It seems that the Springfield Republican’s editorial board has taken a page, rather some column space, from the Boston Herald in its endorsement of Kerry Healey:
Springfield Republican endorsement, 11/1/2006:
Healey sides with the parents and students of Massachusetts on every education issue that is important. Patrick sides with the teachers unions, which have opposed everything about education reform except pay raises.
Boston Herald endorsement 10/30/2006:
On every education issue that is important to the parents and students of Massachusetts Healey sides with them and not with the teachers unions, which have opposed everything about education reform except pay raises.
That’s something, eh? It appears that the GOP’s moribund nature has infected those papers that have chosen to endorse the party’s candidate for governor. Not only do they have cookie-cutter candidates for the state legislature, but cookie-cutter endorsements which look like nothing more than another Healey press release.
Wow. Someone should be fired over that one. If I did that in high school, I’d get an F on the paper…
Remember, when Mike Barnicle was fired from the Globe for plagiarism and fabrication, the Herald grabbed him.
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Here, though, the Springfield Republican apparently lifted its paragraph from the Herald. To my knowledge, those papers aren’t owned by the same company.
Did they lift it from the Herald, or did both papers rewrite endorsements that were sent to them by the Healey/Hillman campaign?
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It’s a valid question.
And why I wrote that the endorsements looked like a press release. The Globe’s blog even stated that they received their copy of the Springfield Republican’s endorsement from the Healey campaign.
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No matter how you look at it, it makes the papers look stupid (or even more stupid than they already do).
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I think it is obvious that the Mass GOP or Healy campaign wrote the endorsement for the papers.
The Springfield Republican is owned by Newhouse Newspapers, the newspaper publishing division of Advance Publications.
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Advance also controls a set of internet forums, such as those of http://www.masslive…. that are linked with the Newhouse rags. A list of probably most of the Newhouse rags may be found at this url:
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http://www.mediaowne…
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Samuel Newhouse is the CEO for Advance Publications, which also publishes The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Parade publications. Other subsidiaries include American City Business Journals, Inc., Conde Nast Publications, Fairchild Publications, the Golf Journal companies, Hemming Motor News, Cartoon Bank, and Comag Marketing Group, LLC.
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Advance is one of the top 20 US media conglomerates. For much of Hampden County, this newspaper happens to be the sole and only daily newspaper that nominally covers local issues. This empty-headed editorial of theirs clearly betrays the deep need in this region for daily newspaper competition – but the Boston Globe, among others, has been strongly resistant to pleas for them to please establish a Springfield bureau.
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The Springfield Republican was a long-time cheerleader for Springfield’s former Mayor, Mike Albano. The Valley Advocate alone practiced the hard-hitting investigative journalism that blew the lid open for reporting on political and police corruption in both cities of Springfield and Holyoke.
I dropped a note to Dan Kennedy; let’s see if he picks up on it.
He could bring some expertise to the matter.
I thought I heard you say Jeff Jacoby could bring some expertise to something. That must have been a mistype, does he really have any expertise at anything?
He’s an “expert,” of sorts, on plagiarism. I had intended my remark as snarky houmor. Oh well.
…have we preformed the same sort of language analysis on endorsements of Deval?
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Are you sur we want to?
I have a huge beef with the big newspapers and their conduct during the primary and the general election phases of this campaign year. What the Springfield Republican example illstrates is laziness, dare I say sloth, on the part of editors and journalists. If the Healey camp fed this and other papers with canned language, then shame on them for collusion. What’s worse is if they did use Healey camp language, but neglected to see if other papers had done the same. If this paper “borrowed” the language from the Herald, then that’s atrocious.
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But hey, in the spirit of fairness and equity, why not look to see if the dozens of Deval endorsements have other examples of lazy, slothful journalism? Please bear in mind that I’d only be interested in seeing laziness and sloth of the same degree as the example illustrated in my original post. I mean, let’s face it, that crap on top is really bad and really blatant.