October 18, 2013
Interesting his-and-his guest op-eds in the local dailies today.
Start with MSNBC video savant Chris Matthews in the Boston Globe:
Yes, politics was once friendly
A NEW NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds that 78 percent of us think the country’s headed in the wrong direction. The true surprise is the 14 percent who think that things are getting better.
Government shutdowns that once amounted to a couple of days are now more than a couple of weeks. And who knows how to measure the possible cost of the threat to stop payment on the national debt?
There was once a man who personified the very opposite of this political dysfunction.
Kirk O’Donnell was chief counsel and partisan consigliore to Speaker of the House Thomas P. O’Neill. He was, by the great man’s own estimate, “hard as a rock.” Young in years, he knew the rules of the old crowd and employed them with brio.
And what was the Golden Rule of politics?
It’s applicable to marriage, work relationships, and most especially to rivalries: “Always be able to talk.”
Yes, well tell that to University of Maryland professor Peter Morici crosstown at the Boston Herald’s op-ed page, who writes this about the end of the government shutdown.
[Obama’s] doomsday rhetoric made the U.S. government appear inept and irresponsible, has eroded the primary standing of U.S. securities in global markets, and will weaken U.S. economic leadership in global forums for many years to come.
Senate negotiators hammered out a bill acceptable to the president that reopened the government and raised the debt ceiling, and House Democrats and moderate Republicans voted for it.
The president’s victory was accomplished through deception and demagoguery, by violating the will of voters expressed in the 2012 congressional elections and the Constitution, and damaging U.S. global standing.
Yeah – don’t see a whole lot of pillow talk happening between those two sides anytime soon.
Leave a Comment » | 
Uncategorized | Tagged: Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Chris Matthews, GOP, government shutdown, Kirk O'Donnell, MSNBC, Obamacare, Peter Morici, President Obama, Ronald Reagan, Tip O'Neill, University of Maryland, video savant | 
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Posted by Campaign Outsider
October 17, 2013
Several days ago the hardreading staff posted an item about the Jewish News Service running this ad in the Boston Herald but not the Boston Globe.
We also said we’d try to contact JNS founder (and inveterate publishing bunny) Russel Pergament to ask, among other things, if he’ll be advertising in the Globe anytime soon.
And so we did. Whereupon we had a nice conversation with Pergament, a media dynamo the hardworking staff has known for over three decades, ever since he was founding the Tab newspapers and we were copy chief at Filene’s.
(Best part of that job: We met the Missus.)
Best part of Russel Pergament: He’s entirely unfazed at JNS being depicted “as foaming-at-the mouth right wingers,” as he put it, referring to this Jewish Daily Forward piece.
Instead, he says this:
Even the most left-wing Jewish writers who see Israel as an aggressive Nazi-like state get nervous about reports like this one from Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet [regarding Jewish soldiers purportedly harvesting the organs of Arabs].
Pergament says a dozen papers – including Christian media and secular media that “emphasize the objective nature of the facts we send” – have subscribed to JNS. He says he’s also run ads in The New Republic and a New Britain, CT paper, while the Jerusalem Press and Chicago Tribune have picked up JNS content.
As for the Boston dailies, Pergament says he gets more bang for the buck in the Herald, and that the Herald sales rep called and asked for his business.
Hey, Globeniks – any response?
1 Comment | Uncategorized | Tagged: Adam Reilly, Aftonbladet, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Boston Phoenix, Chicago Tribune, Filene's, Jerusalem Press, Jewish News Service, Jewish soldiers harvest Arab organs, JNS, Russel Pergament, Tab newspapers, the Missus, The New Republic | Permalink
Posted by Campaign Outsider
October 16, 2013
From our Walt Whitman desk
Today’s Boston Herald has a swell time patting itself on the back for yet another mention by “Journalism’s own hall of fame” – that would be The Newseum – in its daily Top Ten Front Pages feature.
Under the headline “Sports Stories” there’s this:
When a sports story makes the front page, it usually gets the best play. Just look at today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which devoted half of Page One to the Cardinals’ baseball playoff loss. Of course, newspapers aren’t always so keen to promote defeat. The Indianapolis Star found a way to downplay the Colts’ loss in “Monday Night Football” by focusing on the positive. Go team!
You don’t have to tell the feisty local tabloid twice.
And don’t miss that dig at crosstown rival Boston Globe:
The Herald was the only Boston paper featured in the Top 10 list yesterday. The Herald’s front page was even tweeted out by Red Sox owner John W. Henry.
You know he’s gonna own the Globe too, right?
