The hardreading staff has noted before the occasional tendency of the Boston Herald’s Track Gals (without Megan!) to borrow material without disclosing their sources.
• That Jim Braude and Margery Eagan, late of News Talk 96.9, will guest host for two hours on 89.7 WGBH Radio on Tuesday beginning at noon. The pair — he hosts a show on NECN and she is a Herald columnist — will host a segment within the midday show of live, local talk, according to their old WTKK boss Phil Redo, who just so happens to be managing director of ’GBH Radio. Tryout? Do stay tuned.
Two days after they hosted the final talk show broadcast on WTKK-FM, Jim Braude and Margery Eagan have lined up a one-day gig on WGBH-FM that could double as an audition.
WGBH said Friday that the former WTKK morning show hosts will guest host “Boston Public Radio” Jan. 8, filling in for Callie Crossley, Emily Rooney and Kara Miller.
The pair has no other assignments booked on WGBH, but the station’s managing director, Phil Redo, suggested in an e-mail that there could be more to come.
“I’m a big fan of theirs,” said Redo, who managed WTKK and four other Greater Media Inc. stations in Boston from 2006 to 2009 . . .
Not to get technical about it, but next time the Track Gals should File Under: “We Read.”
From our Compare and Contrast in Clear Idiomatic English desk
Barney Frank (D-I Love Me) gets Page One of the local dailies today, but in very – wait for it – different ways (via the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages).
The feisty local tabloid devotes two full pages to the Barney-burner, complete with Hall of Shame qualifications:
Note especially this:
Text:
A huge public policy blunder
During the beginning of the financial industry crisis, Frank defended Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from more government oversight, famously declaring the agencies “fundamentally sound.” We know how wrong that turned out to be.
Crosstown at the Globe, the coverage is more, well, restrained.
Barney Frank says he would like to be interim senator
On what should have been the first day of his retirement from Congress, former representative Barney Frank instead burst back onto the political scene, revealing that he had asked Governor Deval Patrick to appoint him to temporarily fill John Kerry’s Senate seat while a special election is held.
Frank said his 32 years in Congress made him especially qualified to help settle spending and entitlement fights that were pushed off several months by the New Year’s Eve fiscal cliff compromise between President Obama and congressional leaders.
“The first months of the new Senate will be among the most important in American history. I may be a little immodest, but I called the governor and said I think I can be a help in reaching a fair solution to some of these issues,” Frank told the Globe Friday.
Asked about running in the special election for the seat, Frank said “absolutely not.”
And does the Globe piece mention the Fannie/Freddie kerfuffle?
When the Boston Herald gloms onto a good human interest story, it’s like a dog with a bone.
And that goes double for the sad tale of author Dennis Lehane’s dog Tessa, who’s been missing since Christmas Eve.
Today the feisty local tabloid devotes a full page to the dog hunt:
Lehane family ‘can’t give up’
As temps plunge, desperate search for Tessa
Best-selling crime writer Dennis Lehane and his wife, Angie, announced yesterday they are offering a cash reward for the safe return of their beloved beagle, Tessa, as overnight temperatures have plunged into single digits and days stretch on without word of where she could be.
“We just want her home — want her back with my kids, back with my dogs — we just want her to be happy,” Dennis Lehane said yesterday, addressing whomever may have the pooch.
“So If you can do that, believe me, there won’t be a single question asked … she just needs to come home,” he said.
This is the umpteenth piece the Herald has run on the runaway pooch. If the Herald web archives weren’t the unmitigated disaster they are, we’d link you to a bunch of them. But this is what you get when you plug Dennis Lehane into the search box:
And then, this:
Anyway, the Boston Globe is also covering the story, but on a more modest level. From today’s Names:
Dennis Lehane and friends continue search for lost dog
Boston author Dennis Lehane asked his social media followers on Thursday to help him continue his search for his lost dog, Tessa. Lehane invited supporters to meet him at the Stop & Shop in Brookline and at the McDonald’s in Brighton where he and his family and friends put up signs with Tessa’s picture and contact information. Lehane, who reported the rescue dog’s disappearance late last month, has said that he’ll name a character in his next book after anyone who locates the pup. Tessa is a black and tan beagle. Lehane says that if you see her, don’t chase her. There are tips for approaching lost dogs on Lehane’s Finding Tessa Facebook page.
