E-Mail This Article to a Friend The Theo fiasco: a media report card, continued

In a follow-up column on November 1 examining Theo’s departure, Shaughnessy wrote: "Blame me if it makes you feel any better, though it seems pretty ridiculous that Theo would break away from a man he worked with for 14 years because of a few lines he read in the Sunday Globe." But postmortems on the breakup strongly suggested the column may have played a role. Snow’s November 3 Globe piece cited a team source saying that "what Epstein perceived to be media leaks" affected his final decision. In a piece for ESPN.com, Providence Journal baseball writer Sean McAdam, often a voice of reason, said elements of Shaughnessy’s column "incensed Epstein, and along with other anecdotal evidence, caused him to reconsider working under Lucchino for another three seasons."

The blogosphere made Shaughnessy the culprit, calling on him to resign, labeling him "Shaughnasty" and warning him to expect dead fish in his mailbox. (Nice.) And in some ways, he is an easy target. Of the big four Globe sports writers of his era — Shaughnessy, Bob Ryan, Peter Gammons, and the late Will McDonough — Shaughnessy is perhaps the most enigmatic, lacking Ryan’s fiery passion, Gammons’s encyclopedic knowledge, and McDonough’s larger-than-life swagger. Despite his widespread influence, Shaughnessy sometimes comes across as detached and calculating — which isn’t always a great fit in as passionate a sports town as Boston. Maybe it feeds the suspicion that there is an underlying motive for what he writes.

In any case, you knew the Globe’s situation was dire when Shaughnessy, making the media rounds, showed up to chat with WEEI’s morning team of Gerry Callahan and John Dennis on November 2.

Boston Herald: B-

"It was a good week for the Herald," declared baseball writer Tony Massarotti on WEEI’s Big Show. True, but it would have been a much better week if Massarotti had toned down the conspiracy theories. In an infamous October 27 piece headlined "Smear Campaign Stinks," Massarotti accused the rival paper of being in the tank with management to portray Epstein negatively after it reported on some aspects of the negotiations that the Herald didn’t have.

"The Globe owns the Red Sox which means the Red Sox own the Globe," he declared, asserting that both the Globe and WEEI "are not about to challenge the words or methods of Lucchino and the Red Sox."

Massarotti basically accused Globe baseball writers — including Snow and Edes — of having the journalistic ethics of Jayson Blair. That’s not only very strong stuff, it’s wrong. Massarotti seems like a decent guy and a knowledgeable baseball scribe. But he fell prey to that Herald institutional paranoia about the Globe. (And how can the Herald accuse another publication of subverting its editorial judgment to its business interests after the paper relentlessly flogged the story of the racially crude remarks made by Metro employees at a time when Herald publisher Pat Purcell was trying his damndest to kill the Times Company’s merger with the Metro? I’m not asking for navel gazing here. Just a flash of introspection.)

One of the more dramatic moments in this episode was the tense encounter between Massarotti and Edes on the October 30 edition of Channel 4’s Sports Final. Responding to the Herald writer’s allegations of Globe culpability in a smear campaign against Epstein, an angry Edes said: "Personally, I took it as a great affront to myself." A somewhat steamed Massarotti responded that "the Globe as an institution is severely compromised in its relationship with the Red Sox. That’s a fact. That’s not debatable." It made for good TV.

The unfair assault on the Globe spoiled an otherwise solid October 27 Massarotti column in which he sagely predicted that Epstein would likely leave the club. The Herald did other good work as well. On the same day that the Globe was erroneously reporting that Epstein had reached a deal to stay, Michael Silverman, citing "sources close to the talks," said Epstein was undecided about his future with the team. The Herald was also right to question the Globe on the Sox-ownership issue, albeit not in the take-no-prisoners way Massarotti did. A couple of pieces by Scott Van Voorhis headlined "Put ‘Sin’ In Synergy" and "Cozy Sox-Globe ties called into question" raised legitimate questions about the paper’s relationship with the team and discussed the downside of mega-media conglomeration, a subject that has concerned media and consumer activists for decades.