Protesters say fight not over as WGBH brass stand by David Koch
Environmental activists say they have not yet begun to fight against WGBH, after the public TV station’s brass yesterday said they “appreciated” the protesters’ concerns about trustee David Koch, but they have no intention of booting the conservative lightning rod billionaire donor.
“Just as our viewers and listeners reflect a full spectrum of political and cultural views, so do our board members,” WGBH spokesman Michael Raia said in a statement yesterday to the Herald.
“While the Board appreciated hearing the perspective of those who attended the meeting, they plan to make no changes.”
The protestors – all 50 of them – say they “plan to lobby the board’s 31 other trustees individually and ‘get them on the record on how they feel.'”
And some protestors will withhold donations to WGBH. Brad Johnson of Forecast the Facts, “the group that helped gather 119,000 signatures calling for Koch’s ouster, citing his stance on global warming,” said the protestors “don’t want to be in a position where they’re supporting David Koch, and lending their legitimacy to his work.”
Meanwhile, the Boston Globe still isn’t covering the protest. Ditto for WGBH News.
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Fledgling Jewish News Service Rocks Boat With Strident Pro-Israel Message
Challenges JTA for Slice of Jewish Newspaper Market
A new, right-leaning Jewish newswire is seeking to displace the Jewish Telegraphic Agency as the Associated Press of the Jewish media.
Nearly two years after its launch, Jewish News Service is growing fast by promoting its pro-Israel perspective, offering ad-friendly special sections — and by giving it all away cheap.
“Some papers choose to use us versus anybody else because they think we are more respectful of Israel’s challenges,” said Russel Pergament, publisher of JNS. “Other editors prefer us because we’re less expensive. And I’ll take either.”
That would be old Boston hand Russel Pergament, one of the founders of the Tab chain of local weeklies. In a 2007 Boston Phoenix profile of Pergament (who had returned here to launch a new publication), Adam Reilly wrote, “Russel Pergament, the indefatigable publisher of BostonNOW, has been described as having ‘the metabolism of a white rat on amphetamines.'”
The Forward piece is long and involved – far too detailed to summarize here, but definitely worth reading. While you’re doing that, the hardreading staff will try to contact Pergament to ask, among other things, if he’ll be advertising in the Boston Globe anytime soon.
Tough climate as WGBH faces protest over board member over conservative David Koch
WGBH board bigwigs were squirming yesterday as David Koch, one of the station’s biggest benefactors, was ripped by environmental activists — including one dressed as Elmo — who decried the conservative billionaire as a “climate denier” and demanded his resignation from the panel.
“This board would not tolerate a Ku Klux Klansman,” the Rev. Fred Small, a WGBH member and senior minister at First Parish Cambridge, told the trustees of the PBS flagship station. “It would not toler- ate a notorious racist or anti-Semite. Yet you tolerate a man who has spent millions subverting democracy and disseminating lies about climate change in order to protect the profits from his own polluting industries.”
According to the Herald, WGBH board chairman “Amos Hostetter defended Koch, telling the protesters there’s no ‘political litmus test’ for board members. ” But, at least today, there is a Howie Carr test:
HOLY WAR FOR P.C. CRUSADERS
First of all, let’s call this WGBH-David Koch brouhaha what it really is.
It’s not a political fight, it’s a religious war.
Koch has blasphemed the Church of Climate Change, formerly known as the Church of Global Warming, except the P.C. shamans had to change the name because they couldn’t “hide the decline” in worldwide temperatures, to use a famous phrase from one of their prophets.
To those moonbats who were out on Guest Street yesterday — including the one dressed in an Elmo costume — David Koch is not a political foe, he’s an apostate, a heretic.
So they have declared a fatwah against him.
It gets more, well, inflammatory from there.
Crosstown the Boston Globe had no news coverage of the protest, but columnist Joan Vennochi did weigh in on The two David Kochs.
THIS IS a tale of two Kochs — the one who weeps for lab researchers in need of day care, but not for Americans in need of health care.
David Koch, the philanthropist, was so moved by the pleas of MIT lab workers who said they needed day care that he ponied up $20 million for a child-care center at MIT.
Then, there is also the David Koch who, with brother Charles, helped to bankroll what President Obama described as a “cynical ad campaign” to discourage Americans from signing up for Obamacare. “These are billionaires several times over” said Obama, in what was reported to be a presidential reference to the politically active, conservative siblings and their effort to derail the Affordable Care Act.
He is also “the current target of environmental activists, who want WGBH to kick him off its board because of his climate change views,” Vennochi writes. “Koch helps fund Nova, the acclaimed PBS science show — but, according to the activists, has also worked to defund PBS.”
‘This is New England, where people tell it straight,” says Boston-born TV star Donnie Wahlberg in a new commercial for FiOS, Verizon’s cable television and Internet service. “No phonies, no fakers, no shortcuts.”
The commercial, titled “Here’s The Truth about FiOS in Massachusetts,” features Wahlberg standing before the Hancock Tower, Trinity Church, and in Charlestown near the Bunker Hill Monument.