Despite the Boston Herald’s speculation yesterday that Scott Brown (R-Unemployed) might run for governor in 2014, he’s sure acting like a man who wants a return trip to the U.S. Senate.
Scott Brown, in an attempt to define a potential Senate campaign rival before the race even kicks off, questioned Wednesday whether US Representative Edward J. Markey is a bona fide resident of Massachusetts.
Brown took to talk radio, his favored venue, to question whether Markey, the Malden Democrat whose Senate candidacy top Democrats are rallying around, spends too much time in Washington and not enough time in the Bay State.
The early skirmish was a remind er that the campaign season, seemingly over after the November election, is begin ning again as politicians scramble for the seat likely to be vacated by Senator John F. Kerry, who is expected to be confirmed later this month as secretary of state.
Brown, a Republican who has given strong hints that he is running, is heavily leaning toward another campaign, but has not yet made a decision, according to a person familiar with his deliberations.
Uh-huh.
The piece notes that Markey has faced this issue before:
During the 2010 election, challenger Gerry Dembrowski, a Woburn Republican, videotaped interviews with neighbors in Malden asking whether they had ever seen Markey in his home. Most knew his house was there, but said they had not seen him.
The video called “Ed Markey: The Undocumented Congressman,” was posted on YouTube, but it did not stop Markey from winning that year’s race in a 2-1 landslide.
Said video (which is mildly amusing, if a bit heavy-handed):
Crosstown at the Herald, columnist Margery Eagan seems to have actually gone to Malden.
Question hits home with Markey neighbors
In what may be the first salvo in the race for John Kerry’s Senate seat, U.S. Sen. Scott Brown wondered yesterday whether longtime Congressman Ed Markey, who wants Kerry’s job, even lives in his hometown of Malden anymore.
“I’ve come back and forth (from Washington) every weekend,” Brown said yesterday when he called into my last radio show on WTKK. “I see, you know, most of the delegation, and I have never seen Ed on the airplane. … Does he even live here anymore?”
The results of my cursory inquiry of Markey’s Malden neighbors: We’re not quite sure.
Representative samples:
“I don’t see him, to tell you the truth,” said a man who identified himself as Mr. Iacuzzi and has lived next door to Markey on Townsend Street “for more than 30 years.” Iacuzzi thinks he’s seen Markey before, but “it was long time ago.”
“I’m not sure what he even looks like,” said Josh, the manager at Dockside Restaurant, a Malden favorite for fundraisers. So he Googled Markey to make sure. “No, I can’t say that I’ve seen him in here.”
“I have no idea who he is,” said a worker at the legendary Moe’s Cafe.
A Markey spokeswoman had this reply: “(Brown) is already launching false, personal attacks …”
Ha! That’s not even a slapfight. Unlike with Elizabeth Warren, Brown doesn’t have to worry about gender gaps when he jumps ugly on Markey. And there’s not gonna be no People’s Pledge either.
Get ready for some serious smashmouth politics this time around.
In an unusual confluence of influence, the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald both gave positive reviews to Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Django Unchained.
Director charges into American slavery tale with guns blazing
You’ve seen “Lincoln.” Now, see the low low-down on slavery in America.
Brought to us by the much imitated, uniquely gifted and never surpassed Quentin Taran tino, the ultra-violent “Django Unchained” gives us a glimpse of a barbaric episode in American history through the twisted lenses of Tarantino and the Euro-spawned, Asian-influenced 1960s-’70s hybrid the spaghetti Western.
In addition to a terrific and fearless Jamie Foxx in the title role, a freed slave turned gunman named Django (“The d is silent”), the film has great Austrian actor Christoph Waltz (“Inglourious Basterds”) in fine fettle as Dr. King Schultz, a silver-tongued German immigrant and dentist along with his horse Fritz, whom he introduces to strangers. Dr. Schultz traverses the frontier in 1858 in a small coach with a giant tooth on its roof. The truth is Schultz is a gun-slinging bounty hunter, complete with a spring-loaded derringer up his sleeve. Schultz brings in fugitives from justice dead or alive, preferably dead.
Equally enthusiastic was Globe film critic Wesley Morris:
Tarantino blows up the spaghetti western in ‘Django Unchained’
In “Django Unchained,” Jamie Foxx plays Django, a black slave purchased for about a hundred dollars and freed by a German dentist and bounty hunter named Schultz (Christoph Waltz). A straightforward treatment might have involved having the slave run away north. But the movie Quentin Tarantino has written and directed is corkscrewed, inside-out, upside-down, simultaneously clear-eyed and completely out of its mind.
