As SmallTownGuy has already noted, Blue Mass. Group features prominently in Joan Vennochi’s op-ed piece in this morning’s Globe. The op-ed raises a number of issues: anonymity on the internet; the effort at a Howie Carr boycott led by pseudonymous BMGer “Ernie Boch, III” (who, it must be said, is not related to the actual car magnate Ernie Boch, Jr.); and Judge Connolly’s rejection of the Mass. GOP’s lawsuit trying to prevent Governor Patrick from making the interim Senate appointment law take effect immediately.
To those visiting this site for the first time, welcome. Here are some links that might help give some context to what’s going on.
- Our “Rules of the Road,” which discuss (among other things) the subject of anonymity, are here.
- “Ernie Boch, III” is a pseudonym for a blogger who has been a regular on this site for over three years. He has no relation to the car dealership guy Ernie Boch, Jr. He first called for a boycott of Howie Carr’s radio show in this post, and has followed it up with several additional posts listing Carr’s advertisers and asking readers to contact them — you can see all of these posts at this link.
- The real Ernie Boch, Jr. got wind of this effort, and coincidentally, Mr. Boch is a big Howie Carr fan. He told the Herald what was going on, and subsequently offered a $2,000 bounty for the identity of the real person behind the “Ernie Boch, III” screen name. Howie himself also weighed in, oddly seeming to support the effort to remove him from WRKO’s airwaves.
- The Howie Carr column attacking Judge Thomas Connolly, which started the whole thing, is here. I wrote up several posts explaining why the Mass. GOP’s lawsuit (the one challenging the procedure through which Governor Patrick caused the interim Senate appointment law to take effect immediately) was such a joke, and why Judge Connolly’s ruling on it was correct. You can read them here, here, and here.
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With columnists from both of Boston’s mainstream papers taking BMG’s name in vain we are now officially worth paying attention to in state discourse.
This may be a liberal blog, but EBIII ain’t no liberal.
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p>ALSO, in case you haven’t noticed, I am not related to the shopping center.
The title on this old comment is pretty classic Ernie: “That’s The Problem With You Freakin’ Lefty Socialists”.
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p>At the moment I enjoy entertaining the conspiracy theory that EB3 is Howie Carr.
Please ask yourself why Joan isn’t worried about all the anonymous sources the Globe uses in its paper, who don’t have to “own” their opinions, either. If it’s not okay for bloggers to write anonymously (because their agenda’s are a “mystery”), why should it be okay for the Globe to use anonymous sources, either? The bulk of them are for unimportant, he-said, she-said stories where knowledge of an agenda is critically important. Joan’s house is glass.
Which is why the Globe uses them. Writing a pro-Deval story? Go to Anonymous Source X for a pull-quote to back you up. Anti-Deval, go to Anonymous Source Y for a juicy quote.
That assumes that most Globe writers are incapable of being used. I think they have a pretty bad record there. I suppose they could realize at times they’re being used and just don’t care, but I like to have a positive view of humanity. The point remains, though, that their strings have been pulled aplenty — and when they use anonymous sources with gigantic agendas, the public deserves to know what those agendas are. If person X is being pulled down by person Y to pull down an issue that person X cares about, then people deserve to know the motives behind person Y and ought to know who person Y is unless there’s some truly good reason for the anonymity. Allowing a source to be anonymous should be the exception, not the rule.
Sure, Carr’s column on Judge Connolly was vicious and lazy but this boycott is a silly idea with the same prospects for success as the Republican lawsuit.
Having said that, the winner of the race to the bottom is Joan Vennochi. Read the comments in any edition of the Globe (not to mention the Herald) and you will find ugly anonymous attacks on people who can’t fight back, including crime victims. As long as the targets of these attacks are poor or helpless, Ms Vennochi seems unconcerned. But let someone attack a fellow pundit, a pundit who not only has his own column but his own radio show, and the unfairness of it all makes her all conflicted.