But here’s another truth about FiOS: You can’t get it in Copley Square. Actually, you can’t get it anywhere in Boston.
Oops.
The Verizon ad doesn’t seem to mention that inconvenient truth. We even checked the mouse type.
Nothing.
The story says Verizon “apparently doesn’t appreciate the irony.” They also didn’t run an ad in today’s Globe.
The Red Sox crazy-ass 7th inning stretch last night – walk, single, wild pitch, infield hit – pulled Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy’s chestnuts out of an open fire.
As the hardreading staff previously noted, Shaughnessy wrote off the Tampa Bay Rays after Game 2 of the ALDS. The Rays promptly won Game 3, and led Game 4 after six.
Retraction: The hardreading staff was operating on outdated information when we posted this item. Regan Communication’s client list does not currently include the Boston Herald. We regret the error.
Today’s Boston Herald features this undercard in the fight over Westfield State University President Evan Dobelle’s handling/mishandling of his expenses.
Gov, PR big spar over Dobelle
The investigation into embattled Westfield State University President Evan Dobelle’s expenses sparked verbal jousting between Gov. Deval Patrick and high-profile Boston public relations expert George Regan, as Dobelle filed his response to a series of administration questions.
On the heels of a Herald interview published yesterday in which Dobelle downplayed his mishandling of expenses, Patrick told reporters Dobelle appears to be ignoring “very, very serious concerns.”
“He’s not helping himself by apparently not taking this seriously and by having a spokesman he’s hired back in Boston whose job it seems to be to trivialize the role of the Board of Higher Ed and the board of Westfield State,” Patrick said. “That is not acceptable.”
But apparently it is acceptable at the Herald to withhold the fact that George Regan is also the shifty local tabloid’s PR flack. It makes a difference not so much when the Herald publishes an interview “in which Dobelle downplayed his mishandling of expenses” (he’s doing that in every interview), but more when the Herald makes the interview one of its spotlight videos of the day:
That’s when Regan’s role with the Herald should have been spotlighted too.
As the hardreading staff has noted, Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy may have given a kayn aynhoreh (evil eye) to the Red Sox with his Sunday victory dance (headline: “Is it really necessary to go to Tampa?”).
Because it wasn’t just that the Sox lost last night to the Rays, but how they lost.
Red Sox infielders collide to botch ground ball in ALDS loss
Dustin Pedroia may have been a little too eager.
A costly infield blunder by the Boston Red Sox in the bottom of the 8th inning of their ALDS Game 3 matchup in Tampa helped the Rays score a go-ahead run on Monday.
With runners on first and second and one out, Rays shortstop Yunel Escobar hit a ground ball just to the left side of second base. Sox shortstop Stephen Drew and second baseman Dustin Pedroia both moved to field the ball. Drew scooped it up as Pedroia dove toward him, and Pedroia’s apparent effort to pull up wound up jarring the ball from Drew’s hand as he prepared to throw to first.
Exhibit B: Jose Lobaton’s walk-off homer in the bottom of the ninth against Sox ace closer Koji Uehara.
Ouch.
Today’s Total Amnesia column from Shaughnessy (headline on the web last night: “A crushing loss for Red Sox against Rays”):
It hurts, but how badly?
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The Red Sox were inches from a clean getaway. They had mirrors on the ceiling and pink champagne on ice in the visitors clubhouse at Tropicana Field.
And then . . .
The Worst . . .
Loss . . .
Ever.
OK, that’s an exaggeration. There is nothing devastating about a 5-4 loss when you are already leading a best-of-five series, two-games-to-zero. Jose Lobaton’s walkoff splash blast into the fish tank Monday night against heretofore unhittable Koji Uehara probably will end up being a mere footnote in the Red Sox’ inevitable march to the 2013 World Series.
Still, it hurts. And it gives pause.
As does Shaughnessy, who ditches his former bravado and concludes this way:
After the Sox rallied to tie it off Fernando Rodney in the top of the ninth, Lobaton came up with two out and nobody aboard and found the fish tank in right-center. Ballgame.
“I can’t say enough, the way we came back after giving up the lead,’’ said Farrell. “Just an exciting game. Well-played game. Still, we played a very good game tonight.’’
Perhaps. But it doesn’t feel good at this moment. This was the Red Sox’ first postseason walkoff loss since the Aaron Boone/Grady Little game of 2003.
Gulp.
If that turns into the Big Gulp, you know who to blame.
It’s a dog-et-dog world in the local dailies today, with both papers working the canine beat, well, doggedly.
Start with the Boston Herald’s Puppy Doe Jour piece, in this case Joe Fitzgerald’s column.
Barbarian who tortured Puppy Doe is among us
More than a month has passed since the pit bull dubbed Puppy Doe was found close to death in the shadows of a Quincy playground, having been dumped there by the barbarian who inflicted such savage abuse that authorities felt the only way to end her suffering was to terminate her life.
Her tongue had been split. Her joints had been pulled apart. She had been beaten and stabbed, and it appeared she hadn’t eaten in a long while.
