From our One Town, Two Different Worlds desk (in cooperation with our Late to the Party desk)
Yesterday’s Boston dailies provided a textbook compare ‘n’ contrast case study on several fronts.
Start with the Boston Herald’s front page:
What followed was Jessica Heslam’s page 2 column about sports radio moron Kirk Minihane’s gutless bitching about FOX Sports fox Erin Andrews’ lame All Star Game interview of groovy St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright:
Vulgar put-down of Erin Andrews won’t score points for WEEI
Boston sports radio station WEEI — which has been trounced by rival “98.5 The Sports Hub” and is taking a ratings beating because of the cellar-dwelling Red Sox — found itself in hot water yesterday after one of its jock talkers made vulgar on-air comments about a female sportscaster.
“Dennis & Callahan” sidekick Kirk Minihane ended up apologizing for his demeaning remarks about Fox Sports reporter Erin Andrews, but not before the whole brouhaha had some wondering whether it was all a desperate bid to boost ratings.
Groovy. But here’s how the Boston Globe reported it, Metro page 1:
Martha Coakley rips WEEI host for Erin Andrews rant
Stomping onto the dangerous turf of talk radio, gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley called out a WEEI radio host for an on-air tirade in which he lambasted FOX Sports reporter Erin Andrews, cursing about her and telling her to “drop dead.”
The rant on the “Dennis & Callahan Show” Wednesday morning prompted Coakley to contact a reporter covering the story to weigh in and later prompted an apology from the radio personality.
“Everybody understands fair criticism,” Coakley told Boston.com. “But when it becomes personal, when it’s demeaning, and when it goes over the line as this did, that language is inexcusable, and it’s offensive. I just felt it was important for me to weigh in.”
Yeah, that’s really “dangerous turf” – taking a bold stance against sexist buffoonery. The Bay State needs more Profiles in Courage like that.
Meanwhile, here’s what the stately local broadsheet featured on its front page:
Bay State lawmen and lawmakers are urging Gov. Deval Patrick to reject President Obama’s request to shelter some of the thousands of children who have been surging across the nation’s southern border illegally, while immigration advocates are calling the crisis a humanitarian issue requiring immediate action.
“As long as there are signals being sent out that people can come here illegally and we’re just going to take care of them, then they’re just going to keep on coming,” Bristol County Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson said yesterday from the Texas border on a fact-finding tour. “Neither the president nor the governor have come down to the border to see what’s happening — had they taken the time to come down, they would understand why sending people to Massachusetts is not the answer.”
(Can we just interject here that Tom Hodgson is the biggest media slut this side of Kim Kardashian? Thank you.)
That’s not even to deal with the hiss & hiss treatment of the BRA in yesterday’s local dailies. (Roll your own.)
The local dailies’ coverage of Saturday’s Democratic Party hoedown made it clear that gubernatorial hopeful Mirtha Coakley will be forever haunted by her 2010 U.S. Senate loss to Scott Brown (R-Elsewhere).
Poor Steve Grossman. The treasurer wins the Democratic convention in Worcester, and the people who pay attention to these things will be talking about only Attorney General Martha Coakley, who has been killing him in the polls.
Poor Coakley, too. Her camp did a good job of lowering expectations for Saturday’s party confab, but then struggled to meet even those, with Coakley barely squeaking by former Obama administration official Don Berwick to take second place. Oof.
And so she’ll continue to be dogged by the ghosts of 2010, when she lost a special US Senate election to an empty barn jacket. Those four-year-old echoes can be pretty persistent.
Then again, so can Mirtha. Our prediction: Brown won’t mean a thing here come November.
The Boston Herald has slowly evolved into a cross between The Onion and one big selfie.
Exhibit Umpteen: The feisty local tabloid’s hyperventilating coverage today of . . . itself! Specifically the gubernatorial debate the the Herald will stream on its website tomorrow.
. . . to Hillary “Cassandra” Chabot’s dire warning to Martha Coakley . . .
. . . to John “Cassandra” Nucci’s dire warning to everyone else . . .
Wow. So, presumably, there will be a tremendous web audience tomorrow morning, extensive media coverage of the debate, and serious repercussions for the candidates.