It doesn’t get much better than that for the Heraldniks.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: Big Papi, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, David Ortiz, Gerry Callahan, Heraldniks, John Henry, Michael Silverman, Paul Keaney, Red Sox, The Newseum, Top Ten Front Pages, Walt Whitman | Permalink
Posted by Campaign Outsider
October 14, 2013
From our LOL desk
Mistah Mayah makes an appearance in both local dailies today with a story less believable than Bill Clinton on Saturday night. Start with the Boston Herald :
Menino warns: Endorsements only go so far
The two candidates for mayor fought hard for key endorsements last week — with both Martin J. Walsh and John R. Connolly claiming 
victories in that fight — but the current occupant of City Hall, Mayor Thomas M. Menino, said yesterday endorsements aren’t worth the breath they’re uttered on if supporters can’t back it up with votes.
“Endorsements are great to have, but people have to get out and vote. I don’t just say that. When I ran for mayor, I had no endorsements and I won,” Menino, who insists he’s staying neutral, told the Herald, referring to his first race 20 years ago.
But here’s the best part:
Menino maintained yesterday he’ll stay out of the fray.
“Some of my people are with Walsh, some of them are with Connolly,” Menino said. “If anyone comes to me, I say, ‘Do what you want to do. It’s up to you … I don’t run a dictatorship.’ … Unless it gets personal. I don’t intend to get involved in this campaign at all. It’s really great to watch from the sidelines.”
Yeah, and he’s also looking forward to spending more time scrapbooking.
Crosstown, it’s much the same eyewash at the Boston Globe.
In this race, Menino loyalists are on their own
Their arms have hoisted green Mayor Menino signs for 20 years. Their fists have knocked on doors from Oak Square to Neponset.
They have driven sound trucks blasting get-out-the-vote messages in Spanish through Hyde Square and lashed political placards to the fence outside East Boston High School, dressing the polling place for Election Day.
They are the members of Team Menino, the vaunted political machine of Mayor Thomas M. Menino. Some loyalists joined upstart mayoral campaigns as soon as Menino announced in March he would not seek a sixth term. But the mayor’s vow to remain neutral in the 12-candidate preliminary election kept many on the sidelines.
Until now.
Nut graf:
“I said, ‘Do what you want to do,’ ” Menino said in an interview. “It’s not a dictatorship. I have an organization that’s committed to things I believe in in government. They want to make a choice, let them make a choice.”
Yep – they won’t have Tommy to kiss around anymore.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: Bill Clinton on Saturday night, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Boston mayoral race, John Connolly, Marty Walsh, Tom Menino | Permalink
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October 11, 2013
As the hardreading staff has previously noted, the Boston Herald is on the WGBH/David Koch rumpus like Brown on Williamson.
Today’s installment:
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.
Long live the feisty local tabloid!
2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: Amos Hostetter, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Brad Johnson, climate change, David Koch, Elmo, Forecast the Facts, Howie Carr, Joan Vennochi, Koch Industries, Michael Raia, MIT child-care center, NOVA, Obamacare, PBS, WGBH | Permalink
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October 10, 2013
The Boston Herald has an unusual ad on Page 8 of today’s edition.
JNS – the Jewish News Service – describes itself this way:
JNS.org is an independent, non-profit, business resource and wire service covering Jewish news and Israel news for Jewish media throughout the English-speaking world.
We provide objective, non-partisan reporting from Jewish communities throughout the U.S., Europe, South America, South Africa, Australia and a wide array of Israel news. We also provide a rich assortment of photos and art, cultural news and features, commentary, and holiday-specific editorial packages around which our subscribers can sell seasonal-themed advertising.
But here’s how the Jewish Daily Forward describes it.
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.
2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: Adam Reilly, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Boston Phoenix, BostonNOW, David, Goliath, Israel, Jewish Daily Forward, Jewish News Service, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Middle East, Russel Pergament, TAB | Permalink
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October 10, 2013
The Boston Herald has been on the WGBH/David Koch rumpus like Brown on Williamson, but today they’ve really outdone themselves.
Start with Page One.
The inside story (print headline):
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.”
Sounds like double trouble to us.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: Amos Hostetter, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, climate change, David Koch, Elmo, Howie Carr, Joan Vennochi, Koch Industries, MIT child-care center, NOVA, Obamacare, PBS, WGBH | Permalink
Posted by Campaign Outsider
October 8, 2013
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.
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: Board of Higher Ed, Boston Herald, Deval Patrick, Evan Dobelle, George Regan, Westfield State University | Permalink
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October 7, 2013
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.
Rising pit bull adoptions reflect breed’s changing image
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.)
Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, Eric Coldwell, Gary Patronek, Joe Fitzgerald, Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, pit bull, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Puppy Doe, Puppy Doe Jour, Rob Halpin, Tufts University | Permalink
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October 5, 2013
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.
From today’s Boston Herald:
Koch foes blasted for ‘politicizing’ public TV
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.
Can you say Things Go Bitter with Koch?
I knew you could.
7 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: Bob Lichter, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Center for Media and Public Affairs, David Koch, George Mason University, Media Research Center, New York, NOVA, PBS, Tim Graham, WGBH, WNET | Permalink
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It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town 