again. The greedy parking lot owner who held up the airport tunnel. The soil that was softer than expected. The flaws in the slurry walls. That said, I do have three reservations.

  • At the end of episode 8, the Big Dig is portrayed as unsafe. Although Coss tells us that the improperly installed ceiling tiles that led to the death of a driver, Milena Delvalle, were fixed, you do not get the impression that the overall project was safe. Yet in episode 9, the epilogue, we learn that the Big Dig finally can be seen as a success story without any indication of how those safety problems — including significant leaks in the slurry walls — were overcome.
  • A personal pique, but audio clips of my friend and former GBH colleague Emily Rooney, who hosted “Greater Boston” and “Beat the Press” for many years, are heard over and over, especially in episodes 7 and 8 — yet she is never named. Even Howie Carr is identified after one brief snippet of sound. Emily was the face and voice of GBH News for many years, and she should have gotten a mention.
  • The series closes with the launch of the Green Line Extension, which is presented as a triumphant last piece of the puzzle. “It felt good to feel good about a big project that our city had accomplished,” Coss says. “To put the cynicism away for a day and just enjoy the ride.” Now, I’m sure the lead time for the podcast was long, but, uh.

Overall, though, “The Big Dig” is an extraordinarily well-done overview of a project that kept the city tied up in knots for years, and that has been a success despite the astronomical cost — more than $24 billion by some estimates, or triple the $7.7 billion that was budgeted once the work had started, which was itself far higher than the original $3 billion price tag.

I hope GBH got the bounce they were looking for, because I’d like to see more such podcasts in the future. And if you’re new to Boston, you learn a lot about our city from both the Globe’s reporting on the Stuart case and from “The Big Dig.” Along with J. Anthony Lukas’ book “Common Ground,” the story of Boston’s desegregation crisis, these two works of extended narrative journalism have entered the library of essential Boston reading and listening.

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How Rupert Murdoch saved the Boston Herald — not just once, but twice

As I noted Thursday, one of the few positive contributions Rupert Murdoch can take credit for is preserving The Wall Street Journal as a great national newspaper. Another is that he saved the Boston Herald — not once, but twice. Larry Edelman of The Boston Globe writes about the first time (he interviewed me). I tell that story as well as the tale of Murdoch’s second rescue in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” which I excerpt below.

The Hearst chain, which had converted the Herald (known then as the Herald American) to a tabloid during the final years of its ownership, had run out the string by 1982. I remember one old-timer telling me that, with closure just hours away, workers came in to rip out the vending machines from the paper’s hulking plant in the South End. At the last minute, Murdoch reached a deal with the unions and the paper was saved.

Under Murdoch’s ownership, the Herald established itself as a feisty alternative to the Globe, sometimes beating its larger rival on important local stories. That continued in the 1990s after Murdoch’s protégé Pat Purcell bought it from him. To this day there are people who believe that Murdoch continued to pull the strings behind the scenes, but I never believed it. Murdoch just didn’t care that much about the Herald, and I don’t doubt that he let Purcell have it on extremely favorable terms.

Unfortunately, the Herald’s financial model pretty much stopped working in the early 2000s, and today it’s owned by the New York hedge fund Alden Global Capital, famous for sucking the life out of its papers. Alden owns two other Massachusetts papers as well — The Sun of Lowell and the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg.

At one time Murdoch also owned the Ottaway chain, which included the Cape Cod Times and some small weeklies, including the Middleboro Gazette, where I grew up. Murdoch is fondly remembered by taking a hands-off approach, but I honestly wonder whether he even knew those papers were part of his empire. The Gazette was later closed by the Gannett chain, and today Middleborough is served by an independent startup, Nemasket Weekly.

Here’s what I wrote in “Moguls” about the Herald and Murdoch’s TV station, WFXT-TV (Channel 25), which he sold off a few years ago. The “endless struggle” I refer to was the Herald’s long-time ownership of Channel 5, an existential threat to the Globe that was removed when the Globe reported that its rival had gained the broadcast license because of corruption at the Federal Communications Commission. The Herald was stripped of its license in 1972, and Hearst swooped in to pick up the pieces.

