BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
e-mail delivery, click
here. To send
an e-mail to Dan Kennedy, click
here.
For bio, published work, and links to other blogs, visit
www.dankennedy.net.
For information on Dan Kennedy's book, Little People: Learning to
See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Thursday, October 09, 2003
That's Mister Ed to you,
pal. The Globe Spotlight Team today has one of those long
packages on an obscure topic that you wouldn't think you'd much care
about: financial
abuses at private foundations.
This one, though, is pretty
sprightly, mainly because the paper has found some rather colorful
characters with their hands in the till.
My favorite is Edward Lake, whose
story is told in a sidebar
by Francie Latour. A retired $20,000-a-year government clerk, Lake,
through a chance encounter some six decades ago, lucked into serving
on the Florik Charitable Trust, paying himself -- at most recent
count -- $230,000 a year to look at the mail.
Latour's kicker:
"A lot of people thought I
couldn't do this, see? I don't appear to be slick enough," Lake
said. "But I fooled them. I fooled them all. When they say Mr.
Lake, that means Mr. Lake. Nobody calls me Ed."
Urine trouble. Both the
Globe
and the Herald
give front-page treatment to yesterday's regional drug summit at
Faneuil Hall.
The Herald's Thomas Caywood
runs hard with the most disturbing angle: White House drug czar John
Walter's outrageous proposal for random school drug
testing.
As the ACLU's Nancy Murray says,
"It's just putting the emphasis in the wrong place. We don't need our
schools to be more like prisons."
New in this week's
Phoenix. The Wilson
affair is potentially an
enormous scandal that could endanger lives and national security.
Will the media keep the heat on -- or just pass it off as a typical
Washington kerfuffle?
California
voters show the LA
Times that they don't care about Governor-elect (imagine that!)
Arnold Schwarzenegger's groping and humiliation of women.
And the Phoenix
editorial calls on WEEI
Radio to declare that Dennis & Callahan has completed its
long-running engagement.
posted at 9:08 AM |
comment or permalink
MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.