Fire, ready, aim
The Boston Police Department's attack against the Globe claims a
casualty: its own credibility. Plus, notes from the Monica underground.
It's April 14. Word has just come out of New York that the Boston Globe
has won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing corruption in the city's police force.
And Police Commissioner Paul Evans calls an impromptu news conference. "I
congratulate the Globe," Evans says. "Thanks to its reporting, we've
been able to accelerate the process of reform that began when I took this job
four years ago."
At least that's the way it might have played out had the police department not
blundered its way into a public-relations disaster that leaves Evans looking
like part of the problem -- or, worse, out of the loop.
First, on February 6, Detective Sergeant Margot Hill, the department's
director of media relations, sent what has been described as an eight-page,
single-spaced letter and an inch-thick stack of supporting documents to each of
the 19 members of the Pulitzer board. In the letter, Hill argued that the
Globe's Spotlight Team unfairly played down the department's own
anticorruption crusade.
Next, after members of the Pulitzer board told Globe editor Matt Storin
about Hill's letter, the paper asked Hill how she knew about the Pulitzer
submission. According to last Saturday's Globe, Hill responded that she
had somehow obtained a copy of the paper's Pulitzer entry -- a confidential
internal document.
Now, Hill is refusing to discuss the matter, and her boss, Evans, is out of
town and unavailable for comment. "I can't talk about this," Hill said in a
brief interview on Monday. She declined to provide a copy of her letter. She
even refused to confirm on-the-record comments she made to the Globe, in
which she said Evans knew she'd obtained the Pulitzer entry and had given her
permission to write to the board.
In two years of digging into corruption within the Boston Police Department,
the Globe Spotlight Team has reported on allegations that cops stole
cash during drug raids, and on the practice known as "testilying," in which
some police officers lie to obtain convictions. As a result of the
Globe's reporting, two officers have been indicted, a new trial has been
ordered for a man who'd been convicted of attempted murder, and more than $3000
was returned to a retired postal worker six years after it was seized in a
raid.
But despite the drip-drip-drip, Evans's stature has only grown. Indeed, the
Globe itself has weighed in with several favorable profiles of the
commissioner, focusing on the dramatic drop in Boston's crime rate and on
Evans's good reputation among his peers nationally. Now, as a result of Hill's
actions, Evans's image could take a beating.
"Paul Evans has a reputation, and I think for the most part well-deserved, of
being an ethical leader," says Northeastern University criminologist Jack
Levin. "This information is antithetical to that image. It's really kind of
shocking."
Certainly Hill had a right to complain to the Pulitzer board. Indeed, Seymour
Topping, administrator of the Pulitzers, confirms that "that sort of thing has
happened in the past." What puts Hill's actions in a special category is her
use of documents that had apparently been stolen from the Globe, and
which she told the Globe came to her anonymously and unsolicited.
Yet it's possible that Hill never laid eyes on a copy of the actual Pulitzer
entry. Recently, the Globe ordered up a reprint of the series to be
mailed to editors around the country for promotional purposes; the printing job
was reportedly botched, and the mailing was never sent out. Ben Bradlee, the
Globe's deputy managing editor for projects, who supervises the
Spotlight Team, says Hill's written complaint quotes from a letter that Storin
wrote to accompany the reprint, which differed in some minor respects from the
letter he wrote for the Pulitzer entry. That suggests that the document she saw
was the reprint package, which is more widely available and considerably less
confidential than the Pulitzer submission. But Bradlee says that when
Globe reporter Dan Golden interviewed Hill, "she insisted that she had
actually seen the Pulitzer Prize entry." (In the Globe article, Hill
said she saw both the prize entry and the reprint.)
With neither Hill nor the Globe willing to release a copy of Hill's
letter, it's impossible to judge the validity of her complaints. Bradlee
describes her brief against the Globe as "one of shading and tenor," and
claims she alleges no errors of fact. Other sources say her complaint dwells
more on Storin's letter than it does on the Globe's actual reporting.
Bradlee and Storin concede that Hill is correct about one criticism she
apparently made: that the Globe failed to include in its Pulitzer
package critical letters to the editor, as required under Pulitzer guidelines.
(Bradlee says he was under the impression that that was a new requirement, but
a Pulitzer spokeswoman says it was adopted about five years ago.) Still, even a
letter from Evans that was published on December 17 does not allege any factual
errors, criticizing the paper instead for its failure to acknowledge the
department's anticorruption efforts.
More than a few observers have taken note of Evans's failure to come to Hill's
defense. Mayor Tom Menino is said to be less than thrilled by her stunt, too.