The Globe’s endless struggle with the Herald’s broadcast ambitions played itself out in one last, faint echo in 1988, when Murdoch, who then owned the Herald, purchased Channel 25. Ted Kennedy, by then a leading member of the Senate, quietly slipped a provision into a bill that made it almost impossible for the FCC to grant a waiver to its rule prohibiting someone from owning both a daily newspaper and a TV station in the same market. At the time, I was a reporter for The Daily Times Chronicle, which served Woburn and several surrounding communities north of Boston. I remember covering a local appearance by Kennedy as he was dogged by the Herald reporter Wayne Woodlief. “Senator, why are you trying to kill the Herald?” the persistent Woodlief asked him several times.

Murdoch chose to sell off Channel 25, thus saving the Herald; he repurchased the TV station after selling the Herald to Purcell. But the Herald columnist Howie Carr remained bitter. He told me years later that Kennedy’s actions were worse than [Globe ally Tip] O’Neill’s, since O’Neill was just trying to help one of several papers rather than destroy the Globe’s only daily competitor. “I think Tip was just trying to get an ally,” Carr said, “whereas Ted was trying to kill the paper in order to deliver the monopoly to his friends.”

The liberal reputation the Globe developed during the Winship era was cemented during Boston’s school desegregation crisis of the mid-1970s, when the Globe wholeheartedly supported federal judge Arthur Garrity’s order to bus children to different neighborhoods in the city to achieve racial balance. It was a terrible time in Boston, as white racism ran rampant and bullets were fired into the Globe’s headquarters and at one of the paper’s delivery trucks. The Globe took the right moral stand, and its coverage earned the paper its second Pulitzer for Public Service. Winship in those years enjoyed a reputation as one of the finest editors in the country. But it was also during those years that the Globe became known as the paper of Boston’s suburban liberal elite and the Herald that of the urban white working class, a dichotomy that has persisted to this day.

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What’s next for Howie Carr?

Howie Carr in 2010

Howie Carr in 2010

At the bottom of Howie Carr’s column in today’s Boston Herald is this: “Howie will be back on the radio Monday at 3 p.m.” Since Carr had just been released from WRKO (AM 680), I figured he was going to do at least a temporary stint at the Herald’s Internet radio station — maybe even with his old sidekick Doug “V.B.” Goudie, who was put on waivers this week by Cox Media, the new owner of WFXT-TV (Channel 25.) (And who except us old folks remembers that it was Carr who gave Goudie his nickname, which stands for “Virgin Boy”?)

But as the redoubtable Scott Fybush of NorthEast Radio Watch writes Monday and today, Carr has numerous syndication options — none of them particularly attractive, but nevertheless very much in play. He’s still on the air in several smaller markets, and the possible deals he could cut are complicated and involve stations you’ve likely never heard of. But Fybush, as always, has the goods, and you should read him if you want to know every last tidbit.

As for Carr’s departure from WRKO, well, it says a lot about both Carr and his former employer that this isn’t a bigger story. When Carr tried unsuccessfully to get out of his contract and jump to WTKK (96.9 FM) some years ago, it was huge news. Now WTKK is gone, Carr doesn’t have a Boston radio outlet, and WRKO is sucking wind. Non-sports talk has been in decline for years, and Entercom management has seemingly done everything it could to hasten that decline, driving a once-great station into the ground. Carr had long been ‘RKO’s sole remaining asset, but high-priced talent isn’t part of the business plan these days.

And if you don’t think Carr has talent, you should have read him in the ’80s or heard his show in the ’90s. He knew more about Massachusetts politics than anyone alive, and he was absolutely fearless. But I’ve just defined the problem, haven’t I? In addition to letting his natural mean-spiritedness curdle into something uglier than that, Carr has also been phoning it in for years, both at the keyboard and behind the microphone.