A month is a long shelf life for most stories; all that can be said has been said, and eventually the public moves on.
Yet papers and talk shows continue to keep Puppy Doe’s story alive . . .
Most notably, he might have added, his own paper. But that’s good, Fitzgerald says, “because the perpetrator still walks among us, capable of again performing the unspeakable acts of a very sick mind. ”
Crosstown, the Boston Globe reports on the brighter side of Pit Bull Nation.
On a summer evening at JFK/UMass Station, police say, a Quincy man robbed a person standing on the platform. The robber’s weapon? The pit bull tugging on his leash.
A few weeks later, Eric Coldwell walked onto the back porch of his Weymouth home and watched as his own 60-pound pit bull terrier, Maizy, tackled his 9-year-old son, Thomas — then slobbered kisses all over him. “If you didn’t know better,” Coldwell said as he watched the scene unfold, “you might have assumed the worst.”
Those two incidents frame the question: Is the pit bull an animal to fear, or to love? That question, said Rob Halpin of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, “sums up the fight we’ve been in for years.”
If pet adoption rates are any indication, pit bulls have plenty of love to give. Pit bull adoptions are climbing statewide and, in the biggest surprise, extending into the suburbs.
The Globe piece, which has a Puppy Doe Index of 1.0 2.0 [we missed Jennifer Graham’s op-ed piece], spends about half its time chronicling horror stories about pit bulls, culminating with this fun fact to know and tell:
[A] 2009 dog bite study in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery found that over a five-year period in Philadelphia, 51 percent of dog attacks were carried out by pit bulls, 9 percent by Rottweilers, and 6 percent by mixes of pit bulls and Rottweilers.
But others, such as animal epidemiologist Gary Patronek, make the opposite argument. “I’ve simply seen no evidence over the years that pit bulls are any more of a risk than any other breed,” he told the Globe. “In fact, what I’ve found is that the risk rests almost entirely in environmental factors like a dog’s surroundings and how it’s treated by its owners.”
Cue the happy pit bull owners who just want a little love for their pups.
Absolutely. As long as we can do it from across the street.
(Special K-9 bonus: This Globe Page One Metro piece about new regulations that would “ban the adoption of animals with contagious diseases or serious aggressive tendencies.” And so we’ve come full circle.)
It’s called a kahn aynhoreh, “the magical phrase uttered to ward off the evil eye” according to The Joys of Yiddish.
And Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy failed to say it in his front-page piece in today’s Sports section.
Is it really necessary to go to Tampa?
Do we really have to go to Tampa/St. Pete? Can’t we just forgo the formalities and let the Red Sox advance to the American League Championship Series on sheer style, dominance, karma, and duende?
The Duck Dynasty/ZZ Top/Fidel Castro Red Sox look unbeatable at this hour. They bested the fatigued Rays, 7-4, at Fenway Park again on Saturday night and will send 12-1 Clay Buchholz to the mound to finish the series Monday.
And it gets even worse at the end:
It makes you want to fast-forward to the Fall Classic. Do you want the Dodgers (Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford), the Braves (who played here in Boston until the early 1950s), the Pirates (lost to the Red Sox in the first World Series in 1903) or the Cardinals (Series opponents in ’46, ’67 and ’04)?
That’s getting too far ahead. For sure.
But putting the Sox in the ALCS is not too far ahead.
Bring on the Tigers. Bring on the A’s.
This one is over.
Seriously, boychik? You’re actually saying that? First of all, if any town should appreciate the possibility of improbable comebacks, it’s Boston. Beyond that, even though there’s almost no way the Rays will come back, the accent is on almost. Shaughnessy should know that.
If the unthinkable now happens, you know who to blame.
The Kochheads are here! Defenders of conservative billionaire David Koch are going after the liberal activists going after Koch for giving a reported $18.6 to local public broadcaster WGBH over the past three decades.
Environmentalists seeking to oust conservative billionaire David Koch from WGBH’s board of trustees came under fire yesterday from media watchdogs who blasted the activists for “politicizing” public broadcasting.
“If the shoe were on the other foot, I think you would have outrage in a lot of places, that someone is trying to throw somebody off a board over their personal politics,” said Bob Lichter, president of the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University.
“My God, he’s supporting NOVA,” Lichter added of the PBS science program. “If you can get a climate change skeptic to give money to NOVA, I wouldn’t try to change that . . .
The environmental activists have gathered 70,000 signatures that they’ll try to present to WGBH trustees on Wednesday. One PBS critic, despite wanting to defund public broadcasting, calls the protest “political bullying.”
WGBH is essentially ignoring the protesters.
WGBH officials and Koch’s reps have brushed off charges that he wields influence in program decision-making. His company said he’s given $10 million to NOVA alone, and that he has no plans to step down in the face of the uproar around the Brighton studios.
Also ignoring the protesters: The Boston Globe. Our stately local broadsheet has yet to mention the Koch rumpus, although the Globeniks will undoubtedly cover any protest next week.
billionaire donor.
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