Hardball

Accusations that the Globe croaked the Monitor Channel recall a previous media war. Plus, blood, guts, and TV news; and Pedro, sí, español, no.

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

There's something Paula Jones-like about Alex Beam's Boston Globe column of last Friday. The Divine Miss J claims she's suing Bill Clinton to save her reputation, conveniently overlooking the fact that no one had ever heard of her before she went public. Likewise, Beam denies he was part of a Globe effort to put the Christian Science Church's cable-TV venture out of business -- thus giving widespread play to an accusation found only in the footnotes of a forthcoming book that is, to be kind, unlikely to crack the bestseller lists.

To be sure, former Monitor Channel employee Susan Bridge, in Monitoring the News: The Brilliant Launch and Sudden Collapse of the Monitor Channel (M.E. Sharpe), fails to make a credible case against the Globe. Bridge argues -- minus any evidence -- that the Globe pounded the fractious Christian Science Church and its troubled media operations not just because it was a great story, but because the Globe was desperate to prevent a proposed merger between the Providence Journal Company and the Monitor Channel. Such a move, she notes, would have given the Journal Company entrée into the Greater Boston cable market, something she speculates the Globe was determined to prevent. The merger was never consummated, which Bridge claims led directly to the Monitor Channel's demise in 1992, just 13 months after its debut.

Bridge's conspiracy theory (a catch phrase she loathes, but it fits) is free of inconvenient denials: she didn't even bother to interview officials at the Globe. "It's a black box," she says by way of explanation. "I don't know about decision-making at the Globe. What [the Globe did to] hurt the Monitor Channel is on the public record."

Responds business-page columnist Joan Vennochi, identified by Bridge (also in the footnotes) as one of Beam's fellow conspirators: "I just think it's ridiculous."

Yet there's something tantalizing about Bridge's theory. Wrong though she may be, the hardball scenario she describes -- zealous coverage of a competitor aimed at putting it out of business -- is one that is largely responsible for the Globe's emergence as New England's dominant media force.

The story begins back in the 1950s, when the Globe and the Boston Herald were engaged in a tense struggle for primacy. Herald publisher Robert "Beanie" Choate was determined to acquire Channel 5, and he frequently taunted Globe publisher Davis Taylor, saying once he succeeded, he would use his television revenues to put the Globe out of business.

As recounted in the late J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground (1986), Choate got the opportunity he'd been looking for in 1957, when Joseph Kennedy Sr. was lobbying for a Pulitzer Prize for his son John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage (which, according to other accounts, may or may not have actually been written by JFK). The Pulitzer judges hadn't even named Profiles a finalist, but that didn't stop Joe Kennedy from going to work on the Pulitzer advisory committee, which had the final say.

Among the committee's members was Choate, who was reportedly offered assistance by Kennedy bag-carrier Francis Xavier Morrissey in circumventing the Federal Communications Commission's cross-ownership prohibitions. And sure enough, several weeks after Jack Kennedy was awarded a Pulitzer, the FCC gave the Channel 5 license to Choate.

Enter Bob Healy, a young political reporter and the son of a Globe mailroom employee who had been befriended by the Taylor family. Healy was dispatched to Washington to cover politics -- and, as Lukas puts it, to serve as the Taylors' "special envoy on Channel 5." Healy pursued his quarry with enthusiasm. He whacked out the lightly qualified Morrissey when JFK and, later, Lyndon Johnson tried to nominate him for a federal judgeship, thus winning the Globe its first Pulitzer. He chased rumors that a Herald stockholder had mob ties. Most important to the task at hand, he obtained telephone-company records that documented improper contacts between Choate and the chairman of the FCC.

Healy's work finally paid off in 1972, when the FCC reversed its earlier vote and awarded Channel 5 to a community group. The Herald Traveler, as the paper was then known, couldn't sustain itself, and it fell into the hands of the Hearst Corporation, which merged it with its Record American and renamed its paper the Herald American. The Hearst paper staggered on until 1981, when Australian press baron Rupert Murdoch rescued it just days before it would have gone under. (Ironically, Hearst now owns Channel 5.)

Healy's reward was a long stint as the Globe's executive editor.

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Without question, last Friday afternoon's live suicide on a Los Angeles freeway represented local TV news at its worst. With a distraught protester holding up traffic for miles around, the choppers moved in. Some stations even interrupted children's programming, evidently believing the kiddies would like real violence even better than the animated kind. And they kept rolling as the man lit himself on fire, then shot himself in the head.

This landmark moment in the devolution of media came, perversely, just a day after the FCC rejected a test challenge that had been brought by Rocky Mountain Media Watch. The left-leaning group, based in Denver, had argued that four Denver stations should lose their licenses because their news operations focused excessively on violence, racial and gender stereotypes, and trivia. Had Rocky Mountain won, it would have paved the way for similar license challenges nationally.

The FCC rejected Rocky Mountain's case on First Amendment grounds, ruling that TV stations "are entitled to the widest latitude of journalistic discretion in this regard." It was the correct decision. Rocky Mountain's motives may be pure, but what is the difference between its challenge and, say, a religious-right group's going after a station for running pro-choice editorials?

Still, the LA incident demonstrates Rocky Mountain's central point. Corporate greed has transformed televised free speech into an all-out pursuit of ratings and profit -- the public interest be damned.

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Granted, it would be a bit much to insist that the Boston Globe publish a complete Spanish-language edition every day. But its decision to run a Spanish-language story each day after Pedro Martinez pitches at Fenway makes some condescending assumptions about what interests Latinos: Pedro, sí; real news, and even other sports news, no.

There's something smugly offensive about the Globe's belief that non-English-speaking Latinos will fork over 50 cents (or $2 if Martinez pitches at home on a Saturday) for one story. It's pandering, and cheapskate pandering at that: Martinez's road performances, of course, will be chronicled in English only.

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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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