A few days ago, the Globe's metro desk filed a story that raised the question of whether a senior BPD commander was demoted because he dared to tangle with Tom Menino's son, a detective.
As John Carroll notes, the Globe editorial board yesterday waved its magisterial hand and dismissed the story completely:
Some see the mayor's heavy hand behind Perkins's fall.
The evidence suggests otherwise.
OK, so it's not like the reporters themselves were charging politics, they were just reporting on what people within the department were saying. Nothing wrong with the editorial board weighing the evidence and concluding politics weren't involved and Commissioner Ed Davis has the right to run his own department and the story was a complete waste of space.
What's interesting about the editorial, though, is that it makes two specific allegations against the demoted guy that weren't in the news story (co-authored, by the way, by Steven Kurkjian, who knows something about how to investigate things) - allegations that he was slow to set up some sort of database on warrants and that all the bad publicity over the Shephard Fairey ICA arrest was his fault.
When did the Globe editorial board get into the business of reporting? And did they call the guy up to give him a chance to rebut the charges?
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Comments
Agenda
By Todd
Fri, 10/16/2009 - 10:58am
Joan Vennochi even admitted in an interview on Jeff Santos' Show this week that the Globe has an agenda on the Mayor's Race and that it trickles down to the writers. The Globe wants a race here desperatly and after Menino doubled up Flaherty in the preliminaries the reporters have been eating up tips from Flaherty people and pumping out stories. The editorial board at least seems to be doing its job and reporting things that are closer to being true.
Agenda at the Globe? Yeah to keep Menino in power
By Sean H.
Fri, 10/16/2009 - 1:14pm
The agenda is that the Globe, being suburban focused (they killed tghe metro section in favor of sections on boston.com for small towns like Hingham and Wellesley. The Globe editors (it would be interesting to see how many of them actually live in Boston) are pro Menino because he is a suburban oriented mayor (car centric, chains, big box stores). He lives closer to Dedham than downtown Boston.
The globe always favors carburbia over the city, so it is no wonder that they are going to squelch anti-Menino news.
I'm not sure I agree
By FrancescaFordiani
Fri, 10/16/2009 - 2:07pm
I'm not a journalist, and certainly don't claim any special knowledge or insight into journalistic practices, but it seems to me that additional reporting on this story in the editorial pages is not entirely appropriate. Or seemly. Or something -- actually I'm not entirely sure what's not sitting right with me here exactly. As a reader, the message I'm get is, "hey, don't believe everything you read in our newspaper, our dumb reporters write whatever someone feeds them, and, oh, by the way, maybe we, the editorial board know more about this story than the reporters do."
As for the Globe's agenda -- it's to sell newspapers. Controvery and tight political races do that. At the same time, I think they have to play up controversy while avoiding angering the mayor too much, out of fear that they'll never get another interview from city hall about anything ever again (as long as he's in office) if they piss him off too much. I've got to figure that Globe reporters and columnists are just as frustrated with the deflections and contradictions and general blather from city hall as the rest of us.
It was a little strange, no doubt.
By Dan Farnkoff
Fri, 10/16/2009 - 10:51pm
And immediately it occurred to me that Menino might have threatened a slander suit or something. But I don't know about that-more likely they just got an angry phone call or two from the Mayor and Davis. Noteworthy is the discrepancy in final outcomes for favored guerilla artist Fairey versus the draconian throttling visited upon the "Utah" woman (which sentence the Globe went out of its way to explicitly call for).