Bad reporting ruined Boston Globe
by Howie Carr
DNN Staff - EXCLUSIVE!
Monday, Apr. 13, 2009
Now the bow-tied bumkissers are telling us we “need” the Globe.
Maybe, but only for comic relief. The Globe is the “SNL” of newspapers, a yuk on every page. Let’s go straight to the list, a very partial list, of Globe blunders.
- March 2003: Since-indicted Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner holds a news conference at City Hall, complete with a blowup of a still he claims shows an American soldier raping an Iraqi woman. The video capture turns out to be from a Hungarian porn movie. Alone among the media, the ever-gullible Globe runs the XXX-rated photo over three columns, even though readers can see 1-inch square sexual images within it, as the ombudsman later put it. An editor’s note follows.
-The Joe Yandle scandal. The imprisoned murderer claims he became a heroin addict while serving in Vietnam. The Globe campaigns to free the killer, 60 Minutes picks it up, his sentence is commuted, but then he’s rearrested. Turns out Yandle was never in Vietnam, a fact uncovered, never by the Globe’s trust-funded reporters, but by a Viet vet who simply asked the Pentagon for Yandle’s military record. Yandle was paroled last June; his Boswell is now a metro columnist.
-April 2005: The Globe runs a horrific story about Canadian hunters shooting harp seal cubs by the hundreds, the sea running red with blood. In fact, no such hunt had taken place. An editor’s note follows.
February 2007: A geriatric Globe columnist hisses that “global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.”
-April 2006: The Globe runs a front-page sob story about an ex-con who can’t get a job because of the state’s draconian CORI laws. The ace scribe notes the jailbird just finished a 40-year term, but doesn’t say what crime he committed. He murdered a Boston cop.
-October 2006: A Globe writer opines how much he loves the change baskets at the Mass Pike tolls in Allston. “Occasionally,” he writes, “I even throw the basket a head fake.” The last baskets had come down three years earlier.
-The Globe’s coverage of Whitey Bulger through most of the 1980s portrays him as a cross between Robin Hood and Jimmy Cagney. When a Globe photographer gets pictures of a city work crew doing a job at his liquor store, the Globe refuses to embarrass “Jimmy” by printing them. Jimmy gives money to priests, the Globe reports. And don’t forget that with the help of his fearless fed friend Zip Connolly, Whitey “kept the drugs out of Southie.”
-July 2006: The Globe runs a blockbuster scoop about a memo warning of the dangers of the Ted Williams Tunnel, supposedly written in 1999. Turns out the memo’s author is a rather dodgy sort, no one had ever seen the memo before the Globe printed it and the events mentioned in it hadn’t occurred until years later. An editor’s note follows.
-And now the latest, as their rag hemorrhages almost $2 million a week, Globe reporters shake down corrupt pols for quotes about how much the city needs their corrupt, bankrupt newspaper in order to ferret out . . . corruption.
Forget the Internet. You pampered clowns ought to put your lame act on Comedy Central.
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