Normally, I find the Boston press does a decent job of covering campaigns. However, recent articles in the Boston Globe and its online edition has me wondering if they’re doing their jobs as journalists or, even worse, if there’s even a slight bit of bias for or against particular candidates in the Democratic primary.
For example, take the Globe’s ongoing analyses of candidate ads. They wrote up pieces on Healey’s and Reilly’s ads, with their critique of the former’s being far tamer than that of the latter’s. Then the Globe only provides a review of only one of Gabrieli’s ads, criticizing it as “vague” because it didn’t provide any details in its brief 15 seconds. The Globe essentially ignores the more substantive ad Gabrieli put out on education (again, “substantive” being a relative term because it’s still a brief piece of airtime to cram info into), an ad which introduced some of Gabrieli’s proposals to improve education.
Their coverage of Deval? This recent gem is supposed to pass as serious journalism? If so, where are the stories and posts about Reilly and Gabrieli stand-outs and meet-and-greets?
Here’s my beef. Deval takes one in the press earlier this year regarding his involvement with Ameriquest, but there’s been no other RECENT serious inquiry into his other corporate dealings? Meanwhile, Reilly and Gabrieli get repeatedly raked over the coals for their records while in office or in the private sector, or for other such things as vagueness in intro ads?
The press serves a purpose, which is to investigate and report what they find regardless of the benefit or detriment of the candidate. However, as of late, there seems to be an asymmetry to the Globe’s work, with it seemingly content to split hairs in order to get something even the slightest bit negative on some of the candidates. I hope the fact that one of its political columnists used to be employed by Deval’s campaign and that the Globe’s former ombudsman is now employed by Deval’s campaign is not a sign of potential collusion.
A few years ago, there was a referendum that proposed to eliminate the state income tax. It received about 45% of the vote. Globe coverage in advance of the election of this referendum, which would have had interesting…there’s a nice general word..effects if it had passed, before the election, was close to nonexistent.
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Globe coverage afterward focused on claiming that 9/20 of the electorate are morons–they used a more tactful word–who voted for this referendum but did not really mean it, the evidence that the voters are morons being that they disagreed with the Globe’s opinion of the consequences.
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Herald coverage is scattershot, though Howie Carr has his little list of corrupt politicians.
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One of the reasons that we have the entrenched political structure we do is that we do not have a functional, serious, large-circulation newspaper in eastern Massachusetts.
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George Phillies
http://www.phillies2…