The Boston Phoenix
May 25 - June 1, 2000

[Features]

Media

Barnicle gets the Mugger treatment

by Dan Kennedy

Is Mike Barnicle up to his old tricks? In this week's New York Press, owner/CEO/editor-in-chief Russ Smith, who writes the signature "Mugger" column, charges that there was "a whiff of plagiarism" in Barnicle's May 21 piece in the New York Daily News. Barnicle, of course, lost his Boston Globe column in August 1998 amid charges that he'd plagiarized from books by George Carlin and A.J. Liebling, and had fabricated details in a column about kids with cancer.

Smith compared Barnicle's Daily News column with an April 29 Jimmy Breslin piece in Newsday. Both columns explore, in somewhat different ways, the notion that to most New Yorkers, Mayor Rudy Giuliani is irrelevant. Breslin: "It is a city that needs no mayor, except in time of election to provide some excitement." Barnicle: "And I wonder how many of them really need a mayor or even a senator to get through their day."

Writes Smith, "Perhaps this isn't outright theft. But it comes close." By the way, the headline over Smith's Barnicle item is tone-perfect: NEW YORK CITY'S ACCIDENTAL TOURIST.

In the mutual-backscratching department, you can read Smith's entire column at www.nypress.com; look for "Mugger." And you will see that Smith describes me as Boston's "leading expert on Barnicle's journalistic indiscretions."