Hark! The Herald! (Both Sides No Edition)

November 6, 2017

As the hardreading staff has noted on numerous occasions, the Boston Herald has consistently failed to grasp the distinction between news and promotion.

Exhibit Umpteen: Today’s edition of the selfie local tabloid, which devotes half a page of its ever dwindling newshole to a talk Herald columnist Adriana Cohen gave yesterday at a Harvard student conference.

 

 

Just nuts graf:

“No one has a monopoly on smart,” Cohen said [at the event]. “There are good and smart people on both sides of the aisle and across demographics. When some people only want to hear one side of an argument, or one narrow set of ideas, they’re doing themselves a great disservice. We can all learn from one another.”

 

That’s rich, given that Cohen – a charter member of the Trumpettes – has demonstrably never met a knee she wouldn’t jerk.

Just as the Herald has never met a PR event it wouldn’t dress up as news.

(To be fair graf goes here)

To be fair, the Boston Globe has lately done its share of self-promotion as well. There was all the hubbub in the newshole last month over the paper’s HUBweek festival, and this wet kiss for “Globe Live” in the Names column last week.

 

 

Never say we don’t give you both sides.

Two-Daily Tune bonus track:

 

 


Hark! The Herald! (Cohen After WashPost Edition)

May 11, 2016

From our Walt Whitman desk

Call it the fisty local tabloid, ’cause the punches are flyin’ today.

It all started with this Callum Borchers piece in yesterday’s Washington Post.

Pundits achieve cable-news stardom after converting into Donald Trump supporters

Screen Shot 2016-05-11 at 12.38.41 PM

Last summer, shortly after Donald Trump launched his angry missile of a campaign with that memorable remark about Mexicans and rapists, Kayleigh McEnany sounded like pretty much every other talking head on cable news.

“I think he said something very unartful, very inappropriate,” she told Don Lemon during a June 29 segment on “CNN Tonight.”

“I’m here to tell you, he’s not going to be anywhere near the top five,” McEnany added. “He’s not a serious contender within the Republican Party. And I think he made that pretty clear when the most important thing he said in his speech was, ‘I am rich, I am rich,’ repeatedly.”

Today, McEnany sounds very different — both from her earlier self and from better-known conservative commentators such as Karl Rove and S.E. Cupp, who remain highly critical of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. McEnany is now a staunch Trump supporter, a turnaround that has helped make the newly minted Harvard Law School graduate a rising star on CNN . . .

 

McEnany, Borchers writes, “is one of a small handful of commentators — including Jeffrey Lord, Scottie Nell Hughes, Adriana Cohen and Carl Higbie — who have made defending the real estate mogul their niche and in the process made themselves hot commodities.”

And hot under the collar, in Cohen’s case. The Boston Herald columnist fired back at Borchers in today’s edition.

D.C. hit job ignores facts

Post piece demeans female pundits who back Trump

If you want to see what the war on women looks like, you need look no further than The Washington Post.Screen Shot 2016-05-11 at 1.39.38 PM

To be more specific, the war on conservative women.

Because I have dared to write supportive opinion columns on Donald Trump, I was featured along with two other female commentators in a Post story that stated that I have “achieved cable-news stardom after converting” into a Donald Trump supporter, that I, along with the others, “have made defending the real estate mogul their niche and in the process made themselves hot commodities.”

 

Cohen says despite Borchers’ claim that she was an “occasional guest” on CNN, Fox News Channel, and Fox Business Network “before getting behind Trump,” she actually appeared on national TV and radio shows “at least 100 times over the past few years, long before writing columns backing Trump and his positions this February.”

Cohen does not, however, address this part of Borchers’ piece:

On March 25, during a live segment on CNN, [Cohen] brought up a National Enquirer story that alleged multiple extramarital affairs by Cruz — unsubstantiated rumors that the mainstream media had mostly ignored until then. As anchor Kate Bolduan shook her head, Cohen went a step further, asserting on live TV that fellow guest Amanda Carpenter, Cruz’s former communications director, had been identified as one of five mistresses.

 

Ouch.

One last point: As Cohen points out, some of the comments attached to Borchers’ piece are brutally misogynistic. But during this election season, that’s par for the course. Trump supporters or no.


Mayweather & Pacquiao Sucker Punch Boston Herald

May 2, 2015

The Fight of the Century (five years late?) is on tonight, with Floyd Mayweather Jr. facing off against Manny Pacquiao in the squared circle at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.

As for the Fight of the Century advertising, the Boston Globe seems to have won the early rounds of that tilt between the local dailies.

