Media

This week's obligatory Jeff Jacoby item

by Dan Kennedy

The "Inside Track" in Wednesday's Boston Herald led with a lengthy item on a new accusation that Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby may be borrowing material without attribution -- but failed to note that the Globe's editorial-page editor, Renée Loth, had already cleared Jacoby of wrongdoing.

The Herald recounted an item in this week's New York Observer that noted that Jacoby -- in his annual December 28 round-up of liberal hate speech -- had criticized the lack of outrage over CBS's Craig Kilborn's showing a photo of George W. Bush last summer above the caption SNIPERS WANTED. (In that same column, Jacoby also took a remark by liberal Paul Begala out of context and then whacked him for it -- as pundits Peggy Noonan and Michael Kelly had done previously; see "This Just In," News and Features, January 6.)

Jacoby wondered what would have happened if the Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly had pulled a similar stunt with a clip of Al Gore. And the Observer piece, by media critic Gabriel Snyder, noted that Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper and the New York Post editorial page had both made essentially the same point last August, with Roeper citing Rush Limbaugh as an example instead of O'Reilly and the Post citing the Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity.

The Herald contacted Jacoby, who called the similarities a "complete coincidence." But it made no mention of the fact that Loth had told the Observer that she didn't "see much cause for concern."

Just before the Phoenix went to press, Loth expanded on that in a telephone interview, saying, "Obviously three different columnists noticed that joke about the sniper, which would be hard to miss if you were collecting examples of outrageous things that liberals say. I don't see any cause for concern at all. This is a theme he [Jacoby] has returned to repeatedly."

Both the Observer and the Herald drew parallels between the "sniper" remark and a column that earned Jacoby a four-month suspension last summer: a tribute to the signers of the Declaration of Independence that was similar in structure and content to previously published pieces and to versions that had been circulating on the Internet.

Loth, though, says that by comparing "coincidences" such as the repetition of the Kilborn misstep to Jacoby's deliberate (if inadvertent) failure to attribute the Declaration column, "you diminish the meaning of standards."