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This Just In: Media

Jeff Jacoby's historical rewrite

By Dan Kennedy

Maybe Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby's attempt to rewrite media history on Monday could have passed unremarked-upon. After all, his purpose was to praise a sick friend, two-time US Senate candidate Ray Shamie, and anyway, 1984 was such a long time ago. But it's important not to allow the sharp political cleavages of the past to become fuzzed over with nostalgia and sentimentality. Shamie -- a personable businessman and ultraconservative ideologue -- would understand.

After losing a quixotic fight against Senator Ted Kennedy in 1982, Shamie, a Republican, actually had a realistic shot of winning in 1984. He shocked the Brahmin establishment by defeating former US attorney general Elliot Richardson in the Republican primary, and appeared poised to pull an upset in the general election against John Kerry, then making his first Senate run. But Shamie lost -- "in part," wrote Jacoby, who worked on Shamie's campaign that year, "because of a sulfurous assault on his character and integrity by the Boston Globe."

In fact, the Globe hammered away that fall at Shamie's dalliance with the far-right, anti-Semitic John Birch Society. And when Shamie attempted to wiggle away by claiming he'd dabbled briefly and was repelled by the Birchers' extremist views, the Globe righteously whacked him out. In a front-page story by Eileen McNamara (now a Globe metro columnist), it was revealed that Shamie's campaign advisers had written a memo urging him to play down his Birch ties and to remove right-wing literature from his company's library. In the best tradition of political skulduggery, the memo referred to the Birch Society only as ... "Fred." (Fred?)

It got worse. A week later, the Phoenix reported that "Shamie's flirtation with the radical right is actually a romance of some significance, a passion that continues to shape the ideological center of his campaign today." Among other things, the Phoenix revealed that for more than 10 years Shamie had distributed to his employees the Spotlight, published by the Liberty Lobby -- "the best-financed anti-Semitic organization in the United States," according to the Anti-Defamation League at that time. (The Phoenix piece was co-written by Michael Segal and Renée Loth, now the Globe's deputy editorial-page editor and one of Jacoby's supervisors.)

Those who know Jacoby can't imagine his hanging out with an anti-Semite, which leads a reasonable person to conclude that Shamie's views were rooted in naïveté and ignorance rather than animus. But those views were also important information that voters had a right -- a need -- to know.

"Such an attack would be unthinkable today; the Globe's current editors would never allow it," Jacoby wrote on Monday. And it's true that the Globe's political coverage is less knee-jerk liberal than it used to be. But that shouldn't preclude the paper from exposing repugnant ideologies held by candidates for public office.