September 7, 1998

Boston Dispatch

Hanging Barnicle

By Dan Kennedy

Copyright © 1998 by Daniel D. Kennedy

Now that Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle is really gone, it remains to be seen whether his media buddies will rally behind him as they did two weeks ago -- when his plagiarism of one-liners from George Carlin's best-seller, Brain Droppings, first prompted Globe editor Matthew Storin to demand Barnicle's resignation. Initially, when the Boston Herald exposed Barnicle, he told his superiors that he'd gotten the jokes from a friend and that he had no idea his friend had stolen them from Carlin -- an excuse that seemed plausible enough until Barnicle's other employer, WCVB-TV, broadcast a two-month-old segment from its program Chronicle in which Barnicle was seen holding a copy of Brain Droppings and promising that it contained "a yuck on every page. " Storin and Globe publisher Benjamin Taylor called on Barnicle to resign -- which seemed fair enough -- but then the defiant columnist launched a massive public relations offensive that brought Don Imus, Larry King, Tim Russert, Richard Cohen, Marvin Kalb, and Mary McGrory to his defense. Incredibly, Storin and Taylor backed down, reducing Barnicle's sentence to a two-month suspension that was supposed to end, quite conveniently, just in time for the fall election campaign.

At the time, Barnicle's defenders insisted they were standing up against the forces of political correctness. Getting rid of Barnicle, they argued, was merely the Globe's way of making up for ousting Patricia Smith -- the black columnist who resigned in June after admitting she'd created fictitious characters in at least four of her columns. Of course, Barnicle had been dogged by claims of fabrication and shoddy journalism for years. But a review of 364 Barnicle articles going back to January 1996, which Storin ordered in the wake of Smith's resignation, had pronounced Barnicle pure. So, if all Barnicle did wrong was lift a few jokes from George Carlin, well, that was hardly reason to dismiss a columnist of such legendary repute -- or so the argument went.

The chief promoter of this theory, not surprisingly, was Barnicle himself. And, when the Globe caved, his contrition was something less than contrite. At a news conference in the Globe's fortress-like offices, Barnicle duly apologized for what he called "the intellectual laziness" and "sloppiness" of stealing Carlin's lines. But, when a reporter from Boston magazine attempted to press him about allegations of past improprieties, Barnicle snapped that he wouldn't respond to "a hotel guide." Shortly thereafter, a relaxed-looking Barnicle was in front of the building, answering friendly questions from a WCVB reporter, while the Boston writer was reduced to watching a monitor inside the television van.

Unfortunately for Barnicle, more revelations were on the way. And, with new allegations of wrongdoing -- among them the lifting of work by A.J. Liebling, which I reported in my newspaper, the Boston Phoenix -- suddenly hanging over his head, Barnicle finally relented. On August 19 he announced he was resigning after all, although that may not quite be the end of the matter -- or of Barnicle. As of press time, WCVB maintained it planned to keep Barnicle as a regular contributor.

Surely, at least some people will continue to see the Barnicle controversy as some kind of parable about political correctness. But, in a sense, this debate about whether Barnicle was sacrificed in the name of racial symbolism -- or whether his backroom connections allowed him to cheat the executioner for as long as he did -- misses the real lesson here. Like so many other major newspapers, the Globe -- by far New England's largest and most influential news organization -- has been trying for the last three decades to overcome its well- earned reputation for having an elitist, out-of-touch orientation toward the city and region it serves. Barnicle, a tough-talking Irish-American with working-class roots, and Smith, an African American with a poet's voice and a controversialist's heart, were grafted onto this culture in an attempt to broaden the Globe's base -- to reach out to the disparate and distrusting ethnic clans that Boston comprises. Call it tokenism as journalism, or call it a quota system run amok. Either way, it was a substitute for what the Globe really needed -- that is, a staff of city reporters more in tune with the city -- and it didn't work very well.

Historically, the Globe, founded in 1872, was the voice not of Boston's Brahmin classes but rather of the city's dominant Irish community. But, by the mid-1960s, with most of the city's other papers having vanished, the genially complacent Globe had won the upscale readership by default. The paper was owned by Yankees -- the Taylor family -- and edited by a Yankee -- Tom Winship, son of the previous editor, who set about the difficult task of turning the Globe into one of the best regional papers in the country. Winship imported talent from Harvard and from Boston College, the Irish-Catholic Harvard. And he largely succeeded. Under Winship, the Globe won a slew of Pulitzers. The paper offered superb investigative reporting, outstanding coverage of national and state politics, and more and better foreign-news coverage than readers of a regional newspaper had a right to expect. Not to mention a world-class sports section.

