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Chuck Turner tears into media 'criminals'
By adamg on Mon, 11/24/2008 - 2:41pm
On the steps of City Hall, Chuck Turner is saying he can't talk about his criminal case on the advice of his lawyers. But he can talk about the press:
I am not being judged by jury of my peers. I am being judged by the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, Fox News, Channel 5, Channel 7, etc., etc., etc. News outlets that would not cover my work as a city councilor are now knocking at my door almost every hour, demanding that I speak to them as if I have some responsibility to their bosses. That is absurd! Their behavior has been so obtrusive, so offensive, so oppressing, that my wife and I yesterday had to call the police department to give us protection from the press! Channel 5, people, would not leave my porch even when the police came! ... Once the police were gone, they came again. They are criminals! Why aren't they being arrested? ...
I will not sit back silently and allow my reputation that I struggled to build for 45 years to be ripped to shreds by employees of rich media corporation owners who have one desire and that is to silence anybody who is willing to speak up about oppression in this city, in this state, in this country.
Also, Maureen Feeney is a meanie who is attempting to strip him of his constitutional rights by taking away his committee chairmanships:
How can she strip me of my power as a committee chair especially of education and human rights without saying I know you're guilty Councilor Turner? How does she know I'm guilty?
And then he looked at reporters:
If you can stand in front of my house 12 to 14 hours a day harrassing me and my wife ... then you have a responsibility to ask Councilor Feeney why she has determined that we are guilty.
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Comments
Chuc avail
I'm so psyched you're live blogging this. It's fabulous.
Twas cool that ...
Channel 4 was showing it live (Channel 5, as well, I guess).
But Turner is absolutely right that the media has shown little interest in his work before, although to be fair, they've shown little interest in the city council as a whole, so they weren't singling him out.
Communications. Boston City Council public information.
The problematical people of our Boston City Council are the staff director, Council City Messenger, the City Clerk and the Assistant City Clerk, Council City Stenographer. There are a hundred or so staff budgeted to Council offices. The key people, staff director, Council City Messenger, City Clerk, Assistant City Clerk, Council City Stenographer haven't provided good leadership with respect to sunshine open public meetings principles, freedom of information FOI public records principles of open government. Routinely citizens enquiries are deflected for Council public information. It's the Council communications that need to be updated for the times using what is to them these new technologies, wiki templates, blog templates at http://cityofboston.gov/citycouncil
hey zak
Something tells me at this time Chuck Turner isn't too concerned about templating meeting minutes. But good luck getting through to him anyway.
I hear the Museum of Science
Has a pretty cool stegosaurus now.
It's fun to find out
It's fun to find out what makes an ocean wave wave!
What makes an ocean wave wave?
Throw a stenographer in and watch the fun!
Hey, whatever happened to those two tubes they used to have where you could see that feathers and rocks both fell at the same rate? In a vacuum.
Or for that matter, the tic-tac-toe playing computer, which they kept long (like years) after it lost its novelty.
This is the Captain speaking. Come in, Earth!
I'm surprised that the radio light wall (with the thin narrow strips of lights that worked kind of like a VU meter) stayed around for so long, even after half the lights didn't quite work right and the audio was muffled.
It was like the Museum just said "Well, we don't have any good replacement yet, might as well just keep it around."
Draw your own local politico parallels here.
Give them credit
A couple years ago, they finally put a little sign up at the end of the math timeline indicating that time did not, in fact, stop in 1974.
Close (no, not really)
No, it's a triceratops. But it is cool.
I knew it was coming...
This summer I started my vacation standing in line at South Station in front of the woman whose son was at Logan, trying to get his triceratops out of Customs.
Chuck Turner interview from 1974, on WGBH TV
Chuck Turner interview from 1974, on WGBH TV
and another from 1983
still more from the WGBH archives
Ahhh... so Chuck was in
Ahhh... so Chuck was in favor of the City of Mandela. Imagine a City of Boston without a majority of its former black residents. No Roxbury, north Dorchester and South End students in the Boston school system. That's the Boston Mel King and Our Chuck wanted. That would have been a very interesting experiment.
Oh, yeah, that's why
Not to mention how they want to silence anybody who is willing to speak up and let people know about cultural practices vis-a-vis shoveling. See, it's not like Chuckie can't shovel, but shoveling the white stuff is for white people...
Herald beats Globe
Turner blasts media in bribery scandal on BostonHerald.com.
Nothing yet on Boston.com.
The Globe's here
Under pressure from Turner, City Council cancels meeting.
See part of his rally
NECN's posted a piece, although not the part about Channel 5 camping out on his front porch, or the part about why he had his fly unzipped at 4:30 this morning as he tried to flee some reporter.
Dear sir,
You lost your committee chairmanship because the Council decides who gets to run its committees. It has required that those who do run its committees are not indicated in federal investigations. If anyone else who chairs a committee had been implicated in a crime directly relating to the very nature of our politics, you can bet good money that they would also quickly lose their chaired position. If you don't like it, then you shouldn't do things that could even appear to be an impropriety of such a high level.
Signed,
The rest of us, who aren't able to feign moral outrage with a straight face the way you can.
I wuz there
This was a show I couldn't miss. The best part was that there was a schizophrenic who was quite perceptively and loudly riffing on the whole thing in poetic style. The thin line between genius and madness.
About 300 participants. Could not hear much of Turner, because there was no loudspeaker, only press microphones, and I wanted to stay back and out of camera range. One bystander said "Pay him some money, he'll speak louder" and got some glares from the supporters. There were a couple of seriously whacko people with signs alleging conspiracies - if anyone deserved the moniker "moonbat," they did. Most of the supporters seemed to be long-time constituents, though.
From the press release passed out: "I have only one objective in life-the liberation of my people."
He was going to have the crowd follow him into the Council, if Feeney hadn't cancelled the hearing on his status.
He will have another rally in front of his office on Wednesday at 10 am.
Critic gives thumb's down to Turner's theater of the absurd
Mike Ball was also at the rally, explains why Turner reminded him of Abe Simpson and why he thinks Turner blew it:
Chuck Turner first person in history to take VB seriously
OK, so the open-fly incident? Turner was responding to a crack by Channel 25's alleged morning funnyman.
I wish him the best of luck
He is a buffoon, who can forget the "Iraq rape pictures" incident, and the word on the street for years was that he took money for help on zoning variances.
That being said, the feds have those harsh sentencing guidelines and will try to hammer him much more than he probably deserves.
I didn't know he was 68, shit, I'd leave the country if I were him.
Member of the Media Elite admits his guilt
David Wade at Channel 4 comes clean: