Joan Vennochi’s Thursday column, entitled “Killer Coke’s charges go flat,” is quite the fascinating combination of target-hitting and boat-missing. Consider:
Remember the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth? In August 2004, that group of Bush-backing Vietnam veterans turned up the heat and condemned John Kerry as unfit for presidential duty. This August, Ray Rogers, the man behind the New York-based Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, is working to paint Deval Patrick as unfit to be governor of Massachusetts.
Wow – strong words! Vennochi, of course, isn’t the first to link Killer Coke’s anti-Deval Patrick campaign to the notorious “swift boaters” – that honor belongs to Ryan, with Lynne a close second. But her column is the first time someone not publicly committed to supporting Patrick for Governor – much less someone in the mainstream media – made the linkage. That’s quite a bold stand she’s taking.
And here, Vennochi is dead-on:
Rogers is supposedly a one-man attack band, so he is recruiting volunteers to help spread his anti-Coke, anti-Patrick message. Some would-be volunteers, he said, are connected to other Massachusetts political campaigns, although he declined to be specific. “We are getting calls from other candidate offices,” said Rogers. “… People want to be helpful.”
Does that make Rogers a tool of Patrick’s rivals? He says no. But it is hard to separate him from the opposition research that goes on during hot political campaigns. Who is paying for the leaflets and his Bay State travels? Who is behind this all-out effort to derail Patrick? Five labor union representatives who support Patrick yesterday sent a letter to the Office of Campaign and Political Finance requesting that Rogers be investigated for campaign finance law violations.
All excellent questions, Joan! One would almost think you’d been following BMG as we try to disentangle some of this. (And I can’t help asking: would it have killed Vennochi to at least mention that the local blogs played a role in getting this story to this point? I know the MSM isn’t too psyched about what we’re doing here, but come on.)
Vennochi then briefly describes the Killer Coke allegations, and then does everyone a great service by reprinting what Patrick actually said about this exact issue just a few months ago:
I happened to be at a Patrick event in Stoneham on May 15, when he was asked about the matter by someone in the audience. Patrick told his questioner, “We did investigate.” But, he said, “We could not establish a link between the company I worked for and the paramilitary.” (Coca-Cola lawyers argued at the time that it did not own and, therefore, did not control the bottling plants.) The case against Coca-Cola was dismissed and that “was the right legal outcome,” Patrick said in Stoneham. However, he said he was not satisfied with the legal outcome and told Coke’s CEO that “people want confidence in the brand.” He said that he subsequently “proposed and publicly pledged to send an independent arbiter to Colombia.” The company declined to launch an independent investigation and “that’s why I resigned,” Patrick said.
Excellent reporting. (And she works for the op-ed page!) Finally, someone in the media takes the time to set out Patrick’s position on this.
Then, unfortunately, the column goes a little off the rails:
Now, as a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Patrick is running as a populist who will stick up for the little guy. So, yes, Democratic primary voters must decide which best represents Patrick’s true heart and political gut: his current rhetoric or his corporate experience with the likes of Coca-Cola, Texaco, and Ameriquest. He should be held accountable for any inconsistencies in his story or positions. He was an advocate for civil and human rights in the early years of his legal career; from there, he obviously moved onto a more lucrative private-sector practice.
The problem with that paragraph is that is sets up an utterly false choice: either you’re a populist who believes in helping the “little guy,” or you have corporate experience with big companies. Obviously, the column implies, both can’t be true. Obviously, it implies, his “lucrative private sector practice” is not really ideologically compatible with his earlier civil rights work. But why should that be? What if what Patrick is saying about his corporate experience and his reasons for going to work for the likes of Coke, Texaco, and Ameriquest, is actually true? Some people who want to effect positive change choose to do so from the outside – by, for example, suing companies that they consider to be doing bad things. Others choose to work from the inside, believing that change of that sort may be slower in coming, but may, once achieved, be deeper and longer lasting. I’ve talked about this before. Anyway, the point is that regardless of whether you believe Patrick’s version of why he left Coke (and we’ve yet to see any information that calls that account into serious question), or why he worked for Texaco and sat on Ameriquest’s board, Vennochi’s broader point that working for big corporations and wanting to help people are basically incompatible is, IMHO, erroneous. It’s that kind of mistaken assumption that has led Democrats to be unduly distrustful of people who have succeeded in the private sector.
Ironically, at the very end of the column, Vennochi decries the very false choice that she set up only two paragraphs earlier.
In an interview with the Globe’s Frank Phillips, Patrick said, “People have to figure whether they want to call me a liberal loony or a corporate devil.”
Unfortunately, Patrick’s comment echoes the sad extremes of modern campaign rhetoric. The truth about most people is almost always somewhere in between. But political attack campaigns care less about truth and light — and more about generating enough heat to burn and destroy.
On that, Vennochi is absolutely right. It’s too bad that she played right into those “sad extremes” two paragraphs earlier.
I’m just not sure it’s accurate. I’ve been staying away from this issue, because Deval had it right when he said, “People have to figure whether they want to call me a liberal loony or a corporate devil.”
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In the past I’ve encouraged Patrick to play his corporate card and give the moderate swing voters a sense of balance. So I can’t fan the flames of this “corporate devil” message. No, my concerns about Deval lean towards the other concern.
over stated. Unless you’re using it as the tactic, not the previous event.
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It’s become something of a verb now…for anyone willing to lauch smear campaigns at a candidate with false or very muddied methods and facts.
Keep the heat on!
Some in the MSM see us, I think incorrectly, as competition. So it’s no surprise she doesn’t mention the blogs. She may also feel that she didn’t learn anything here. Inded, she may not even read or know about blogs in general and BMG in particular. I don’t think she is under any obligation to reference anyone except for the direct sources of her information, and we shouldn’t expect her, or anyone else, to do that. Then again, I ask, who would know that Rogers had a cat if not for BMG. That’s the kind of in-depth coverage we can bring to an issue, and I would have expected a cite from her if she had drawn Melvin into the discussion.
If I remember the broader context of that quote correctly, he was poking fun at people who were trying to do that to him. Even if I’m mistaken (and I don’t think I am, but I don’t have a link either) he still wouldn’t have said that as if he was asking people to make that choice…
Bob, I think you’re very wrong. If I did what Joan did in a paper, I’d get an F on it.
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Journalists have a responsibility to source their information, they can’t make it as if they’ve just discovered the idea. And I’m sorry, but I don’t just by she thought it up all on herself.
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I realize, in a column, it could get wieghty to put in all the information. However, she simply could have said “David so and so of Blue Mass Group, a popular left-wing Massachusetts blog, discovered…”
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She’d extend that courtesy to any professor, author of a book or non-Globe article.
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Heck, I couldn’t have gotten away with the stuff lots of journalists do to blogs when I was writing for my college newspaper. It’s down-right plaigarism and there’s actually been reporters from other newspapers who have gotten in trouble for it.
LOL, Bob, and I agree that your investigative reporting puts you right up there as the Guy Noir of the blogosphere.
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I mean, how can anyone vilify a man who would take in a stray cat?
Patrick himself bears some blame for propagating the unfortunate idea that progressives cannot work for large corporations. “People have to figure whether they want to call me a liberal loony or a corporate devil.” The choice might not be either-or, but both … or neither.
I accidentally hit “reply” to Bob’s reply above. There’s one that relates to this Deval Patrick quote and that should be here, but I’m too tired to fix it.
First, for Frank, I do indeed think this is swiftboating. He says he’s tied with labor – presumably democratic – yet is attacking Deval Patrick on Coca-Cola saying his practices SPECIFICALLY regarding Columbia should be called into question.
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However, just as Vennochi makes clear, Deval LEFT COKE because of Columbia – because he couldn’t get that investigation. So, just like Swiftboaters, Ray Rogers is spreading false accusations and rumors that are essentially unfounded and can be proven false. It’s a democrat swift boating democrats. It’s disgusting.