Remember those two knuckleheads who had the bright idea of scamming the One Fund Boston out of $2.2 million by claiming an aunt had been maimed in the Marathon bombings?
Last we heard from them, Branden Mattier had filed suit against the State Police and FedEx in December for “[violating] his constitutional rights when he was arrested in July after allegedly signing for a bogus $2.2 million check from One Fund Boston.”
A South End rapper texted his brother he was moved to “real tears of joy, dawg,” upon learning The One Fund Boston had approved them for a $2.2 million payday based on their bogus claim that a long-dead aunt had lost both her legs to last year’s deadly Boston Marathon bombings, according to grand jury testimony their lawyers have filed in the case.
Branden “The Real SouljaBoy” Mattier, 23, told Domunique Grice, 28, the pair would be moving to “a place where only royalty lives” courtesy of their newfound wealth and the black Mercedes-Benzes they’d soon be driving.
Those are just a few of the roughly “40,000 texts between them police said they recovered from Mattier’s iPhone, according to voluminous documents filed Friday in Suffolk Superior Court.”
Here are a few more:
According to Sweet, “[t]he brothers were due to face a jury next month on charges of conspiracy, identity fraud and attempting to commit a crime, but the trial has been postponed indefinitely.”
But SouljaBoy will be in court on Thursday hoping to suppress recorded statements he made to police last July.
Maybe the Boston Globe will cover that. Because right now this one is all the Herald’s.
It’s a regular Galathon at the feisty local tabloid today. Start, appropriately, with Page One.
Because the Herald has a new Race for Governor Poll to tout, it splashes the gubernatorial hopefuls across four pages inside (note that Martha Coakley gets the Inexplicable Green 1- good luck?).
A few pages later, it’s the other cover gal in the spotlight.
Here’s the nut graf:
“This is one of the best days of my life,” [de la Garza] said. “You’re just going to see me in a totally new way. Under the news umbrella, I can only really do so much. So it’ll be a little bit more unfiltered. Let’s call it Bianca unanchored.”
And here’s video of de la Garza talking about her new Lucky Gal Productions, which will produce the as-yet-unnamed “late-night, personality-driven program [focusing] on Boston’s celebrity, fashion and nightlife scene.”
It’ll be interesting to see if de la Garza follows the lead of Style Boston, the largely unwatchable show that’s just advertising in TV-magazine drag. She’ll be a Lucky Gal if she can avoid that.
Today’s Boston daily double features a rarity: The Boston Globe front-pages what should have been the Boston Herald’s Page One.
First, here’s what the feisty local tabloid actually ran:
That’s fine – gotta do the Pats when it’s Monday Night Football and Coakley’s jumping on the junkets is good (and it beat the Globe). But the Health-Connector-Is-Worse-Than-Obamacare story is thrice-told news at this point. It doesn’t really merit another front page hit.
Crosstown, the Globe’s Page One has the story the Herald should have had.
Boston police officers wary of GPS for cruisers
Fear too much scrutiny of police under city’s plan
The pending use of GPS tracking devices, slated to be installed in Boston police cruisers, has many officers worried that commanders will monitor their every move while supervisors insist the system will improve their response to emergencies.
The change, a result of contract negotiations between the city and the patrol officers union, puts Boston in league with small-town departments across the state and big-city agencies across the country that have installed global positioning systems in cruisers.
Boston police administrators say the system gives dispatchers the ability to see where officers are, rather than wait for a radio response. Using GPS, they say, accelerates their response to a call for a shooting or an armed robbery.
Just think how that translates to the Herald’s front page, all donuts and dozing off. Can’t you see it?
Two different – but not necessarily contradictory – takes in the local dailies about former Massachusetts Treasurer Tim Cahill’s close call with the law over financial shenanigans in the Bay State’s 2010 gubernatorial race.
First up: Joan Vennochi’s column in Thursday’s Boston Globe:
With Cahill, a good law and a weak case
IT’S EASY when it’s cash stuffed between a state senator’s breasts or checks funneled through a law partner directly into the pockets of the speaker of the House.
