Media

The Big Dig and the so-called power of the press

by Dan Kennedy

There's a wonderful moment in the 1976 movie All the President's Men in which Jason Robards, playing Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, intones (I'm paraphrasing here): We don't print the truth. We print what people tell us.

Jump to April 11, 2000. On New England Cable News's NewsNight, MIT urban-studies professor Tom Piper is waxing rhapsodic about the glories of the Big Dig, about how it will position Boston for the 21st century, and how it will be worth it no matter what the final price tag turns out to be. The Boston Globe's transportation reporter, Tom Palmer, turns to Piper and says, Well, you've got a point, but if everyone had known the cost right from the beginning, the project never would have happened.

Palmer is correct. What's interesting is why for more than a decade the media have been unable to show in a compelling way that the price tag was far higher than Kerasiotes was willing to admit. It may be true that the result will be worth it, but in a democracy the public has the right to make such decisions based on accurate information.

There are many lessons in the fall of Big Dig chief Jim Kerasiotes, who was shown the exit Tuesday following the release of a scathing federal audit that accused him of covering up a cost overrun now estimated at $1.9 billion. For the news media, and for a public that depends on the media to keep it informed, the most important lesson was spoken most cogently by Robards a quarter-century ago.

In fact, the media's ability to drive a story is far more limited than the public understands. Reporters are, indeed, constrained by what sources tell them. And the Big Dig shows why.

The press has been all over the Big Dig since the 1980s, when it was little more than a $2.5 billion gleam in the eye of then-transportation secretary Fred Salvucci. As work began in the early '90s and the cost was set at $7.7 billion, the scrutiny grew more intense. The Boston Phoenix and Boston magazine reported on contractors who routinely put in for massive cost overruns with little scrutiny. The Boston Globe weighed in with a three-part series in 1994 that found that the cost might rise to $10 billion, or even $12 billion. The Boston Herald kept pounding away as well. Even CBS's venerable 60 Minutes took its best shot. No one, it seems, was able to penetrate the inner layer of the Big Dig bureaucracy. Thus, Kerasiotes and other project officials would merely murmur reassuring denials, and the public would go back to sleep.

Since last year, the Globe, the Herald, and the Wall Street Journal had been chasing tips that Kerasiotes's "final answer" of $10.8 billion was seriously out of whack. But Kerasiotes's world didn't really start to unravel until this year, when state treasurer Shannon O'Brien refused to sign off on some borrowing-related paperwork unless the Big Dig came clean about its spending. Thus, it was O'Brien, and not the press, who kicked off the chain of events that led to the federal audit and to an ongoing investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It's not that the media haven't done some valuable reporting. The Journal's February 9 story, in which Kerasiotes called one member of Governor Paul Cellucci's inner circle a "reptile" and another a "moron," and bragged that Cellucci was afraid of him, captured the real Kerasiotes in a way that had rarely been done before. The Globe and the Herald both published valuable follow-up stories showing how costs had spiraled out of control. But the truth is that the state treasurer did more in one day than the media had been able to do over a period of years.

On Wednesday morning, WRKO Radio's Andy Moes played a tape of Kerasiotes essentially threatening to beat the tar out of anyone who dared question his integrity. "Come and get me, big boy," Moes cackled. (Moes's on-air partner, fittingly, is Gidgetgate perp/victim Peter Blute, who shed crocodile tears for Kerasiotes on WGBH-TV's Greater Boston Tuesday evening.) Perfect: now that the feds have taken out the neighborhood bully, it's safe for everyone else to pile on.

But no one should be surprised. After all, we don't report the truth. We just report what people tell us.