Tag: New Hampshire Union Leader

NH Supreme Court throws out libel suit brought by man accused of espousing white supremacy

New Hampshire Statehouse in Concord. Photo (cc) 2011 by Teemu008.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court has ruled that an op-ed piece published in the New Hampshire Union Leader claiming that a resident of Hanover had espoused “white supremacist ideology” was not libelous. The reason: the writer was expressing an opinion rather than making a factual assertion.

According to Grace McFadden of New Hampshire Public Radio, the plaintiff, Daniel Richards, sued the Union Leader and op-ed writer Robert Azzi for a piece that Azzi wrote in 2021 lumping Richards with former Republican politico Newt Gingrich and several others. Azzi castigated them for trying to keep anti-racist instructional materials out of the public schools. (Note: NHPR renders the plaintiff’s name as “Richard,” but it appears as “Richards” in the original op-ed and in court documents.) The passage at issue:

Desperate to stay bonded to America’s original sins of slavery and genocide of indigenous peoples, Gingrich, Frank Edelblut, Dan Richards, Mike Moffett, Joseph Mendola, and others have disseminated, across multiple media platforms, white supremacist ideology to keep Americans from learning an unexpurgated American history from its 1619 origins alongside the dominant White 1776 narrative.

Richards appealed to the state’s highest court after losing at a lower level. Richards had attracted Azzi’s attention by submitting public testimony in favor of a bill prohibiting some classroom discussions about race, according to the NHPR story. The bill passed but was later thrown out by a federal court judge. The state Supreme Court said in its ruling:

Reading the op-ed as a whole, we agree with the trial court that the op-ed merely expressed the author’s political opinions and beliefs that he individually held about the plaintiff and others not based on any undisclosed defamatory facts.

Azzi and the Union Leader were assisted in their defense by way of an amicus brief from the ACLU of New Hampshire, the New England First Amendment Coalition and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders.

It’s a basic part of libel law that opinion is protected speech. Although it’s possible to run afoul of the law by stating a false fact within an opinion article, opinions are not by themselves actionable. As an illustration of that principle, the Supreme Court approvingly quoted the ruling by the lower court, which found that Azzi’s op-ed could not be found libelous because “whether a statement espouses white supremacist ideology is a matter of socio-political opinion that differs between individuals.” Yet the very fact that this case has been hanging around since 2021 shows how even futile legal actions can chill free speech and the free press.

As Gilles Bissonnette, legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, put it in a statement: “People and the press — despite pressure and intimidation from those with financial resources who vehemently disagree with them — have a First Amendment right to voice their opinion without fear of litigation from those who seek to stifle criticism.”

Richards also sued for invasion of privacy, and that claim was thrown out as well.

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Emulating its R.I. strategy, The Boston Globe next year will move into N.H.

The State Capitol in Concord, N.H. Photo (cc) 2010 by Jimmy Emerson, DMV.

There was news in Mark Shanahan’s Boston Globe story on the decline of the once-great Providence Journal under Gannett ownership: the Globe is opening a New Hampshire bureau sometime in 2023, a move similar to what it’s done in Rhode Island.

At one time the Globe took New England coverage seriously, even publishing a Sunday section called New Hampshire Weekly. On a recent episode of our podcast about local news, “What Works,” Nancy West, executive director of the investigative news organization InDepthNH, said she would welcome a Globe comeback in the Granite State.

“I loved it when the Globe came up and was doing important reporting,” she said, citing in particular the paper’s coverage of a cardiac surgeon at Catholic Medical Center in Manchester whose horrendous malpractice record was obscured by his status as an operating-room star. “Was I a little jealous? My first instinct is jealousy, of course,” West told us. “But then I’m just really pleased that the word is getting out.” She added: “I would love to have the Globe come back. I would love to see it because we just need talented reporters on the street. And I think competition is healthy.”

Unlike Rhode Island, New Hampshire’s two major daily newspapers, the New Hampshire Union Leader and the Concord Monitor, are independently owned. Both, however, have endured significant cuts to their reporting capacity in recent years. As West says, another news organization focused on the state would be welcome.

As with Rhode Island, New Hampshire is an opportunity for the Globe to sell more digital subscriptions without the hassle of bygone days, when it was necessary to truck papers across New England.

So where might the Globe go next? Vermont strikes me as a stretch. Connecticut? Probably not. Much of the state roots for the Yankees, and Hearst CT has a growing digital operation. Maine? Possibly, although the Globe has collaborated on some stories with the Portland Press Herald. I’m not sure they’d want to compete. If they do, David Dahl, a former top editor at the Globe who’s now editor of the nonprofit Maine Monitor, told us on “What Works” that he’d love to work with his old paper. “We’re open to any partnership discussions that we would have,” he said, “and if they want to affiliate with us, they’re more than more than welcome.”

The most logical move for the Globe after New Hampshire would be an expanded presence in Central Massachusetts — ironic given that Globe owner John Henry acquired the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester when he bought the Globe in 2013 only to sell it to out-of-state interests. The T&G eventually landed in the hands of GateHouse Media, which merged with Gannett; like most of Gannett’s properties, the T&G has been gutted.

At a time when the decline of advertising and fears of recession are leading to cuts even at once high-flying newspapers like The Washington Post, it’s heartening to see that the Globe continues to focus on expansion.

William Loeb’s stepdaughter says the toxic publisher was also a child molester

William Loeb in 1974. Photo via the Spencer Grant Collection / Boston Public Library.

The stepdaughter of William Loeb has accused the infamously toxic right-wing Manchester Union Leader publisher of sexually molesting her when she was just 7 years old. Nackey Gallowhur Scagliotti, 76, also said that Loeb sexually abused his 6-year-old daughter, the late Edie Tomasko.

