Copyright © 1999 by the Boston Phoenix, Inc. All rights reserved.

This Just In: Media

No news is bad news at One Herald Square

By Dan Kennedy

It was a story seemingly made to order for the colorized-but-still-gritty Boston Herald: a security guard at one of the city's larger companies, his suspicions reportedly aroused by a foul odor, forces open an employee's locker. Inside is a leather bag filled with six handguns, several of them fully loaded semi-automatics, along with hundreds of rounds of ammunition. The worker, when questioned by police, claims he bought them from young gangbangers in order to get them off the streets. But his terrified fellow employees worry that he might have had something else in mind, and demand to know why management hasn't addressed their fears.

The guns were discovered on January 4. As of Wednesday, 16 days later, the Herald still hadn't reported on the incident.

Perhaps that's because the company where the weapons were found was the Boston Herald.

"If this had happened at the Globe we would have reported on it," says a disgusted staff member. Adds another: "People here are just insane about this one. They're terrified."

Indeed, the paper's managers, rather than leveling with the troops, have shrouded the matter in what might be called enforced silence. For instance, employees posted several copies of a Boston Tab story on the find, but someone reportedly took them down a short time later.

Lesley Phillips, president of the Newspaper Guild of Greater Boston, says she intends to ask management three questions: "When did this happen? Why did this happen? And why weren't we informed?" Phillips, who says she first learned about the guns last week, while she was in Washington on union business, calls the discovery itself "unnerving," and says of management's non-response: "It's just absolutely appalling."

Herald editor Andy Costello, though, claims the guns add up to something less than a major story, noting that as of early this week, the employee hadn't even been charged with a crime. (Police sources say the employee, who reportedly works in the pressroom, may face charges of illegal gun possession.) Asked whether the Herald would have covered the story had it unfolded at another company, Costello replied: "It's a fair question. Quite frankly, we hold ourselves to the same standards as anyone else." He added that he expects the Herald to publish a story on the gun discovery sometime this week (perhaps as early as Thursday), and noted that, last September, the Herald reported on a cocaine sting on the Herald's loading dock that resulted in the arrest of two employees (in that case, the Globe had the story a day earlier).

As for the alleged disappearance of the Tab clips and management's failure to meet with employees, Costello defers to the other side of the building. "The only thing I'm concerned about is writing an accurate story," he says. (Herald spokeswoman Gwen Gage, who declined to comment to the Tab, could not be reached by the Phoenix.)

And though the fears voiced by some employees may be overstated, veteran staffers have not forgotten what took place at the Herald in September 1990. That's when a newspaper handler walked into a locker room, pulled out a gun, and shot a pressman to death.