January 8 - 15, 1998
![[Don't Quote Me]](/standard/image/headers/dont_quote_me_header.gif)
Ask the average reader her impression of the Boston Globe, and you can be sure that one of the first things she'll mention is the paper's reputation as a house organ for the Kennedys. Certainly that appeared to be the case following the death of Michael Kennedy. The Globe attempted to burnish a mythology long since discredited elsewhere, leaving it to the Boston Herald to provide the requisite dose of reality. Lost in the myth
The Globe bids Michael Kennedy an exceedingly gentle farewell. Plus, Szep and the Irish, and this side of parodies.
by Dan Kennedy
Of course, as with most truisms, the facts are considerably more complicated. The Globe's coverage of Michael Kennedy's death is actually a striking exception to a trend toward tougher, more skeptical stories.
Yes, old-line columnists such as David Nyhan and Mike Barnicle can still be counted on to weigh in on the side of Camelot. And the Globe's liberal editorial pages are largely in sync with the progressive public-policy agenda of US Senator Ted Kennedy.
Will Joe Kennedy run for governor?
But during the nearly five years that Matt Storin has been the Globe's editor, news coverage of the Kennedys has shifted. The paper signaled a major change in the way it covers politics with its evenhanded reportage on the 1994 Senate race, when Kennedy, until the final weeks of the campaign, was threatened by Republican businessman Mitt Romney.
More to the point, until last week the Globe was Michael Kennedy's principal tormentor, revealing last spring that he'd had a sexual affair with his family's teenage babysitter, and, later, that he'd enriched himself while running Citizens Energy Corporation, the fuel-assistance program for the poor that his brother Joe started before he was elected to Congress. Clearly the Globe had come a long way from the days when its editors negotiated with the president of the United States over how to play a story on Teddy's cheating at Harvard.
So it was something of a surprise when the Globe reverted to its old ways.
Perhaps Storin and company recognized -- as Brian Mooney did in a perceptive column on Saturday -- that Michael Kennedy was essentially a private, unknown person from a famous family, and that it would therefore be unseemly to subject him to the kind of tough postmortem a truly public figure would warrant. Perhaps they simply saw no need to cause further pain to a family that, however flawed it may be, has suffered more than most of us can imagine.
Whatever the reason, the Globe essentially took itself out of the game in the days following Kennedy's death. Particularly obsequious was Sunday's front-page commentary (not labeled as such) by Barnicle, a former Robert Kennedy Sr. employee (not identified as such). As a friend of the Kennedys, Barnicle was one of the few journalists who attended the private wake and funeral. There's nothing particularly wrong with his writing as a friend, though the Globe's editors should have made it more clear that's what he was doing. Certainly that was the case when he wrote about the suffering of Michael's mother, Ethel, and the "biographers, historians, and a legion of greed-crazed magazine writers" who helped contribute to that suffering. As if the revelations unearthed by Seymour Hersh, Nigel Hamilton, David Horowitz, et al. were of no public import. Yet not until Tuesday (Jeff Jacoby) and Wednesday (Eileen McNamara) did any Globe pundit seriously question the Kennedy aura.
The Herald provided welcome relief from this reality-distortion field. It offered nothing startling, but it at least managed to treat Michael Kennedy's death as a news story rather than a canonization.
Three Herald pieces, in particular, stand out. A story by Carolyn Ryan on Friday, headlined ASPEN FOLK CARE LITTLE FOR ROWDY KENNEDYS, reported that the Kennedys have been less than popular in Aspen over the years because of their Belushi-esque behavior and their penchant for not paying their bills.
A Howie Carr column that same day made the point that Michael's sexual conduct was reprehensible and could have landed him in prison if it weren't for the protection accorded by his famous name. Needlessly cruel? I don't think so. Carr toned down his usual sarcasm and offered a useful antidote to the hypocrisy of the day.
Finally, on Monday the Herald splashed across the front page the Time magazine revelation that a top Aspen official had asked Ethel Kennedy to cancel the family's traditional -- and incredibly dangerous -- ski-football game. Now, passing along a story from Time isn't going to win the Herald a Pulitzer, but it was a highly significant development, and the Globe should have carried it, too.
There's no question that this family continues to exert a peculiar hold on all of us. The night of Michael Kennedy's death, for instance, MSNBC went wall-to-wall Kennedy, with extended live commentary from the Globe's Marty Nolan, based in San Francisco, and Washington reporter Chris Black. (Interestingly, New England Cable News, which has a partnership with the Globe that includes a studio in the paper's newsroom, could rouse none of the paper's reporters -- though NECN did keep on top of the story with live updates during time slots when it normally shows canned news or sports.)