“I am now in my seventies and, when I am gone, there may well be nobody left with a first-hand account of Loeb’s abuse,” Scagliotti wrote in a statement that was reported by Loeb’s old paper, since renamed the New Hampshire Union Leader. “It took me many years to learn this one true thing about family dynamics: when dark secrets are kept they have a caustic effect, not just for those who were participants or bystanders at the time, but across generations.”

In response, the Union Leader has removed Loeb’s name from its masthead. This is a huge deal. Even though Loeb died 40 years ago, the paper had never repudiated the caustic hate he espoused on his pages, and its editorial page remains an important (if toned-down) voice of New Hampshire conservatism. As the editorial puts it:

William Loeb has nothing to do with the current New Hampshire Union Leader, but he has much to do with its history. Loeb famously said, “I don’t care what people think of me, just so long as they think.” We are certainly thinking now.

We know now that William Loeb is not a man to be celebrated.

My Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman, who wrote an excellent biography of Loeb’s widow and successor as publisher, Nackey Scripps Loeb, called “Political Godmother,” tweeted out a thread that offers some further insights:

William Loeb had such disdain for New Hampshire that he wouldn’t even live there — he lived in a mansion on Boston’s North Shore. Despite his patrician background, he was a racist from the old school, once publishing his birth certificate on the front page of the Union Leader in an attempt to prove he wasn’t Jewish. He also published a headline that read “Kissinger the Kike?” For more on Loeb, I recommend Kevin Cash’s 1976 book “Who the Hell Is William Loeb?” Among other things, Cash hints that Loeb may have had Nackey Loeb’s first husband murdered. Who knows? But it seems significant that Cash was not sued for libel.

In 1972, Loeb published a letter from then-President Richard Nixon’s dirty-tricks operation falsely claiming that Sen. Ed Muskie, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, had poked fun at “Canucks,” a derogatory term for French-Americans, a large ethnic group in New Hampshire. Muskie showed up outside the Union Leader’s headquarters and raged against Loeb — and, depending on whose account you believe, started to cry. Muskie’s campaign unraveled after that, leading to the nomination of Nixon’s preferred opponent, Sen. George McGovern.

The ugly tale told by Nackey Scagliotti adds to the Loeb lore, and certainly not in a good way. According to the Union Leader account, as well as conversations I’ve had with Meg, the story had been making the rounds for years, but couldn’t be pinned down as long as Scagliotti was unwilling to go on the record.

Now she finally has.

WHAV Radio takes note of the 200th anniversary of The Haverhill Gazette

The Haverhill Gazette in the early 1900s. Photo via WHAV.

The Haverhill Gazette marked its 200th anniversary in 2021, and WHAV Radio has taken note of the occasion in a lengthy tribute. The Gazette, an independently owned daily for most of its existence, launched WHAV in 1947 under the auspices of a publisher who was distantly related to the Taylor family, which then owned The Boston Globe. The station was revived about 15 years ago and converted to a nonprofit, low-power FM station (it also streams) by local advertising executive Tim Coco, who continues to run it as an independent source of news.

Coco and David Goudsward trace the Gazette from its founding in 1821 to the present day. I had no idea that Haverhill’s favorite son, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, was the editor for a brief period in the 1830s.

A long series of events that led to the shrinkage of the Gazette began in 1957, when William Loeb, the notorious right-wing publisher of the Manchester Union Leader (now the New Hampshire Union Leader), took advantage of a strike at the Gazette by starting a competing paper, the Haverhill Journal. Coco and Goudsward write that the Gazette was sold to a consortium comprising The Eagle-Tribune, then of Lawrence, now of North Andover; The Sun of Lowell; and Vermont’s Burlington Free Press.

John Greenleaf Whittier. Image via the National Portrait Gallery.

Although the arrangement somehow managed to pass antitrust muster, I’m old enough to recall stories that The Eagle-Tribune and The Sun weren’t going to let the Gazette get too good. The Gazette changed hands several more times and in 1998 was sold to The Eagle-Tribune. Today, the Gazette is a weekly. Both the Gazette and The Eagle-Tribune, which remains a daily, are owned by CNHI, a corporate newspaper chain based in Montgomery, Alabama. As Coco and Goudsward write of the Gazette:

It is better off than the thousands of newspapers that have succumbed in recent years, but still a shadow of its former self — the victim, first of consolidation that reduced it from a robust daily to a weekly, and then of the loss of its advertising base to electronic media.

For several years, I followed news coverage in Haverhill quite closely, as it was the first community chosen by the Banyan Project in which to launch a cooperatively owned news organization, to be known as Haverhill Matters. The idea never came to fruition despite years of planning. During those same years, Coco was building WHAV into a vital source of local news and information, both over the air and online.

Labor unrest hits the Union Leader

Manchester Newspaper Guild members on the picket line.

Some serious labor unrest has hit the  New Hampshire Union Leader, as the Manchester Newspaper Guild voted 76-0 on Wednesday to turn down a contract proposal. According to the Guild, management has threatened to lay off six employees and implement a 10 percent pay cut if the two sides can’t reach an agreement by Monday.

The Guild claims that management “has demanded an across-the-board, 10-percent reduction in Guild salaries, cuts in sick time, a longer work week, the revocation of protections for full-time jobs, and the elimination of unpaid union leave, among other givebacks.”

Tony Schinella of Patch recently reported that the Guild picketed a Rick Perry event and wants all presidential candidates seeking an endorsement from the Union Leader to ask that management “bargain respectfully with its unions.”

The Union Leader does not appear to have covered the contract dispute in its own pages. Management is, of course, welcome to respond in the comments.

The photo, which accompanies the Patch story linked above, was provided to Patch by the Newspaper Guild.