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."