Starting over

The Globe should rethink what it wants from its metro columnists. Plus, video sex, and getting stupid on MSNBC.

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

No doubt it would be exceedingly difficult for Boston Globe editor Matt Storin to discern an opportunity in the demise of metro columnists Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith. As recently as last week, a reporter for the American Journalism Review was making the rounds at 135 Morrissey Boulevard for yet another embarrassing "What Went Wrong at the Globe" takeout.

But if Storin and company choose to think creatively about filling the two open slots, they could improve the paper's often-tepid local coverage while moving away from the old-fashioned star system that was partly to blame for producing Barnicle and Smith in the first place.

Yes, Storin has posted the open positions in the Globe newsroom, and yes, the betting is that the writers who land the jobs will be subject to roughly the same rules as their predecessors -- that is to say, they'll be able to write about anything they want, any time they want. (One change I assume will take place is that someone -- my guess is assistant managing editor Walter Robinson, who nailed both Smith and Barnicle -- will be giving the new columnists the hairy eyeball from day one.)

Storin, though, needs something more than just honest versions of Barnicle and Smith. After all, even before they were exposed as fabricators (and Barnicle as a plagiarist, too), they were dragging down the Metro/ Region front with wispy, unreported pieces that set a lazy tone for the rest of the section (see "The Un-Metro Columnists," News, May 22).

Rather, the model Storin should look to is Brian Mooney, who writes a semi-weekly column on state and local politics inside Metro/Region. It's not just that Mooney is good, though he is. (Witness last Wednesday's classic on Ray Flynn's final, frenzied, rain-drenched hours on the campaign trail.) It's that he writes a column in the context of a beat, lending analysis and color to local news that really matters.

Instead of letting the new columnists write about whatever they want, Storin should consider assigning them to beats such as the city's neighborhoods, the region's undercovered intellectual and academic scene, public safety, and the like.

This is also a good time to reform the system that contributed to Barnicle's and Smith's getting away with it for as long as they did. All the metro columnists, including Pulitzer winner Eileen McNamara, should report not to senior editors, who lack the time to give their work the proper scrutiny, but rather to the metro desk. In an interview last spring, metro editor Teresa Hanafin admitted that she finds the current setup -- in which she has zero control over what the columnists who adorn her section choose to write -- at least mildly frustrating. "It is sort of an odd situation for me," she said. It's time for that to change.

Then, too, there is no reason for the metro columnists to chew up one-fifth of the Metro/Region front. Their work could just as easily go on page three of the section. Pulitzer winner David Shribman's national column runs on page three of the "A" section, and no one seems to have any trouble finding it.

Such a change would send a signal that the Globe has its priorities straight: news first, opinion second. And no more scam artists.

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Context is everything, and the context now changes not just every day but practically every hour. So it's not surprising that the opinion mafia (as Slate has so aptly dubbed the pundit class) is of a mind that the broadcast of Bill Clinton's grand-jury testimony was a qualified plus for the president. As CNN's Jeff Greenfield put it Monday night, the four-hour tape, far from being a bombshell, will not even count as one of the 10 most significant events in determining Clinton's fate.

Of course, if the tape had been shown a month ago, Clinton's performance -- which included some lame attempts to explain his previous lies about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and his struggle to parse the meaning of the word is -- would have rightly been judged a disaster. But in the wake of the Starr report, Clinton's testimony humanized him and took some of the edge off the notion that he's nothing but a sexual predator. Indeed, a CNN poll showed Clinton's job-approval rating actually rising, from 60 percent to 66 percent, since last week.

The conventional wisdom of the moment appears to be swinging back toward that mildest of options, congressional censure -- provided Clinton can bring himself to admit publicly that he perjured himself last January at his deposition in the Paula Jones case.

There also appear to be some nascent misgivings as to how far the media should go in acting as the enabler for independent counsel Ken Starr, who promised impeachable offenses and gave us pornography instead. Though I've long argued that complaints about media excess in the Clinton scandals are overblown, I certainly won't miss commentary such as Sally Satel's op-ed in Monday's Wall Street Journal.

Satel, a psychiatrist, attempts to refute the argument that Clinton is a sex addict and thereby can't help himself. Satel's proof: Lewinsky's testimony that Clinton usually stopped their oral-sex sessions just before he reached orgasm. "That hardly sounds like a man out of control," Satel huffs.

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My condolences if you wasted two hours watching MSNBC's "town meeting" on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal last Wednesday night, September 16. I was one of about 75 people drafted to sit in the audience at Harvard's Kennedy School while Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz fulminated and various ditzy Harvard freshmen blamed Clinton's problems on the media or whatever.

Neither smart enough to inform nor raucous enough to entertain, the show served mainly as a way of demonstrating MSNBC's commitment to hearing the views of what cohost Jody Applegate called "real people." Yet nearly the entire audience of "real people" consisted of media figures, elected officials, academics, and political activists of various stripes -- an inconvenient fact she never figured out during her quickie touchdown in Cambridge. (She just missed Clinton, who arrived the next day for a fundraiser notable mainly for Ted Kennedy's boisterously incoherent introduction.)

The lowlight came when Applegate approached an elderly man and asked his name. "Howard Zinn," he replied, and half the audience burst into applause. It was clear that Applegate had no idea who the world-famous Boston University historian was.

Then again, Applegate's ignorance appears to be endemic to MSNBC. In an account of the event on the network's Web site (http://www.msnbc.com), a photo caption refers to Zinn as "a man who identified himself as a historian." At least the story quotes the unnamed Zinn, who deftly skewered the hypocrisy of those who lament the loss of Bill Clinton's "moral authority." Like many leftist critics, Zinn contends that Clinton lost his moral authority a long time ago.

"I think it's a loss of moral authority when Democrats and Republicans get together to take away benefits from poor women raising children," he said. "I consider it a loss of moral authority when they go bombing places around the world and telling lies about it."

Soon Zinn will be translated into a language Applegate and her colleagues should be able to understand: Good Will Hunting's Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are turning Zinn's A People's History of the United States into a 10-part miniseries for Fox.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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