Eric Moskowitz’s Boston Globe interview with the Tsarnaev brothers’ carjacking victim is just astonishing — detailed, full of suspense (even though we know the outcome) and tautly written. And the Globe’s Kevin Cullen continues to show why he has emerged as the voice of the city following the Boston Marathon bombings.
Tag: Kevin Cullen Page 2 of 3
Update: This, by Northeastern’s Matt Collette, is much better than my tweets.
Shelley Murphy has been chasing the notorious gangster James “Whitey” Bulger since she was a young reporter at the Boston Herald. Now a Boston Globe reporter, she and Globe columnist Kevin Cullen are the authors of a new book, “Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice” (Norton).
Murphy, who graduated from Northeastern one year after I did (I won’t say when), spoke on campus today before a packed room in Snell Library. She shared some great stories — some funny, some harrowing. I live-tweeted the event, and offer some of what she said below.
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311870223370293248
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311871180791492609
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311871905764368384
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311872240541126656
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311872735984881664
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311873657674797056
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311874171837763584
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311874616530440193
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311874863616901120
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311875282128736256
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311875896795611137
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311876370634506240
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311877377313607680
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311877749247725568
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311878209052504065
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311878699102384131
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311879072173150208
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311879413358813184
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311879757354659842
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311880287174942720
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311881484703236096
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311882202449321984
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311882756315545601
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311883065712594944
https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/311884104545214464
Rick Edmonds
Earlier this month, before the New York Times Co. announced it was putting The Boston Globe up for sale for the second time in four years, Poynter Institute business analyst Rick Edmonds sat down with Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab for the lab’s weekly podcast, “Press Publish.”
Toward the end of their nearly hour-long conversation, Benton asked Edmonds which newspapers he thought had the brightest prospects over the next few years. Edmonds responded that he could think of four major metros that were getting it right: the Globe, the Seattle Times, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Tampa Bay Times — formerly and still better known as the St. Petersburg Times.
(It should be noted that Poynter owns the Tampa Bay Times, although I think anyone would point to that paper as one model for how to do it right.)
What Edmonds meant: the four papers had done a better job than most of maintaining the quality and depth of their journalism while at the same time achieving some measure of success financially. Earlier in the podcast, Edmonds voiced his enthusiasm for flexible online paywalls such as the Globe’s (now becoming less flexible).
As another prominent newspaper analyst, Ken Doctor, observes, a lot of newspapers are likely to be sold in the months ahead. The business has recovered slightly since the depths of 2009 and prices are low. Of course, prices are low because the long-term prospects for newspapers remain grim. Still, there are no doubt a number of prospective owners who have enough money and ego to think that they will be the great exception.
Seen in that light, the Globe is a prime property that can be acquired for an attractive price. “The Globe isn’t going anywhere,” Globe columnist Kevin Cullen writes. “It’s changing owners.”
Republished by permission of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, where this article first appeared. Thanks to my friend Harvey for making this available to readers of Media Nation.
By Harvey A. Silverglate
Some lawyers are joking when they refer to the Moakley Courthouse as “the House of Pain.” I’m not.
The ill-considered prosecution leading to the suicide of computer prodigy Aaron Swartz is the most recent in a long line of abusive prosecutions coming out of the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston, representing a disastrous culture shift. It sadly reflects what’s happened to the federal criminal courts, not only in Massachusetts but across the country.
It’s difficult for lawyers to step back and view the larger picture of the unflattering system from which we derive our status and our living. But we have an ethical obligation to criticize the legal system when warranted.
Who else, after all, knows as much about where the proverbial bodies are buried and is in as good a position to tell truth to power as members of the independent bar?
Yet the palpable injustices flowing regularly out of the federal criminal courts have by and large escaped the critical scrutiny of the lawyers who are in the best position to say something. And judges tend not to recognize what to outsiders are serious flaws, because the system touts itself as the best and fairest in the world.
Since the mid-1980s, a proliferation of vague and overlapping federal criminal statutes has given federal prosecutors the ability to indict, and convict, virtually anyone unfortunate enough to come within their sights. And sentencing guidelines confer yet additional power on prosecutors, who have the discretion to pick and choose from statutes covering the same behavior.
This dangerous state of affairs has resulted in countless miscarriages of justice, many of which aren’t recognized as such until long after unfairly incarcerated defendants have served “boxcar-length” sentences.