It’s harder — as it should be — when a case for political corruption consists of a feel-good lottery ad campaign that cost taxpayers $1.5 million but never mentions the name of the state treasurer who ordered it up. Those are the underlying facts in the case that Attorney General Martha Coakley brought against former state Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill.
While treasurer, Cahill spent public money to advance a personal political agenda — his failed campaign for governor. A new state law makes it a crime for politicians to do that — if prosecutors can show “fraudulent intent.” But in the case against Cahill, the evidence of fraudulent intent simply wasn’t strong enough.
That’s the legal angle. Peter Gelzinis had the human angle in his Friday Boston Herald column:
Tim Cahill: I’m still here
Tim Cahill tucked himself away at a back table a couple of mornings ago, inside his favorite breakfast haunt, McKay’s in Quincy. The word other customers kept tossing his way was, “Congratulations!”
Cahill thanked them all with the grateful smile of someone who’d just come out of a coma.
“I hesitate to think of these past two years as a near-death experience,” he said, referring to his disastrous gubernatorial bid, followed by Attorney General Martha Coakley’s corruption indictment, the threat of serious jail time, a trial that ended in a hung jury and, finally, a negotiated plea to something called “a perception of wrongdoing.”
The piece ends with this, which is bound to warm the hearts of Cahill supporters and make his detractors burning mad:
The experience, he said feels “as if I’ve been to my own wake. For two years, I couldn’t really talk to anyone and yet I’ve had all these friends come by to wish me well and tell me they were praying for me. Then, the weirdest, or perhaps, the nicest thing, is that I’m still here to be with them all.”
Instead of in the sneezer, where very few ever thought Cahill should wind up.
Under pressure from its high-powered – and for the past two years, uncompensated – board of directors, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts has started to pony up to the bigwigs again. Both local dailies give the move Page One play, but the similarities pretty much end there.
Two years after bowing to its critics and suspending five-figure annual pay for directors, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is reinstating the compensation — though at reduced levels and to fewer board members.
The state’s largest health insurance carrier will pay part-time board members who chair committees a maximum of $54,500. That is down from the $78,60 [sic] before the public outcry over how much directors were paid at nonprofit insurers regulated as public charities. Blue Cross will pay other directors no more than $47,000, down from $58,600 in 2011.
Despite the reductions, Blue Cross board members will remain among the best compensated directors at any nonprofit health plan in the state.
Blue Cross board members attend up to five full board meetings a year, a strategic planning session, and about eight committee meetings, executives said.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts has quietly resumed paying its part-time, politically wired board of directors tens of thousands of dollars a year, sneaking the cash back into their pockets two years after Attorney General Martha Coakley publicly pushed health care nonprofits to end the outrageous payouts.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield spokesman Jay McQuaide confirmed last night that the board’s 17 members are back on the payroll — the result of a vote they took at a December meeting. McQuaide did not specify their pay but said it has been cut by an average of 25 percent. Directors were previously paid from $60,000 to $90,000 a year.
Pretty different top number from the Globe’s, but why get technical about it.
The Herald also drops different – and better – names than the Globe, which lists the new directors and ex-directors. The Herald has all the usual suspects:
The Blue Cross board’s 17-member roster is packed with powerbrokers from just about every arena in the state. Among them, Blue Cross CEO Andrew Dreyfus, chairman William Van Faasen, Massachusetts AFL-CIO vice president George R. Alcott III, Massachusetts Teachers Association President Paul Toner, former Massachusetts Democratic Party chairman Philip Johnston, Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce chief Paul Guzzi, Bentley University president Gloria Larson, Simmons College president Helen G. Drinan, former Suffolk District Attorney and current Northeastern University general counsel Ralph C. Martin and Benaree Wiley, former head of The Partnership.
Finally, no surprise, the feisty local tabloid remembers to pat itself on the back:
A series of Herald stories in 2011 exposed the exorbitant pay and lavish perks to the nonprofit’s board of local powerbrokers. The series came after the board voted to give departing CEO Cleve Killingsworth an $11 million golden parachute after the health insurer posted a $149 million loss.
