I’ve decided to resubscribe to the Boston Globe for a few months in response to an exchange on another thread here. I’ve signed up for online access from my computer and cellphone (the same access I have for the New York Times, Washington Post, and others).
I invite the BMG community to join me in blogging a contrast-and-compare between the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Washington Post as the events of the next few months unfold.
In the exchange on that thread, fellow BMG participant pogo makes a legitimate criticism of my negative commentary about the Boston Globe:
… [You’ve] presented no factual evidence as to why you dismiss the Globe as not “providing responsible journalism” and is filled with “propaganda and lies “. Frankly those are typical round-house punches thrown by the likes of Trump when he’s got nothing to back him up. What do you have to back up your assertions about the Globe?
I was a daily reader of the Globe for decades, until it was purchased by John Henry. I canceled my subscription to the print version years ago after the paper used printed subscriber lists to wrap papers for delivery. The “customer service” I received when I attempted to inquire about that episode was so insulting that I canceled the print subscription (retaining my online access). I canceled my online subscription when the Globe ran a front-page “human interest” story about the dents in the the Green Monster. Since canceling my online access, I’ve been alienated by the very intrusive paywall maintained by the publication on all its online sites.
This is all a long-winded way of agreeing with pogo that my criticism of the publication is at least out-of-date and perhaps overblown.
Hence this thread. For a story of interest that is covered by the Times and the Post (my main sources), I’ll make an effort to compare and contrast that coverage with the content of the Globe. If and when I see stories in the Globe that I like, I’ll note them. If and when I see stories that I don’t like, I’ll note those.
I do want to be explicit about one thing — no sports please. I’d like anything to do with the Celtics, the Patriots, the Red Sox, the Bruins, or anything else related to sports to go somewhere else. I’m interested in NEWS, not sports.
I invite you to join me in this exercise. If there’s no interest, then of course we can drop the thread. I’m putting this up primarily as a gesture of respect towards pogo.
The lead editorial in today’s Sunday Globe (27-Jan-2018), praisng the “Bold Leadership” of Mr. Baker, includes this gem:
Excuse me? “Owning the problems of the MBTA…?” What I saw was yet more budget-slashing and layoffs. More starve-the-beast nonsense. “The highly effective fiscal control board”?
By what measure is the new fiscal control board “effective”? By what measure is the T “in better shape”?
What I see is a transit infrastructure continuing to crumble even as the GLX is being built. Yes, some new Green Line trains are finally being delivered, ordered as part of the GLX upgrade.
Ten years ago, the MBTA commissioned a comprehensive report on its then-current status. That report identified a specific set of serious shortcomings and made specific recommendations to address them.
For example, in FY2010, there were 15 funded SGR (State of Good Repair) projects totalling $203M — only 6% of the then-outstanding $3 B worth of needed SGR work.
What is the 2019 total of needed SGR funding? What portion of the current SGR backlog is funded for the current fiscal year?
After these “successes”, and the “highly effective fiscal control board”, what IS the current SGR backlog? Is it growing, staying the same, or shrinking?
How much is today’s MBTA investing in critical “Safety Level 10” projects? What portion of these outstanding safety projects is planned in the upcoming fiscal year?
The crushing burden of the Big Dig debt imposed by Mr. Baker himself before he was governor has played an enormous role in the destroying the MBTA. What, if any, progress has been made on addressing that travesty?
This vacuous and misleading cheerleading for the actions of Mr. Baker towards public transportation certainly looks like an example of propaganda at least verging on lies. Am I missing or distorting something here?
You have to give Baker his due. He took a system that broke down in the middle of a blizzard and transformed it into a system that can break down in any weather.
The Globe editorial is a good example of their editorial bias. A more telling example however would cite bias in a news story.
One recent reporting gaffe was especially egregious: a story about charters that blandly repeated as fact the assertion of the charter-school lobby that charters are public schools.
This is a favorite pro-charter talking point about these private institutions. However, other than that these schools take public money, I do not understand any factual basis for it.