Aaron Swartz was a victim of this system run amok. He was indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a notoriously broad statute enacted by Congress seemingly to criminalize any use of a computer to do something that could be deemed bad.
As Harvard Law School Internet scholar Lawrence Lessig has written for The Atlantic: “For 25 years, the CFAA has given federal prosecutors almost unbridled discretion to bully practically anyone using a computer network in ways the government doesn’t like.”
Swartz believed that information on the Internet should be free to the extent possible. He entered the site operated by JSTOR, a repository of millions of pages of academic articles available for sale, and downloaded a huge cache. He did not sell any, and while it remains unclear exactly how or even if he intended to make his “information should be free” point, no one who knew Swartz, not even the government, thought he was in it to make money.
Therefore, JSTOR insisted that criminal charges not be brought.
U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz obscured that point when announcing the indictment. “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, whether you take documents, data or dollars, and whether its to feed your children or for buying a new car” she said, failing to recognize the most basic fact: that Swartz neither deprived the owners of the articles of their property nor made a penny from his caper.
Given The Boston Globe’s past favorable coverage of U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, I’m heartened to see how aggressively the paper is covering her conduct in the investigation of the late Internet activist Aaron Swartz.
Today the Globe fronts a story by Shelley Murphy about some repulsive tweets posted by Ortiz’s husband, IBM executive Thomas Dolan, in which he defended his wife and lashed out against Swartz’s grieving parents. Dolan’s Twitter feed has since disappeared, but BuzzFeed posted what I can only hope is the worst of them Tuesday.
Murphy’s story follows an angry piece by Globe columnist Kevin Cullen on Tuesday. Cullen wrote:
The argument about whether prosecutors should have been insisting that Swartz, who had written openly and movingly about his struggle with depression, serve at least six months in prison is not an academic question. It is a question about proportionality and humanity, and on both fronts the office of US Attorney Carmen Ortiz and the prosecutors who handled this case, Steve Heymann and Scott Garland, failed miserably.
For too long Ortiz has led a charmed existence, using and abusing the power of her office in order to burnish her law-and-order credentials. In 2011 The Boston Globe Magazine went so far as to name her its “Bostonian of the Year.”
Ortiz is not to blame for the suicide of a young man who had long struggled with depression. Nevertheless, her insistence that he serve prison time was absurd given the nature of his offense. Now we’ve lost a brilliant, creative thinker whose greatest contributions were yet to come.
Correction: Updated to fix Thomas Dolan’s name.
With our television set broken, I’ve been cruising around for the best video coverage of Whitey Bulger. I think I’ve done a lot better with my laptop than I would have in front of the TV.
Lots of good stuff, but this one is particularly must-watch: Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen and former Globe reporter Dick Lehr talking about the FBI warning Cullen that Bulger might walk into his living room and “blow [his] brains out” around the time the Globe was revealing Bulger’s corrupt relationship with that agency.
“It wasn’t exactly an idle threat,” Cullen says. “I lived in South Boston. I was well-known in that community, especially by people of Mr. Bulger’s ilk.”
Paul Levy, president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is one of the Boston area’s great managers and leaders of the past generation. So I’m not surprised — as Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen reports — that he earned a standing ovation when he suggested that high-paid people at the hospital sacrifice in order to save low-paid jobs.
In the endlessly depressing category of “you can’t make this stuff up,” the New York Times today runs an op-ed by erstwhile Boston Globe columnist Muammar Gaddafi, the terrorist-coddling, human rights-abusing dictator of Libya.
Gaddafi has a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: wipe Israel off the map. Funny, but I somehow knew he was going to say that.
The Globe’s Kevin Cullen weighs in usefully on Gaddafi today, and Universal Hub wraps up the whole miserable affair.
Note: Gaddafi, Qaddafi and Khadafy are all the same person. I’m going with Gaddafi because that’s how the Globe recently spelled it.
Because I’m feeling charitable this evening, I will assume that Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen knew better when he identified Delaware as a former Confederate state. After all, Adam Gaffin missed it, too. But not Ron Newman. (Thanks to Media Nation reader B.C.)
You don’t need me to tell you what a heartbreaking story Kevin Cullen offers us in today’s Boston Globe on the death of Rakan Hassan. I’ll just add this: the original series on Rakan, by Cullen and photographer Michele McDonald, was so moving, so deeply reported and deftly executed, that I’ve exposed several classes of journalism students to it.