But until now, Hill's career has been impressive. In 1991, she was one of three
recipients of a "Detective of the Year" award for her work in arresting a
violent rapist. From 1994 until 1996, when she was promoted to her present job,
she ran the police department's Crime Stoppers program, an anonymous phone-tip
line. Boston Police Patrolmen's Association president Thomas Nee praises Hill
for writing to the Pulitzer board. "I tip my hat to Margot for doing that," he
says.
Meanwhile, at 135 Morrissey Boulevard, some are wondering whether any attempt
will be made to root out the mole who presumably gave the Pulitzer entry to the
police. "Frankly, I hope we do find out. I think it's a pretty scurrilous act,"
says Mitchell Zuckoff, who wrote or cowrote many of the police stories.
But Storin, reached on vacation, sounds as though he's willing to let it pass.
"I'm sitting here in Maine," he said when asked whether he's taking steps to
find the guilty party. "We're not going to have an inquisition over this."
What gives this whole affair particular resonance is the issue of power -- who
has it, who wields it, and to what end.
From Storin's perspective, the power lies with the police, who abused it by
making use of private Globe documents to advance their agenda.
Yet to Tommy Nee, it's the media that hold the real power. "There's a great
feeling of anxiety and frustration at some of these broad-based stories," he
says. "You guys are very, very powerful people, and a lot of people are
intimidated by that."
That doesn't excuse Hill's actions. But perhaps it provides some insight into
why she felt it was necessary to fight back.
With the front pages and TV newscasts running out of fresh material to keep
the Monica Lewinsky story moving forward, supporters of Bill Clinton might
suppose that the media feeding frenzy has just about run its course.
Yet beneath the flash and the headlines, the editorial pages -- those dense
columns of type -- have been assembling a solid case for why investigators
should keep pushing.
To be sure, such card-carrying members of the right-wing conspiracy as the
Wall Street Journal and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Washington
Times have been having a field day with Fornigate. The Journal's
editorial page published a full-page chart on Clinton scandals real and
imagined, from Lewinsky to cocaine and murder, and the Times speculated
on whether Clinton masturbated while Lewinsky talked dirty to him over the
phone. But the Clintonistas can readily dismiss such fulminations.
Not so easily dismissed, though, are the New York Times, whose
editorial-page editor, Howell Raines, has long questioned Clinton's ethics, and
the Washington Post, whose news pages broke the Lewinsky story on
January 21.
"It is not the legality of anyone's sexual behavior that is at issue here,"
the Times thundered on January 22. "The legal questions before Mr. Starr
are obstruction of justice, perjury, and suborning of perjury." Since then, the
Times has repeatedly demanded that Clinton provide a full accounting of
his relationship with Lewinsky, and urged the media to stop their "unwarranted
self-flagellation" and get back to investigating the scandal.
The Post's most important contribution came on February 2, with an
examination of Starr that criticizes him for his political entanglements but
concludes that the real problem is "the Clintons' own behavior."
Closer to home, the conservative Boston Herald, predictably, has
pounded away at Clinton day after day. Characteristic is this judgment,
rendered on January 27: "The president can explain anything he wants to,
whenever he wants to. He just doesn't want to."
More curious has been the liberal Boston Globe, whose Lewinsky
editorials have been few and exceedingly delicate, but which have ultimately
taken the position that, yes, the president must come clean. The paper put it
this way on February 6: "In most cases, questions about politicians' sex lives
deserve a `no comment; that's none of your business' -- an answer that should
be given more often. But the Lewinsky story, with its allegations of a misuse
of power, is a legitimate public concern."
The most ludicrous result of the White House's propaganda blitz against leaks
has to be Ann Scales's piece in this past Sunday's Globe, reporting (we
are shocked!) that Globe columnist John Ellis was a beneficiary of leaks
from Ken Starr's office.
Let's take this one right from the beginning.
On February 9, at a forum at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Ellis
repeated a claim he'd made in his column: that three White House aides were
cooperating with the independent counsel. When Marvin Kalb, head of the Kennedy
School's Joan Shorenstein Center, asked where he got his information, Ellis
replied, sheepishly, "I was told by a person in the special prosecutor's
office." Snickers all around.
The Globe didn't even report on the forum. But the New York Daily
News picked up on it. And that, in turn, led to Scales's piece, in which
she rehashed the News' item and wrote, "The White House yesterday seized
on Ellis's statement as proof that Starr's office may have broken the law
against leaking testimony from grand jury proceedings."
Please. What's astounding isn't that Starr is leaking, but rather that the
White House has succeeded in getting the media to focus on it. As
civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate pointed out in these pages several
weeks ago ("Starr Chamber,"
News, February 6), that's a cruel irony given
Clinton's own lack of regard for defendants' rights.
Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here