But, when it came to covering the city whose name adorned its masthead, the Globe was curiously lackluster. The Globe, then and now, is a paper whose publisher and editor live in the affluent, overwhelmingly white suburbs -- along with much of the reporting staff -- where they are primarily exposed to well-educated, well-meaning folks much like themselves. Which explains why they were so shocked when white working-class neighborhoods such as South Boston and Charlestown exploded in fury at the Globe in the school desegregation crisis of the mid-1970s. As vividly recounted in the late J. Anthony Lukas's 1985 book Common Ground, the Globe was literally under siege, in danger of being attacked by white mobs and/or terrorists who were enraged by the Globe's pro-busing stance.

Enter Barnicle, a working-class kid from nearby Fitchburg who had managed to talk his way into a prominent position on Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign, and who had later befriended Robert Redford and helped write the screenplay for The Candidate. Barnicle, who'd joined the Globe as a columnist in 1973, was invaluable during the busing crisis. Not only was he one of the few members of the Globe's staff who had any street savvy, but he was the only voice in the paper with the sense and the guts to criticize white suburban liberals for imposing unworkable social-engineering schemes on the urban poor of all races.

But, from the outset, Barnicle was just as contemptuous of journalistic professionalism as he was of the Globe's upper-middle-class sensibility. One of his very first columns quoted the white owner of a gas station in predominantly black Mattapan calling his neighbors "niggers." The gas-station owner denied using the epithet, sued Barnicle, and won a $40,000 judgment. It was just the first in what has been a 25-year career of staggering from one professional misadventure to another. He's been accused of lifting material by the late Chicago columnist Mike Royko. In 1990, he wrote that Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz had once told him he loved Asian women because "they're so submissive." Dershowitz objected, and the Globe ultimately paid a $75,000 settlement, a fact revealed just recently by the New York Times and Brill's Content. In 1991, Boston magazine, in a series of solid, well-researched articles, strongly suggested that Barnicle had made up characters and quotes, the very offense that cost Patricia Smith her job. Barnicle denied it but never publicly offered any proof to the contrary.

It's because of those problems, not because of the George Carlin column, that Barnicle's critics originally charged that the Globe was guilty of a double standard in forcing out Smith but keeping Barnicle. And, taken as a whole, Barnicle's transgressions would indeed appear to equal Smith's. The critical difference was in how the two could defend themselves. Smith's support mainly came from a few black leaders and the city's not-terribly-influential poetry community; Barnicle could call in 25 years' worth of chits from his influential friends in the worlds of politics, media, and business. He had powerful allies within the Globe -- like political columnist David Nyhan, who shared pallbearing duties with Barnicle at Tip O'Neill's funeral several years ago -- and among key Globe advertisers as well. When Storin first asked Barnicle to resign, Thomas Stemberg, the chief executive of Staples office supply stores, sent the Globe a letter fretting about what Barnicle's dismissal would do to circulation.

Connoisseurs of hypocrisy took vicious delight as they watched the Globe, a leading exporter of boutique liberalism and diversity-babble, prostrate itself before the old-boy network. Within the Globe, many writers and editors made the same observation -- if rarely with the same bemusement. More than 50 reporters and editors, a number of them white, signed a letter protesting the unequal treatment given to Barnicle and Smith. More ominously, New York Times editorial page editor Howell Raines wrote a blistering commentary in which he charged that "a white guy with the right connections got pardoned for offenses that would have taken down a minority or female journalist." (Since the New York Times Company owns the Globe, many wondered if Raines's column was simply his opinion or a message from the management.)

The real question, though, is not why Barnicle and Smith got unequal treatment -- but why both didn't get fired long ago. And the blame for this belongs with Globe management -- specifically, with the Taylor family and with Storin's predecessors, for slapping Barnicle lightly on the wrist time and again, and with Storin, for promoting Smith to a columnist's slot in 1994 despite past questions about her ethics and for meting out nothing more serious than a warning after some of her early columns came under suspicion. Indeed, the Globe recently announced that as many as 52 of her columns may have been faked. In ethnically divided Boston, there are good reasons to have highly visible African American and Irish-American columnists. But, by deliberately filling two of its most prominent columnists' slots with writers who were ethnic warriors first and journalists second, the Globe invited the disaster that has befallen it.

As the Globe seeks to regain the trust of its readers, it ought to consider the lesson of one of Storin's smartest moves: his naming of Eileen McNamara to a columnist's slot in 1995. McNamara, a first-rate reporter who'd come up through the ranks, had quit the paper in a huff several years earlier. Storin, despite a strained relationship with her, worked assiduously to bring her back. As a stylist, McNamara is no Patricia Smith or Mike Barnicle. Yet her carefully reported columns, engaged and passionate and filled with righteous indignation, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997.

McNamara, in other words, is the real thing. Barnicle and Smith were gaudy wallpaper, hung to cover over the structural flaws that lay underneath. The talk of Boston now is whether those flaws can be patched over again -- or if new leadership will be brought in to undertake some major renovations.

Dan Kennedy is the media critic of the Boston Phoenix.