At its best, celebrity journalism can tell us much about the state of our culture. Look at what the O.J. Simpson case taught us about race, wealth, and celebrity, or at what we learned about the simmering tensions over child care and the role of women from the Louise Woodward trial.
It's difficult to say what the life and death of Michael Kennedy can teach us, but the story made this much clear: there are moments when it's easier to perpetuate a myth that absolutely no one believes anymore than it is to tell the simple truth.
Globe editorial page editor David Greenway has apologized. Cardinal Bernard Law has denounced what he called a "shameful ethnic slur." No doubt ombudsman Jack Thomas will deliver a stern admonition as well.
So it is with some trepidation that I come to Paul Szep's defense in the matter of his December 30 cartoon, in which he indulged in crude stereotypes about the Irish as beer-swilling boyos who'd rather fight than work.
A good cartoonist, like any good satirist, needs to have the freedom to push the envelope, and to be as outrageous and over-the-top as he can get away with. If there's any part of the newspaper that should be exempt from the increasing blandification that's overtaking corporate-owned media, it's the editorial cartoons. (Has there ever been a memorable cartoon in USA Today?)
There was something profoundly comical about watching former Boston mayor Ray Flynn, himself no stranger to Irish pubs, complaining about Szep on WCVB-TV (Channel 5). "Two guys sitting in a barroom, rugged complexion, with scally caps, drinking beer, talking about how they hate to work, how it would kill them if they can't hate anymore," Flynn rambled. "I don't know where they're getting that."
Szep is an easy target, having frequently come under the lash of the ombudsman -- usually for insults against the Catholic Church. Two years ago, he was suspended for two weeks without pay for copying substantial elements of two illustrations that had appeared elsewhere ("Don't Quote Me," News, March 1, 1996). Yet Szep is also a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who got where he is with a vicious, biting wit. Not for him the light touch of modern-day practitioners such as his younger Globe colleague Dan Wasserman, or of nationally known cartoonists such as Ted Rall and Tom Toles. At his best, Szep is a pit bull.
Szep's cartoon was neither as funny nor as clear as it should have been, but he deserves credit for taking on a serious issue -- the renewed violence in Northern Ireland -- without worrying about the overly delicate sensibilities of his readers.
In a sense, Szep proved his point when 150 protesters showed up at the Globe last weekend. When the organizers show they can bring out 150 people to protest the killing on both sides in Ireland, their complaints will carry considerably more weight.
If the Smudge Report were half as funny as it was inevitable, it would be a regular piss-your-pants laugh riot. A parody of the Drudge Report, the cybergossip sheet infamous for its high dish and low accuracy, Smudge went live two months ago with a Web site (http://www.smudgereport.com) that captures the look, but not the feel, of the object of its derision.
The problem is its heavy-handed obviousness. Take, for instance, this recent lead headline: HUGE BULLET HOLE FOUND IN G. GORDON LIDDY'S HEAD! FORTUNATELY IT MISSES TINY BRAIN! The effect is rather like that of an inebriated guy at a bar who keeps telling the same lame joke over and over, all the while elbowing you in the ribs and yelling, "Get it? Huh? Huh?" Maybe P.J. O'Rourke was right when he said liberals aren't funny.
Not that Smudge doesn't have its moments. My favorite is what happens when you click on "Bill Safire." Rather than being taken to the New York Times' Web site, you're diverted instead to Ed Anger, the "pig-biting mad" reactionary columnist for the Weekly World News. Bat Boy lives!
The Smudge Report is the work of the pseudonymous Al Smudge, who, in response to an e-mail query from the Phoenix, described himself as a 47-year-old writer in the entertainment business. "I average a little under 200 hits a day. The trend is slowly going up," he says. "I do get love notes and hate notes from readers. The most amusing are Drudge fanatics who think I should be sued for libel."
The Drudge Report (http://www.drudgereport.com), the creation of thirtysomething self-described "Clinton crazy" Matt Drudge, has rapidly evolved from obscure cult favorite to pop-culture icon since last August, when Drudge passed on inaccurate rumors about journalist-turned-White House aide Sidney Blumenthal. Drudge quickly retracted the item and apologized. But that didn't stop Blumenthal from suing Drudge and America Online, which carries his column, for $30 million.
"I did get an e-mail from Drudge the first or second day out," Smudge says. "It was one word. `Cute.' My one-word description of his page would be `irresponsible.' "
Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www1.shore.net/~dkennedy/
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com
Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here
