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How an Orchard Gardens student put one over a Globe columnist
By adamg on Thu, 07/04/2013 - 11:53pm
If you subscribe to the Globe, you may have seen Yvonne Abraham's inspirational column on Sunday about the 15-year-old Nigerian immigrant at the Orchard Gardens School in Roxbury who became a champion javelin thrower because of how he used to use spears to catch zebras.
Only problem, as Robert A. Blewett, a professor who spent time in Nigeria as a Fulbright Scholar, reports: There are no zebras in Nigeria:
Yep, being a bright 15-year-old boy with a wry sense of humor gave him a leg up on Ms. Abraham. He put her on, dangled the hook and she went for it. As a sophisticated Bostonian, I'm sure she's seen all those National Geographic specials; Africa is chocked full of zebras and cheetahs. Kenya and Nigeria must be pretty much the same thing. ...
BTW, I wouldn't worry about Mr. Suleiman. He'll do just fine. A bright kid like him should succeed at just about anything he puts his mind to.
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Comments
Par for the course
Whitey kept the drugs out of Southie (Barnicle). Martin Richard ran out onto Boylston Street to congratulate his dad on finishing the marathon (Cullen). Martha Coakley is ahead by 10% (City Desk). Complete farce. New owners should apologize and clean house.
"cleaning house" is part of the problem
Seems they fired all the people who used to catch grammar and spelling mistakes, then sacked all the fact-checkers.
Here's another Globe columnist who continually gets the facts wrong: http://dankennedy.net/2009/01/28/jacoby-joins-broo...
What else do you expect
from the idiot the Globe hired to provide "balance"? Jacoby only exists to rile up the left base of the Globe with his moronic column.
Meanwhile, as of five minutes ago, Boston.com is featuring what's open and closed on the Fourth (!) and not one, but two links for the same story on Mass levying 26 million in securities fines.
Hire that Student
I'm sure the kid could produce quite the column for the Globe - make Abraham his fact checker, though.
I've noticed that the Glob is not alone in fielding a pile of "token" columnists - NYT has this problem as well, although that's two peas in a rotten pod.
Blessed are the cheesemakers.
Par? The Globe reports
Par? The Globe reports probably 5,000 facts a day, and you can name three that were wrong over several years. You call that a complete farce? If any other company, or government, or individual had to keep track of their errors and publicize them, you'd see what a farce actually is and how most people should simply wear gags all the time.
Barnicle
Someone should spend an afternoon looking up Barnicle's columns about Whitey Bulger over the years. Barnicle sucked up shamelessly to Bill Bulger and John Connolly, but his praise for Whitey has been greatly exaggerated — mainly by Howie Carr. This Barnicle discovery is slightly off topic, but it's an example of Barnicle's alleged love for Whitey being proven wrong.
Maybe Barnicle wrote a column at some point claiming that Whitey kept the drugs out of South Boston, but I've never seen it.
The Coakley poll! The only thing that proves is that Fish listens to Howie. The poll was conducted by the respected UNH Survey Center and was taken several weeks before the election. What proof does Fish have that the poll wasn't accurate at the time it was taken?
More Barnicle
Barnicle wrote this on Jan. 10, 1995: "This notion that he [Whitey Bulger] served as some great protector of the neighborhood — a guy who singlehandedly kept the curse of cocaine, crack and heroin from the streets of South Boston — is a myth. Part of his profits came from the agony of others too weak to resist the lure of drug money or the escape of the narcotic itself." I have searched back to 1980, and nothing else comes up.
No surprise there....
As you know, the animus between Carr and Barnicle goes back years. Mainly, in my opinion, because Barnicle has always been accepted by the well heeled in this town as one of their own, where Carr has always been seen as a hack and a mob groupie. Many were the mornings I watched Barnicle doing power breakfasts at the old Ritz Cafe, then having the doorman keep his Range Rover in front so he could get out to the ghetto quicker to write those tales of the downtrodden for people in Newton to read and tsk-tsk over.
As I've stated before, I can only imagine how much it burns Howie's ass to see Barnicle on Morning Joe everyday. How Carr must hate dragging his ass up to Keene and Bangor to push his shitty books at his "Evening's of Slime", while Barnicle enjoys that TV money and laughs at the way he was able to reinvent himself after being proven to be the plagiarist he is. And as much as I despise Barnicle, I really don't think you'd ever see him paying half a book advance to a low life murderer like John Martorano, never mind continued points.
Wow
This is maybe the greatest comment ever.