Agreed, regarding reporting bias in addition to editorial bias.
I invite you to post a link to that charter-school piece if you can find it (I’ll look as well).
Perhaps you mean this 22-Jan-2o19 reporting (not opinion) piece (emphasis mine):
Interesting. Sure looks like a lie to me.
What say you, pogo?
I appreciate the cite of relevant law from tedf.
It looks very much like I was mistaken. It seems clear from the statutes that the paragraph I quoted was, in fact, consistent with the law.
“A commonwealth charter school shall be a public school, operated under a charter granted by the board, which operates independently of a school committee and is managed by a board of trustees.” G.L. c. 71, § 89(c).
That’s the equivalent of a law declaring the value of pi to be equal to 3, because it would be so much simpler.
Still I appreciate being directed to the statute.
I don’t understand this… Pi is ahem simply a ratio of two values that can be empirically determined. Pi is what pi is quite apart from the law.
Are you asserting that we retro-actively defined charter schools as public schools to make everything “simpler?” As though *poof* one day charter schools popped into existence and we were at odds about what to call them? And so, settled upon calling them public schools because that was simpler… ?
Charter schools exist because of the law. The law does not exist because charter schools. Charter schools are public schools because the law that created charter schools defined them as public schools. Charter schools have been public schools from day one.
Simpler for the charter schools’ strategy of winning support by pretending to be public institutions, yes.
The public does not seem to have gotten the memo. Thus the need to repeat the talking point, I guess.
I am reminded of the words of William Tallman while president of the Public Service Company of Hew Hampshire: “The Public Service Company is a private company.”
Well, you are quite simply — and comprehensively — wrong.
But that lack of understanding is not evidence for a factual basis against it. I don’t understand how someone can come to such firm conclusions about something they admit to not fully understanding…
To circle back to the central theme of this diary: what’s up with journalism? Well, let’s take a look: As you demonstrate above, we are often simply engaging in an a priori dialogue (and one that is often full of recrimination) rather than a (perhaps skeptical) consumption of information. Here, you already thought you ‘knew’ a piece of information and were comparing the Globes writings with your prior knowledge, and judging their results harshly, rather than questioning your beliefs.
What good is journalism in that instance?
I think if you are going to read the Globe for information you owe it to yourself to at least make an attempt to accept what they write at face value. If, a priori, you are not willing to accept the possibility of becoming more informed, why read the Globe at all? Healthy skepticism is one thing, but a glib form of prior restraint upon reality is quite another.
I, for one, appreciate the above citation of the relevant law.
I confess to being confused, because I thought the entire point of why a Charter School is supposed to be better is because it is private.
I guess we have to dig deeper into the meaning of “public” and “private”.
Charter schools are negotiated exemptions from the legal mandates of pedagogy and other regulations/administration of traditional public schools . These exemptions are reviewed periodically and renewed according to performance and conduct or revoked for breach of negotiated parameters. Whether or no this produces a ‘better’ school is a topic of much debate.
But, for purposes of this discussion, in which somebody made an accusation of bias against the Globe for printing some version of the phrase ‘charter schools are public schools’ the question of performance is irrelevant. If the Globe does have a certain bias –an important question– it hardly helps the case to manufacture accusation of bias that do not stand up… The phrase quoted is completely true and, on it’s face, it is not at all controversial that a newspaper would print something that is true.
“The phrase quoted is completely true and, on it’s face, it is not at all controversial that a newspaper would print something that is true.”
Indeed. I added a comment to my quote from the Globe where I think I said the same.
Yes, petr. In response to my post, tedf pointed to the language of statute, for which I am grateful.
So there are now two things we can say about the “public” status of these private institutions. They take public money, and they successfully lobbied the legislature to label them as public.
Circling back to the journalism question, I agree that means that an account of their “publicness” ought to include that fact.
So rather than just blandly asserting that these private institutions are public (which is inaccurate and one sided), a journalist might say
Give the complexity of all that, it might be better to leave it out unless it is central to the story, which it usually is not.