From Friday’s edition of the Globe:

 

Screen Shot 2015-05-02 at 2.10.59 AM

 

No such ad ran in Friday’s Boston Herald.

In terms of news coverage, yesterday’s fighty local tabloid did feature this Ron Borges piece.

While the stately local broadsheet ran this Callum Borchers Page One take on the fight.

The hardfighting staff looks forward to both of today’s bakeoffs. But we’re only paying for one.


Hey, Forget Arthur S . . . The Boston Globe Owns Market Basket Today

July 30, 2014

As the hardreading staff noted earlier, yesterday’s Boston Herald got the better of the Globe in the Boston dailies’ coverage of the Demoulas Slapfight/Market Basket Rumpus. But today, the stately local broadsheet was on the story like Brown on Williamson, with four – count ’em, four – pieces on the grocery-store equivalent of mutually assured destruction.

Start, of course, with Page One (the Globe ePaper is Lost in Cyberspace right now, so no screenshots for you!).

Market Basket board still ponders sale offers

Bid by ousted leader reportedly the focus

Negotiations over the fate of the embattled Market Basket grocery chain stretched into a second day Tuesday, as the company’s board said the owners were evaluating a sale to help rescue the multibillion-dollar business.

As analysts warn that the value of the company falls and the threat to workers’ jobs rises with each day of indecision, the board said it was still considering offers by ousted president Arthur T. Demoulas and other suitors. People familiar with the talks said Demoulas’s offer was the focus of discussions throughout the day.

 

And Market Basket is the focus of the Globe throughout today’s paper. Drifting back to the Business section we find Shirley Leung’s column about other grocery families that struggled with ownership, Jack Newsham’s piece on Market Basket loyalists shopping at the competition, and a look at social media by Callum Borchers and Andrew Ba Tran, complete with nifty graphic.

Social media play key role in Market Basket saga

 

mbsocial

It should be no surprise that in the digital age Facebook has served as the center of the Market Basket protest movement. But just a few short weeks ago, many of the employees leading the fight barely knew their way around the Internet.

Until recently Market Basket didn’t have an official company website. It quickly crashed and is still not working. Managers have company e-mail accounts but use them sparingly. When you work in a supermarket, the colleague you need to talk to is never more than a few aisles away.

“Technology is not part of our company culture,” acknowledged Tom Gordon, who was a a grocery supervisor at market basket for 39 years before being fired in early July for helping organize the protest. “I’m still using my flip phone, if that’s any indication.

Yet a Facebook page called Save Market Basket has become the hub where workers lay out the next course of action to get their ousted president, Arthur. T. Demoulas reinstated, post news articles and letters from the company’s board of directors, and where tens of thousands of customers have pledged their support.

 

feels like there’s no bottom to this well, doesn’t it?


Our Boston Globe/John Henry Watch (Landsdowne Street Air Rights Edition)

September 27, 2013

(Two-Daily Town is proud to introduces this new feature tracking the Boston Globe’s disclosure of Red Sox principal owner John Henry’s Globe purchase)

The hardreading staff is, as you may have gathered, an eternal optimist. But this piece in Thursday’s Boston Globe gives us pause.

 

Screen Shot 2013-09-27 at 12.54.13 AM

 

Nut graf:

Cahill said the BRA is attempting to “give away rights to a public street without reasonable public notice, without public advertisement, and without utilizing a public process.” There were no public hearings about the deal, though the board will vote during a public meeting.

Cahill also said the city should not sign a lifetime contract with the Red Sox and should seek a slice of the revenue generated by the team’s use of Yawkey and Lansdowne — a total of about $4.5 million annually, according to the team.

 

Sweet(heart), yeah?

The problem here isn’t the Globe story – reporter Callum Borchers does a perfectly reasonable job of examining both sides of the issue. The problem is, nowhere does the Globe disclose that Red Sox principal owner John Henry is the boss of them – something the Globe should absolutely overdisclose.

Crosstown, the Boston Herald is less, shall we say, nuanced.

NEL_9829.JPGCrying foul over Boston Sox deal

Watchdogs to review $7.3M pact

Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino balked yesterday at intervening in a proposed $7.3 million deal between the BRA and the Red Sox for air rights over Lansdowne Street and game-day concessions on Yawkey Way as the state Inspector General’s office said it would review the deal and an independent watchdog group called it “financially irresponsible”

“Why should I?” Menino asked. “It’s a good deal. (The Boston Redevelopment Authority) got much more money than they got in the past. Think about what the Red Sox mean to the city: jobs, taxes, vitality, heads on beds.”

 

The Herald piece doesn’t mention the Globe’s opaque coverage of the story.

Not sure that will be the case for long.