But despite our very different political sensibilities, I am a former fan, and I’d love to see him rediscover what made him a must-read and -listen.

Photo (cc) by Mark Sardella and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Why Rupert Murdoch probably won’t buy the Herald

Published earlier at WGBHNews.org.

Here’s the answer to today’s Newspaper Jeopardy question: “Maybe, if there’s a willing buyer and seller.”

Now for the question: “With Rupert Murdoch getting out of the Boston television market, is there any chance that he would have another go with the Boston Herald?”

Following Tuesday’s announcement that Cox Media Group would acquire WFXT-TV (Channel 25) from Murdoch’s Fox Television Stations as part of a Boston-San Francisco station swap, there has been speculation as to whether Murdoch would re-enter the Boston newspaper market. Universal Hub’s Adam Gaffin raises the issue here; the Boston Business Journal’s Eric Convey, a former Herald staff member, addresses it as well. I’ve also heard from several people on Facebook.

First, the obvious: There would be no legal obstacles if Murdoch wants to buy the Herald. The FCC’s cross-ownership prohibition against a single owner controlling a TV station and a daily newspaper in the same market would no longer apply.

Now for some analysis. Murdoch is 83 years old, and though he seems remarkably active for an octogenarian, I have it on good authority that he, like all of us, is not going to live forever. Moreover, in 2013 his business interests were split, and his newspapers — which include The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London and the New York Post — are now in a separate division of the Murdoch-controlled News Corp. No longer can his lucrative broadcasting and entertainment properties be used to enhance his newspapers’ balance sheets.

Various accounts portray Murdoch as the last romantic — the only News Corp. executive who still has a soft spot for newspapers. The Herald would not be a good investment because newspapers in general are not good investments, and because it is the number-two daily in a mid-size market. Moreover, the guilty verdict handed down to former News of the World editor Andy Coulson in the British phone-hacking scandal Tuesday suggests that Murdoch may be preoccupied with other matters.

On the other hand, who knows? Herald owner Pat Purcell is a longtime friend and former lieutenant of Murdoch’s, and if Rupe wants to stage a Boston comeback, maybe Purcell could be persuaded to let it happen. Even while owning the Herald, Purcell continued to work for Murdoch, running what were once the Ottaway community papers — including the Cape Cod Times and The Standard-Times of New Bedford — from 2008 until they were sold to an affiliate of GateHouse Media last fall.

There is a storied history involving Murdoch and the Herald. Hearst’s Herald American was on the verge of collapse in 1982 when Murdoch swooped in, rescued the tabloid and infused it with new energy. Murdoch added to his Boston holdings in the late 1980s, acquiring Channel 25 and seeking a waiver from the FCC so that he could continue to own both.

One day as that story was unfolding, then-senator Ted Kennedy was making a campaign swing through suburban Burlington. As a reporter for the local daily, I was following him from stop to stop. Kennedy had just snuck an amendment into a bill to deny Rupert Murdoch the regulatory waiver he was seeking that would allow him to own both the Herald and Channel 25 (Kennedy’s amendment prohibited a similar arrangement in New York). At every stop, Herald reporter Wayne Woodlief would ask him, “Senator, why are you trying to kill the Herald?”

The episode also led Kennedy’s most caustic critic at the Herald, columnist Howie Carr, to write a particularly memorable lede: “Was it something I said, Fat Boy?” Years later, Carr remained bitter, telling me, “Ted was trying to kill the paper in order to deliver the monopoly to his friends” at The Boston Globe.

Murdoch sold Channel 25, but in the early 1990s he bought it back — and sold the Herald to Purcell, who’d been publisher of the paper, reporting to Murdoch, for much of the ’80s. It would certainly be a fascinating twist on this 30-year-plus newspaper tale if Murdoch and Purcell were to change positions once again.