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Now, David, I do want to comment on the fact that Joan didn’t talk about your work or anyone elses for that matter. I find that vastly innapropriate – and reporters do that ALL THE TIME. It’s not okay to committ plagairism, except when it’s off bloggers. I’ve read of dozens of instances where reporters do this to bloggers and it needs to stop. I wasn’t going to say anything about it, but if you want to address this, it deserves to be addressed and I’d be more than happy to put the heat on the media to give proper distinction to the blogosphere – at least the local media – just like the state services did for you.
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I do want to comment on Joan’s brief departure from logic, because that also bothered me. I think she did that to give Phillips some leeway just like she did last week when she criticized his work by not naming him. Where this is even easier to link to him, I think she needed to do that so it at least wouldn’t seem to the common person that she was calling him out (even if she kinda sort of is). Especially with the research you put into this – which I’m sure she either read or came across from people reporting (and, like I said before, should have given you kudos for that) – she really had to write another column on it.
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After all is said and done, I’m glad whoever it was that’s behind this all tried to Swiftboat Deval. It really blew up in their faces. It’s been so stupidly done I really almost think it’s Reilly;s campaign LOL.
Easy on the blogs v. MSM kvetching, guys. I like Joan, but in this case she’s following a well-established Globe practice of not crediting anyone else who gets there first. The Globe never mentioned then-Phoenix reporter Kristen Lombardi’s groundbreaker work on the archdiocesan sex-abuse scandal (see http://transcripts.c…), and they never acknowledge being beaten by the Herald. Welcome to the club.
It seems to me that the only real investigative journalists left are here at BMG and other blogs. Most of the information and data you and Bob have gathered could have been found a year ago by anyone in the media who wanted to do so. I think the question we all need to ask is why has the print media in this state not followed up on the whole story? There must be complicity for any type of “Swift Boating” to occur. Where are the editors who are responsible for asking for background and verification? If BMG had not printed the info about Killer Coke and Ray Rogers, would we ever have known the other side of the story? I think not.
Granted it was just a throwaway remark, but I was one of the first to see this smear campaign for what it truly is: simple unadulterated Smear. BTW, they were in “full force” last might at a Deval fundraiser. Ray and one or two dupes were handing out flyers. I couldn’t dirty myself by accepting one of their proffered leaflets, though in retrospect I should have accepted it for evidentiary purposes.
Oh GOOD. Time for the investigation to begin, then, since he actually DID something with his corporately-funded flyers.
right here
Another good post, David. Thanks again.
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I found Vennochi’s column irritating from the getgo–as hers so often are. The best one can say for this piece is that, like so many of hers, it combines the occasional acerbic insight with a lack of both rigor (that is, overall coherence or systematic analysis) and nuance. The worst one can say–and I’m inclined to say it–is that it seizes the occasion to offer underhanded critique in the guise of defense. I think we’ve seen this from her before. The same thing marked her piece on Deval’s club membership; while you spoke of it as a take-down of her fellow Globe employee (Joan Vennochi pretty much trashes Frank Phillips), her piece again took the form of “look at this silly criticism of Patrick, while the REAL problem with him is…” This is typical of her.
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In making this assessment, I’m ticked off but not conspiratorial. I don’t necessarily think she’s pushing another candidate (unlike Lehigh, who, I think, is basically–despite occasional criticisms–pushing Gabrieli, or McGory, who appears to be in Reilly’s camp). Vennochi’s problem is in a way deeper, forit stems, I believe, from a pervasive and pernicious sense of what it means to be a news professional: she has taken up a cynical posture, common as well among national newspaper reporters and columnists, which mingles knowing skepticism with insider (Beltway, Beacon Hill, etc.) cliches, therby corroding not only hope for change but the ability to imagine and assess alternatives. Although it’s almost never clear who, or what, she’s for in politics–as if the expression of honest aspiration would be a betrayal of her profession–it’s also pretty much the perfect mentality for not gettting Deval or his campaign right. And, ironically, this kind of professional cynicism doesn’t even make for deep or probing critical analysis–as is exemplified by the reductiveness (crude dichotomies, false choices) that you’ve pointed out in this case.