That would explain this on Page One:
Say it with me: I celebrate myself and sing myself and yak yak yak.
Now that Lt. Gov. Tim Murray (D-Pressed) has made his high-speed exit from the 2014 Massachusetts gubernatorial race, rampant speculation about who might emerge as alternatives has officially begun.
As is only fitting, the Great Mentioner stopped by both local dailies in Murray’s wake, with – wait for it ! – decidedly different results.
From Joe Battenfeld’s Saturday Boston Herald column:
Here’s one scenario: Joe Kennedy, the father. Sources say the former congressman may not have completely shaken off the political bug. One Democratic source said there has been increasing chatter about Kennedy mulling getting back into politics. But there is even more buzz that his son, newly elected U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III, could be a gubernatorial prospect.
While the elder Kennedy and many other Democrats say he’s happy living in the private sector, he — or his son — could always come in as the Democratic shining knight to keep the GOP from taking over the Corner Office.
Lt. Gov. Tim Murray’s stunning decision yesterday to bow out of the 2014 gubernatorial race shook up the Bay State’s political landscape — likely nudging potential candidates for the Corner Office closer toward a run.
State Treasurer Steve Grossman has made his intentions about a likely run clear, but candidates such as Attorney General Martha Coakley and U.S. Rep. Michael E. Capuano could also decide to take the plunge.
“The race now is wide open,” said Democratic consultant Mary Anne Marsh. “Steve Grossman becomes the front-runner as of today, and you’ve got to think Martha Coakley is looking a lot more closely at it.”
In addition to [State Treasurer Steve] Grossman, potential Democratic candidates include Donald M. Berwick, a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and State Senator Dan Wolf, the founder of Cape Air.
Murray’s exit could also clear the way for US Representative Michael E. Capuano, an urban liberal who would draw some of the same supporters as Murray. Capuano, a former Somerville mayor, said this week he will not run for Senate.
His spokeswoman, Alison Mills, said Capuano “has already received a great deal of encouragement and will consider other opportunities at the appropriate time.”
Charles D. Baker, a Republican who ran for governor in 2010, is considering another run as well.
Donald Berwick?
Dan Wolf?
But no Martha Coakley?
Seems like the Great Mentioner had an off-day at the Globe.
Up until now, conventional wisdom in the Bay State held that Scott Brown (R-Tickle Me Grover) had first GOP dibs on the U.S. Senate seat soon to be vacated by John Kerry (D-So Long, Suckers), while Good (Next) Time Charlie Baker had same on the 2014 Massachusetts gubernatorial race.
Not so fast.
From Joe Battenfeld’s piece in today’s Boston Herald:
Dems fear Scott may run for gov
While Democrats frantically try to block Scott Brown from going back to the U.S. Senate, there are also increasing fears he could pose an even bigger threat as the next Massachusetts governor.
Republicans close to the departing U.S. senator said he’s itching to go back to Washington to replace John Kerry, but Democrats are buzzing more about a potential Brown gubernatorial campaign in 2014. It may be tempting for Brown to run in a special election against a vulnerable Rep. Edward J. Markey, but he should reject the easy play and go for the job that really matters — running the state of Massachusetts.
“In the last week, there has been more speculation (about a Brown gubernatorial campaign),” one top Democratic strategist said. “He’d have a much better shot at (governor).”
Battenfeld says in a Senate race Democrats “will throw millions of dollars against him and use the same strategy they used last year for U.S. Sen.-elect Elizabeth Warren, trying to tie him to national Republicans.” The gubernatorial race would be an easier one to win.
[I]f you were Scott Brown, who would you rather run against, Ed Markey and the entire Democratic Party, or state Treasurer Steve Grossman or Attorney General Martha Coakley?
Good question.
One last question: What does Charlie Baker think?
Battenfeld doesn’t say.
UPDATE: Gotta add today’s overcaffeinated Page One (via the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages):
The rant on the “Dennis & Callahan Show” Wednesday morning prompted Coakley to contact a reporter covering the story to weigh in and later prompted an apology from the radio personality.
humanitarian issue requiring immediate action.
Posted by Campaign Outsider 
It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town 