Serious question
Fish: Do you have any documentation showing that Howie accused Barnicle of saying Whitey kept the drugs out of Southie? I know I've heard him say it. So do you. But now I'm being challenged, and I can't find anything.
Never mind
Found it. http://audio.wrko.com/a/76805784/blood-money.htm
Careful when you listen to that clip...
Rational people like yourself might be affected by being in such close proximity to such a large field of bullshit. Listening to him mutter and stumble through his various repeating of the phrase "you know" as he tries to convince rational people that his deal with Martorano was a service to history, will further convince you that this morally bankrupt "author" is about as street smart as your average Deerfield Academy graduate.
This clip is even funnier when you hear the fact that he throws it out to the audience to criticize him, begs the audience to give him grief, then has his producer only allow the usual cadre of ancient white people to call in and tell him he did the right thing.
Here you go,Dan
And of course, Howie being the streetwise hard guy that he is, doesn't have the balls to mention Barnicle by name in print. He has, however, mentioned Barnicle by name several times on his show as having written that about Whitey.I guess he figures no one in Barnicle's close circle of friends listens to Howie's show. And as we all know, 90% of Carr's audience will be dead soon of natural causes.
Howie's "column" from 6/13/13:
Thanks!
That's even better than the audio clip I found.
Yvonne Abraham is one of my
Yvonne Abraham is one of my least favorite writers in the Globe. (Note how I called her a writer and not a journalist or reporter because she is neither of those things).
Yeah
She would come into where I used to work when an "incident" happened, fishing for insider info. Each time I told her to speak to our public info. contact. The next time, same thing.
She also always looks like she just woke up and had no idea what a hairbrush was.
Hoping to find the truth- poor, misguided soul!
Glad that you heroically referred her to the PR-bullshit-coverup department like a good corporate stooge, "each time.". Just kidding, Christopher- we all have to eat, right?
But seriously, where did you used to work that often had evil "incidents" occur? Surely you don't owe them your loyal silence now,as an ex-employee?
No, he doesn't, nor does he owe the reporter
Assuming you're dumb, and not just attempting to be super-meta-ironic: What should this person have done when a hack columnist comes sniffing around for some "lead"? Heroically give her information, and then just as heroically get fired?
(And how would it be "heroic" in the first place? Never mind, I don't want to know)
No. Here's how it works: When a leak is made-- leaving aside "official" leaks-- the leaker is often found out pretty quickly; whether or not that's a fireable offense (which it can be), that person's life can be made hellish pretty quickly.
It's also not that person's job to do Ms. Abraham's job for her, and more than a bit silly for Ms. Abraham to come back around to get denied a second (or more?) time; if this is how she develops contacts, it's not hard to see how she could taken by a 15-year-old on something you could fact check on Wikipedia.
Finally, as an added bonus: The incident(s) being investigated may well have just been vapor-- some "tip" phoned in by a disgruntled ex-employee/customer/competitor. Was this person obligated to explain that it's vapor, why it's vapor, etc.? (Just a rhetorical question-- no, they're not)
Second added bonus: That person might not leak something simply because doing so would fuck over someone on their team. This isn't "All the President's Men" or whatever fantasy you base your pathetic "we all have to eat" dig upon.
This is great...
Maybe this is less about how much the Globe sucks and more about how much this kid rocks? A 15-year old Nigerian sassing a posh(?)-Brit writer?
Cheer up folks. Focus on the good. I hope we'll hear more from Abubakar Suleiman doing things around Boston.
Put a column on the barby mate
she's Australian.
I stand corrected
Thanks for the clarification
Huge discussion of this
Huge discussion of this article over at Metafilter.
Paging Brian McGrory
The Great Hegemony is long over....
He does a weekly thing on Eagan and Braude, where he puffs and postures and acts like it is still 1978, and the Globe is the Kennedy's. Rather than 2013, when the Globe has become Oz. I think he'll give this story a good goddamned leaving along, as George V. Higgins would say.
Can we get Mike Barnicle back for one more plagiarized column? Or Chuck Turner, for more faked front page photos of US Service men abusing Iraqui women? A kind of victory lap from the past?
Assume much?
Why assume his stories were an intent to deceive? I don't think writer or student put as much thought into this as all the people (especially the idiots commenting on metafilter) so eager to use this story to preach about how smart they are or how clever they are or how they are above racism or could be better journalists than Globe writers. I think the story of the boy is inspiring and I don't care if he ever chucked a spear at a zebra or ran from a cheetah.
Yvonne Abraham
I worked with Yvonne at the Phoenix. Good reporter, good writer, bad day. We've all had them.