Copyright © 1998 by the Boston Phoenix, Inc. All rights reserved.

This Just In: Media

Grading the other horse race

By Dan Kennedy

Superficially, at least, the Herald beat the pants off the Globe in covering this year's bitter gubernatorial campaign. The Globe was out to lunch on several events that defined both the tone and the substance (such as it was) of the battle between Acting Governor Paul Cellucci and Attorney General Scott Harshbarger.

But even though the Herald captured the war of the scoops, declaring an overall winner is a complicated matter. That's because for anyone who was trying to figure out how the candidates' positions would actually affect people, the Globe was the paper of choice. The Herald's reporters were superior at observing what was right in front of them, but the Globe did a better job of looking beneath the surface.

Take, for instance, the papers of Monday, October 19. The Herald's lead story, by Jack Sullivan, quotes a Harshbarger line that Cellucci has complained about ad nauseam: "Paul, if sending two kids to college and remodeling your kitchen cost you $740,000, you better call my Consumer Hotline.... Because, brother, you just got scammed." And Sullivan quotes a Cellucci spokesman as calling Harshbarger "a complete sleazebag."

Not one word of this nasty rhetoric appears in the Globe. Instead, the page-one off-lead is a think piece by Scot Lehigh on Cellucci's and Harshbarger's differing approaches to welfare reform -- a key issue because, as Lehigh notes, some 6000 families are scheduled to be tossed off the welfare rolls this December.

The Globe also weighed in with smart pieces on Harshbarger's record as attorney general, Cellucci's flip-flops, the fading importance of taxes as a hot-button issue, the massive education challenges facing the next governor, and the nearly $10 million poured into the campaign by favor-seeking corporate bigwigs.

The Herald, by contrast, thought fewer deep thoughts but was more consistently on top of the news. It was the Herald that learned the national Democratic Party was preparing to inject so-called soft money into the Harshbarger effort. It was the Herald that gave Jan Cellucci a forum in which to voice her outrage at Harshbarger's tactics. (And it was the Herald that pointed out that said outrage may have been more theater than genuine emotion.) The Herald even had the field to itself in noting that the hapless Harshbarger identified the wrong Jack Nicholson movie as the source of Cellucci's debate line "You can't handle the truth." The paper's minidebates were a nice touch, too.

Neither paper's coverage, though, was particularly distinguished. For the true junkies, the best stuff was the way-inside-baseball columns by the Globe's Brian Mooney and the Herald's Wayne Woodlief.

Unfortunately, the wall-to-wall coverage that marked Weld-Silber '90, Kennedy-Romney '94, and Kerry-Weld '96 appears to be a thing of the past. No doubt the dour personalities of the combatants has something to do with that. But the papers' editors have to take some blame as well. The Herald needs to offer smarter coverage; the Globe needs to find some passion. Above all, both need to do more.