BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Tuesday, March 09, 2004
THE AGELESS DANIEL DAMON.
Last October 31, Boston Herald reporter Tom Farmer wrote about
Peter Damon, an Army sergeant from Brockton who lost both hands in
Iraq when a helicopter tire he was working on accidentally blew up.
Farmer reported that Damon and his then-girlfriend (now wife),
Jennifer Maunus, had two children - "Allura, 6, and Daniel, 18
months."
On November 27, the Herald's
Jessica Heslam did a follow-up, reporting again that the couple's
children were "Allura, 6, and Daniel, 18 months." Scientists are not
sure why Daniel Damon did not get a month older in a month's
time.
Then, today, on the front page of
the Herald, brand-spankin'-new columnist Mike Barnicle
wrote
(sub. req.) in his debut that the now-married Damons are the parents
of "a daughter 6 and a boy, 19 months."
Obviously someone is wrong, and
it's not necessarily Barnicle - although, for obvious reasons, he is
the one who's being watched the most carefully. The Herald
needs to run a correction. And I'm curious, to say the least, as to
whose reporting gets corrected.
DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT
HISTORY. To read the coverage of Barnicle's return to the Boston
newspaper wars, you'd think the only things he'd ever done wrong were
to rip off a few lines from George Carlin and to write a column about
kids with cancer without checking his sources all that
carefully.
Barnicle has been writing a column
for the New York Daily News for five years now with no
apparent incident, and it's unfair to bear the guy ceaselessly back
into the past (that's, ahem, a semi-literate reference to F. Scott
Fitzgerald). But let's not gloss over the past. Barnicle had been
credibly accused of plagiarism on several occasions during his
quarter-century career at the Boston Globe - including by the
late, great Mike Royko. Barnicle attributed a racial slur to Harvard
Law professor Alan Dershowitz (no witnesses, naturally) after
Dershowitz dared to criticize Barnicle's buddy Bill Bulger. (The
Globe ended up paying a settlement.) And, in the early 1990s,
Boston magazine turned up a number of columns that appeared to
be partly or wholly fabricated. You can read all about it
here.
After Globe columnist
Patricia Smith was forced out for fabricating characters and quotes
in June 1998, the end came quickly for Barnicle. In July, my friend
Bill Kirtz, a journalism professor at Northeastern University,
reported in the Quill, the magazine of the Society of
Professional Journalists, that Barnicle had once plagiarized from
A.J. Liebling. Then the Herald reported the Carlin incident,
which led to a suspension and a nationwide campaign among Barnicle's
media buddies to save his job.
Finally, I reported on Kirtz's
allegations, digging up evidence showing that, in a 1986 column,
Barnicle had apparently lifted direct quotes, complete with
idiosyncratic spelling, from Liebling's 1961 biography of Louisiana
politico Earl Long, The Earl of Louisiana. An advance copy of
that
story was released to the
local and national media early in the afternoon on August 19. Within
a few hours, Barnicle was gone, with the Globe announcing that
it had uncovered yet another instance of journalistic malfeasance: a
column about kids with cancer that appeared to be partly or wholly
fabricated.
Barnicle deserves to be judged on
his current work, not what he did six or 18 years ago. But let's get
the record straight, shall we?
By the way, here
is a worthwhile piece by Kirtz on his own 15 minutes of fame as the
man who discovered the Barnicle-Liebling connection.
posted at 9:22 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
