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

Tag: Michael Levenson

City workers can’t criticize Olympics. Or maybe they can.

There’s much more to be learned about this, obviously, but right now it’s unclear whether Boston city employees can or can’t criticize the Olympics bid.

Michael Levenson reports in The Boston Globe that Mayor Marty Walsh “signed a formal agreement with the United States Olympic Committee that bans city employees from criticizing Boston’s bid for the 2024 Summer Games.”

But Walsh says it doesn’t matter because it’s a “boilerplate” document. Or something. “I believe in free speech,” he added.

Will Globe and Herald go to war over sex registry story?

Deval Patrick

Gov. Deval Patrick. Photo (cc) 2008 by Alison Klein of WEBN News and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

This story may take another day or two to ripen. But Gov. Deval Patrick’s firing of two members of the Sex Offender Registry Board has all the ingredients of a major donnybrook between The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald.

Globe reporter Michael Levenson writes that Patrick fired the two officials in part because of their insistence that his brother-in-law register as a sex offender. The brother-in-law, Bernard Sigh, was convicted of raping his wife (Patrick’s sister) in 1993 and served a short prison sentence. The couple later reconciled, but the Herald made it an issue during Patrick’s first run for governor in 2006. Levenson writes:

Blaming the Herald and the Republican Party for the revelation, Patrick said the disclosure that his brother-in-law had been convicted of raping his wife, Patrick’s sister, more than a decade earlier in California “nearly destroyed their lives.”

In the Herald, Erin Smith and Matt Stout offer a similar account, including Patrick’s lambasting of their paper. A Herald editorial criticizes Patrick mainly for the week-long delay in explaining the reason for the two officials’ firing: “Eight years and multiple bureaucratic scandals in, how has this administration not figured out that honesty — from the outset — is the best policy?”

Finally, if you’d like to read a thorough account by a neutral reporter, I recommend Gin Dumcius of State House News Service. [Update: I don’t mean to imply that the Globe and Herald accounts today are not neutral; they both seem pretty straight. I simply mean that the two papers are rivals, and the Herald’s 2006 reporting may become an issue.]

So will this spark another chapter in the Hundred Years’ War between the Globe and the Herald? I think it mainly comes down to how vigorously Herald editors want to defend their paper’s 2006 reporting. As they say, stay tuned.

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