Howie Carr falsely claims Bill Ayers is ‘a convicted terrorist’

I could turn Media Nation into a full-time Howie Carr Watch, and I don’t want to do that. But it seems worth pointing out that Howie’s description today of Bill Ayers as “a convicted Weatherman terrorist” is — oh, how shall I put this? — false.

As for Carr’s claim that Ayers ghostwrote Obama’s autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” if you Google around you’ll see that Ayers once joked about it and thereby ignited many heated imaginations on the right. Take my word for it: it’s not worth it.

Howie misspells name, mocks legislator for misspelling name

Note to Howie Carr: When mocking someone for misspelling a state legislator’s name, try extra hard not to misspell the name of a congresswoman. It’s Kuster, with a “K.”

Whitey Bulger plays unfavorites in the press

James_Whitey_Bulger_capturedA few days ago we learned that Whitey Bulger had named Boston Globe reporter Shelley Murphy, Globe columnist Kevin Cullen, Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr and former Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill as possible witnesses in his federal trial.

Today we learn the likely reason: the five, all of whom have written books about Bulger’s murderous ways, might be barred from attending the trial if Judge Denise Casper rules that potential witnesses must be kept out of the courtroom.

Murphy writes that her paper has asked Casper to allow her and Cullen to attend the trial on the grounds that they are the Globe’s leading experts on the Bulger case, having covered it since the 1980s. She reports that prosecutors have called Bulger’s witness list a ploy to keep out certain media and non-media witnesses.

In the Herald, Laurel Sweet quotes Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Kelly as saying, “It’s not a real witness list. He’s just putting names on there in order to keep them out of the courtroom.”

Let’s hope Judge Casper refuses to go along with this travesty.

Was Ordway firing more about ratings — or money?

Yes, as a matter of fact, I am old enough to remember Glenn Ordway as the color man back when the legendary Johnny Most was doing Celtics play-by-play.

I have nothing especially profound to say about Ordway’s departure from WEEI Radio (AM 850), a station he helped build into a sports powerhouse and that is now lagging in the ratings behind relative newcomer WBZ-FM (98.5 FM), better known as the Sports Hub. I’m only pointing out the obvious by observing that if this was all about the ratings, then no one is safe, starting with John Dennis and Gerry Callahan.

The one thing I’d keep an eye on is whether the move to dump Ordway was about money as much as it was about ratings. Marc Ganis, a sports business consultant based in Chicago, tells Matt Stout of the Boston Herald that Ordway’s salary — $500,000, down from $1 million a couple of years ago — was seriously out of whack with what local stations pay these days. Chad Finn of The Boston Globe reports that Ordway’s replacement, Mike Salk, is expected to make about $100,000.

We’ve already seen the dismantling of political talk radio in Boston. WTKK (96.9 FM) recently switched to music. WRKO (AM 680), which, like WEEI, is owned by Entercom, has cut way back over the years, to the point at which afternoon host Howie Carr is the station’s only highly paid star. The one exception to the downsizing trend on the commercial dial is Dan Rea’s evening show on WBZ (AM 1030).

Sports talk starts from a much higher ratings base than political talk, so perhaps Entercom is willing to spend some money to get WEEI back in the game. But it’s not only about ratings these days. It used to be that if you put up the numbers, the advertising would come rolling in. The ad business has changed considerably in recent years, and it’s not that simple anymore. There are plenty of non-radio options for people to listen to in their cars these days.

Ordway is talking about pursuing Internet options, and I wish him well. The challenge is that Internet radio doesn’t make money, and is generally used to promote something else. Consider the city’s two online alternative-music outlets. WFNX.com and RadioBDC exist to extend the brands of The Phoenix and the Globe’s Boston.com site, respectively. I don’t think anyone expects them to become profit-generating monsters.

As for the battle between WEEI and the Sports Hub, it could be that the most interesting sports talk you’ll hear over the next few weeks and months will be about the stations, not what’s on them.

Photo (cc) by uzi978 and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

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