Django is married. He and his wife (Kerry Washington) were savagely lacerated and separately sold. He’s not free until she is. So he works as the bounty hunter’s sidekick, with the bounty hunter agreeing to help him find the wife and rescue her from a Mississippi plantation.
Set in 1853, this isn’t a runaway narrative. It’s a run-toward narrative, rigged for shock. Each scene lays a stick of dynamite and lights a fuse that runs down and down and down until the whole thing blows up like the Fourth of July. I’ve never seen anything like this movie, not in one 165-minute sitting, not from a single director, not made with this much conscientious bravado and unrelenting tastelessness — this much exclamatory kitsch — on a subject as loaded, gruesome, and dishonorable as American slavery.
Boston Globe Movie Critic Likens Django Unchained’s Villainous ‘House Negro’ To Black Republicans
In his official review of Quentin Tarantino‘s box office smash Django Unchained, Boston Globefilm critic Wesley Morris likens the movie’s villainous “house Negro” to black Republicans like Justice Clarence Thomas or former RNC Chairman Michael Steele.
The positive review largely took note of the film’s successful twisting of the Spaghetti Western genre to fit a Civil War rebellion story, with special praise for Tarantino’s script and the actors who filled the screen.
But upon praising Samuel L. Jackson for his portrayal of Stephen, the head servant at the villainous Candie family mansion, Morris invoked the names of modern black Republicans whom he believes Jackson channeled in his “black self-loathing” performance . . .
Boston Herald columnist/WRKO squawker Howie Carr is experiencing an extreme bout of Howenfreude over the demise of FM talk station WTKK. (Full disclosure: The hardreading staff did a weekly segment on the Jim & Margery show.)
WTKK wouldn’t be turning off the lights next week if I could have just gotten over there back in 2007. No brag, just fact. And by the way, I’m still damn sorry I didn’t make good my escape from the AM band.
But here in Massachusetts, in the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls. And you wonder why I dismember so many state judges. Payback is a bitch, you hacks.
Still, WTKK’s failure is not the end of talk radio in Boston. Nature abhors a vacuum, and having no talk station on FM is a gaping hole. Less than 20 percent of the radio audience ever listens to AM radio — and it’s a mighty old audience, too. They don’t call it “Ancient Modulation” for nothing.
In his gleeful victory dance, however, Carr gets his feet all tangled up.
Harry Truman used to say, “If you give people a choice between a Republican and a Republican, they’ll vote for the Republican every time.”
Here’s WTKK’s epitaph: “If you give listeners a choice between NPR and NPR, they’ll pick NPR every time.”
Sorry, Jim and Margery, nobody was giving up “All Things Considered” for you guys.
First of all, what Harry Truman actually said was this: “Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.” That makes sense, as opposed to Carr’s mushbrained quote.
Second, Jim and Margery are up against “Morning Edition,” not “All Things Considered.”
Not to get technical about it.
Crosstown at the Boston Globe, the Namesniks have a slightly kinder – and slightly more optimistic – take.
WTKK to abandon talk radio for music
For an all-talk station, the folks at WTKK aren’t saying much. But we’re told the rumors are true: News Talk 96.9 FM is ditching its lineup of loudmouths in favor of music. The format change, which will take place right after the new year, means no more Michael Graham, who was sent packing last Friday, or midday host Doug Meehan, who actually left Boston a few weeks ago, or Rick Shaffer, cohost of the weekend “Money Show.” We’re told Jim Braude and Margery Eagan will be on the air as usual Wednesday morning, but that will be their last day at WTKK. Fans of “Jim and Margery” will be happy to learn, however, that they’re very likely to show up elsewhere on your radio dial sometime soon. No word on what sort of music 96.9 will be playing, but let’s hope it’s more soothing than Graham’s rants.
The Boston Herald, God love it, is always scrapping to retain its foothold in the local news media, which leads to enterprising front pages like Wednesday’s (via the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages):
Part One of the series focuses on the K-9 Unit’s preparation for drug- and bomb-sniffing duty.
K-9 squad keeps Hub’s streets clean
Barking up the right tree
Before the giant LNG tankers are allowed into the city, Boston’s crack bomb-sniffing K-9 squad sweeps the gargantuan ships seven miles out at sea.