Which is why just calling them “public schools” is not journalism, but editorial partisanship.
I don’t understand what you mean when you say they are “private.” They are accountable to the Department of Education, which approve charters and can revoke charters ” if the school has not fulfilled any conditions imposed by the board in connection with the grant of the charter or the school has violated any provision of its charter.” G.L. c. 71, § 89(ee). The Boston School Committee is also not elected by the public.
By the way, I am not a proponent of charter schools at all.
This is layered and I might not get it all on the first try, but here goes.
They are private because they are governed by private boards, and also because they require charters.
All private corporations have a charter from either a state or from Congress. Who does not have charters? Public institutions.
True, the degree of oversight over CS charters by the DOE is generally greater than that exercised by the Secretary of State over Massachusetts corporations.
But in both cases the oversight exists; both the SOS and the AG have intervened against private nonprofits that go against their charters.
Also true, it is arguable that local governments have something like charters and yet are undeniably governments.
But I think these (charters) have a fundamentally different character. (I am going to cop out and not flesh that argument out tonight, but if you think about the historical role of local government and the way that is enshrined in common law, you can maybe see where I would go with that.)
In all cases, the charter is a way of regulating a private corporation.
By contrast, public institutions are governed by elected officials, e.g. school boards elected by the voters.
Pubic institutions do not have a charter precisely because they are public and their governance is set forth by elected public officials in accordance with federal, state, and local laws adopted by elected legislatures.
Only private institutions require charters because they lack public control; it is the existence of a charter that shows these are not public.
Sorry that this is sketchy, but it’s late for me. And I did not assume that tedf was a charter supporter just because he was able to answer my implied question.
The City of Boston has a charter. Most cities do. Charter is a legal term (that predates public education) that is used to describe something similar to a contract, but between a sovereign entity and either another sovereignty or a sub-entity of the original sovereignty. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with distinctions (legal or colliquial) between public and private..
Charter schools are public schools. The mechanism of administration ( in some cases but by no means all, or even most) might be private but they teach public school students using public school funds and, at least in the CommonWealth, are by statute strictly non-profit.
The charter itself is the mechanism of public control. It can be instantiated only at the benefice of a public municipality and It can be revoked or renewed only at the discretion of that same — very, very public — municipality.
There are laws that govern public schools: length of day, length of term, approval of curriculum, etc. School administrators and teachers cannot deviate from these laws without specific permission to do so — that is to say without a charter. When somebody proposes a charter they write into the very charter how they propose to deviate from the laws and regulations as well as performance metrics they expect to derive from the deviations. If the municipality finds these deviations acceptable, or even laudable, they implement the charter. If they find the deviations unacceptable they don’t implement the charter. If performance does not meet or exceed the predicted performance or the schools administration deviates from the charter then the charter is revoked.
I do not adress the merits of charters, I only say that this is the form of public school, and oversight, we call ‘charter school.’ I get that people may not like it, but such dislike is not a license to call it something that it is not nor to deny that it is what it is.
Wasn’t that the storm after which Baker said at a press conference, that we start with the premise that people are already taxed enough?
It is a bit nuts how much free advertising sports teams get, and how little time is spent on substantive discussion. The farmers of 250 years ago were much more intelligent and well-informed than the average person of today. We seem to have amplified quantity more than quality, and nothing makes that more clear than the current commander-in-chief, who could only be elected by a nation of imbeciles. Kudos for reading the Globe and taking other peoples criticisms to heart, but in general I find the best reason to read the news is to only discover how people are being misinformed and misdirected.
I’ve been a subscriber of the Globe for a bit over a year and on the fence as to keeping it. I’ll be interested in your eventual decision, Tom.
I note that the monthly cost (after the initial trial period) of the Boston Globe ($29.99) is about twice that of the Times and the Post.
Whoops, my bad for not checking in for a couple of days. Thank you Tom for the post. Life in real world is still a bit busy. Let me try and push through those priorities and I’ll be back.