Boston Globe on Verdugo Days Late, Disclosure Short

February 16, 2020

The story of newly minted Red Sox outfielder Alex Verdugo’s involvement it the alleged sexual assault of a minor in 2015 has been out there for over a year, thanks to baseball writer Jessica Quiroli, who chronicled the incident in chilling detail on her blog All Heels on Deck.

Nut graf:

She was one of the 75% of runaways who are female. And, as runaways often do, she found support where she could. Maybe on that February night in Glendale, Arizona, a city nine miles outside of Phoenix, she felt safe when she agreed to hang out with two women, who were a few years older than her, whom she’d met through social media.

Maybe the prospect of hanging out with Los Angeles Dodgers players, in town for Spring Training, sounded like fun. What she ultimately experienced was a twisted night of physical, verbal and sexual abuse. And, once she made her story known, she was subjected to more trauma.

 

The story has also been all over Twitter this past week. But there was nothing in the stately local broadsheet until this story by Peter Abraham and Alex Speier ran in the Boston Sunday Globe (and was buried on the website).

Verdugo explains ’15 police investigation

FORT MYERS, Fla. — New Red Sox outfielder Alex Verdugo acknowledged his involvement in a 2015 incident in Arizona that led to police investigating the alleged sexual assault of a minor by another player.

No charges were ever filed, and, in response to a question from a Globe reporter on Saturday, Verdugo said he was “cleared of any wrongdoing” in the matter.

“With that being said, it was a terrible thing that happened. It was in my past,” Verdugo said. “It was something that I’ve grown from it; I’ve learned from it.”

 

To call that eyewash is an insult to saline solution everywhere.

In addition, a number of significant facts were conspicuously missing from the Globe story.

 

 

One other thing missing: Disclosure of John Henry’s dual ownership of the Boston GlobeSox.

And before you bother pelting me with tweets, a) no, everyone does not know that Henry owns ’em both, and b) even if everyone did know, the disclosure should still be in there.

Yes – every single time.

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Mike Bloomberg Even Has Ads in the Boston Herald

February 9, 2020

The chattering classes have no idea how far Mike Bloomberg’s staggering 300-million-going-on-one billion-dollar ad campaign extends.

Here’s conservative hall monitor Rich Lowry in yesterday’s Boston Herald op-ed page.

The level of his spending is truly astonishing — Croesus goes all-in on Super Tuesday. He’s spent more than $300 million on various forms of advertising. By the end, he’s going to make the profligate self-funder Tom Steyer — who managed to pointlessly buy himself onto the Democratic debate stage — look like a penny-pincher.

Bloomberg is running a presidential campaign that Curtis LeMay would love, carpet-bombing the airwaves every single day. He’s single-handedly changed the market for TV ads in many places. He spent $10 million on a Super Bowl spot, or about half of what Joe Biden raised in the entire fourth quarter.

 

And here’s what appears right below that on the Herald’s website.

 

 

Megabucks Mike is also running ads in the Herald’s E-Edition. This is what we got when we double-clicked for the text version of a Sinn Fein piece.

 

 

Most analysts – Lowry included – have focused on Bloomberg’s TV buys. But when a campaign is peppering the likes of the flimsy local tabloid with ads, it’s way beyond carpet-bombing.

Mike Bloomberg has gone nuclear.

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