If a bullet, spent magazine or gun must be found, these crime biters are called.
The U.S. Postal Service, DEA, ATF and area schools all have Boston Police Special Operations K-9 Division on speed dial.
“It’s just amazing what these dogs can do,” said Sgt. Frank Flynn, commander of the K-9 unit. “They won’t quit until we tell them to stop.”
Just like the Herald, yeah?
As the feisty local tabloid is wont to do these days, it also features videos of the dog-training on its website.
Given all that, would it be unfair of the hardreading staff to point out that Part One of the series is all of 17 paragraphs long? That compared to, say, the Boston Globe’s 68 Blocks series, this is sort of Nerf journalism?
Yes, it would be unfair.
The Herald newsroom has fewer than a dozen general-assignment reporters, with stripped-down crews across the board. In some ways, it’s a miracle they get a paper out every day.
So, in the holiday spirit, let’s all appreciate the Herald for what it brings to the table every day, shall we?
While the hardreading staff was down the Big Town, the Boston Herald gave WGHB a real thrashing last Friday, featuring this Jessica Heslam column on Page Two:
High-living WGBH owes $300G
Public TV behemoth WGBH has to pony up more than $300,000 as part of a federal civil settlement for what authorities said yesterday was shoddy record keeping of federal grant money.
Under a deal struck with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, WGBH must fork over the money for failing to “properly track and account for” federal grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, according to an announcement yesterday by Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz.
In 2011, a Herald review found that more than a dozen WGBH execs at the taxpayer-subsidized flagship station were making more than $200,000 a year while working in an $85 million multimedia headquarters dubbed the “Taj Mahal.”
“This settlement underscores that recipients of federal grant money must be scrupulous in their accounting for how those funds are spent, and in making accurate reports to federal grantors,” Ortiz said.
At issue: WGBH’s “inadequate accounting system” for the over $60 million in federal grants the station received from 2003 to 2010.
A Herald website news report on the fine included this comment from Doug708:
The left wing screaming liberal media will make sure this story gets buried. The only place anyone will see this story is the Herald.
If by “left wing screaming liberal media” Doug708 means the Boston Globe, he’s right. The hardsearching staff got this result for “WGBH federal fine” from the Globe’s website as of Monday at 1:27 AM:
When a local labor union decides to take a workplace dispute public in a newspaper ad campaign, the knee-jerk locale would be the Boston Herald, champion of all things blue-collar.
Not so in the case of the SEIU’s current crusade against HealthBridge that surfaced in a Tuesday Boston Globe ad:
A HealthBridgeWatch video:
This isn’t the first healthcare organization the SEIU has targeted. The union also has a longtime beef with BIDMC, as the hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider has previously noted.
So far, the SEIU hasn’t made a dent in HealthBridge’s image. We’ll see if the Globe ad helps.
It is the Hall of Fame ballot voting members of the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) have dreaded for the last five years. Our feet are finally being held to the bonfire. How will we as a body judge the candidacy of the all-time home run leader, the only man to win seven Cy Young Awards, and a man with 609 career home runs who is the only person to homer 60 times or more in three seasons?
Absent, shall we say, a complicating factor, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Sammy Sosa would be ultra-mortal locks. Based on the numbers, there wouldn’t be the slightest hesitation in checking the box next to their names.
But what sports fan doesn’t know there is a complicating factor?
The rest of the piece has Ryan wrestling with/explaining his choices. The final score:
Summing it up: Yes to [Jeff] Bagwell, [Craig] Biggio, [Edgar] Martinez, [Jack] Morris, [Mike] Piazza, [Tim] Raines, and [Curt] Schilling. Sorry to anyone else not named Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, McGwire , and Palmeiro.
By contrast, Globe baseball scribe Nick Cafardo skipped the Hamlet stuff and just included this in his Sunday Baseball Notes column:
Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Mike Piazza, Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, Alan Trammell, Tim Raines, and Jack Morris were all checked on my Hall of Fame ballot.
Reasoning, we hope, to come.
Crosstown at the Boston Herald, meanwhile, no mention whatsoever of the Hall. It’s not like there are no BBWAA voting members at the feisty local tabloid – Steve Buckley, Jeff Horrigan, and Michael Silverman are listed on Wikipedia‘s BBWAA roster.
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