In order to thumbnail Boston's political reporting (more accurately the competent lack thereof), we need to look at the media business as a whole.
So please bear with me as the Dog goes didactic on y'all:
A continuing source of frustration to me is the structural disconnect between the media and day-to-day politics. It's nothing new; in fact, journalists and commentators such as
William Greider,
E.J. Dionne, and
Kevin Phillips analysed the dynamic years ago.
American politics (and the journalists that report on it entered a period of structural cognitive dissonance forty years ago, from which they have yet to leave. It's inaccurate to look at this in terms of
Left versus Right politics, since the
New Left was neither new, nor a Left, and
Reagan was not a conservative.
American elite culture became so disconnected from the broad base of society that politics, public policy, and civic culture, that many Americans presumed malicious intent to explain what was in fact structural collapse. This accrued to the benefit of the Republican Party; in its most sophisticated form, it
accrued to the benefit of Richard Nixon, who realized that:
(a) the Left was useful as an outreach mechanism;
(b) that the Left as constituted had no politically significant constituency (there was no "Youth Movement", the
biggest college organization in 1967 was the College Republicans, and white baby boomers have been a primarily Republican constituency since 1968);
(c) the New Politics movement within the Democratic Party, as symbolized by Eugene McCarthy was a Tory-Right dynamic, with its social culture derived primarily from the class bigotry of the 1950s Adlai Stevenson campaigns. The perfect metaphor for the period was
McCarthy's 1980 endorsement of Ronald Reagan. What occurred (and is still occurring) is the triumph and commercial exploitation of class bigotry in American life.
While this approach was invented and refined by the Right, it's been an integral political tactic across the political spectrum, because small turnouts make for less heavy lifting by campaigns; and disengaged electorates are revenue enhancement mechanisms for the media side of the business. Democrats have traditionally depended more on media than field (just as Democrats depend more on big contributions than Republicans), so it would be hypocritical to cast stones at elephants.
The decline in reporting paralleled the civic collapse, as print reporting became a profession, rather than a trade. Preconceived opinions became the basis of newsgathering in the absence of structural connections to the community. The myth of Watergate became the foundation for media amour propre, despite the fact that
the Washington Post reporting had nothing to do with Nixon's resignation.
Television news became so consultant driven that infotainment and marketing (to be redundant) replaced journalistic values; and the same dynamic infected the print media, accelerating as competent reporters aged out of the business.
Corporate concentration within the media accelerated the process, but did not cause it; the problem is more the structural corruption of journalistic culture than the ownership thereof.
Put simply, the Sixties never ended.
In the modern world of politics, journalists exist primarily as conduits, so separate from reality that they do not know what questions to ask, much less whom to ask them. If pointed in the right direction, the media has sufficient resources to cover an issue in depth; but real-time political reporting at the local and State level is practically nonexistent.
Thus political players - and the term covers more than political professionals - have an inbred contempt for the media, and folks at the grassroots misconstrue arrogance and ignorance for conspiratorial malfeasance. The "corporate media'" and "liberal media" accusations from Left and Right are simply misinformed dogma resulting from the same thing.
A classic case in point is how the
Boston Globe's coverage of Senator Dianne Wilkerson's tax problems in 1998 saved her seat. When the news first broke, community sentiment in Boston's black community was overwhelmingly negative until the
Globe printed an op-ed by the Reverend Eugene Rivers condemning the Senator and calling for her resignation.
This ignored two dynamics hard-wired into Boston's black civic culture: most people hate Gene Rivers; and most people hate the
Globe. In particular, the more prominent black Christian ministers and the Nation of Islam hated Rivers more than they hated each other. The result was a packed rally at the Charles Street AME Church, in support of a martyr of white racism, as symbolised by the genocidal cultural imperialists of Morrissey Boulevard.
Wilkerson was overwhelmingly re-elected.
Wilkerson's eventual defeat in 2008 actually reinforces the point. Wilkerson was the Vice-Chair of the Senate Committee on Redistricting. In that capacity, she redistricted more than forty per cent of the black population out of her District, while absorbing hostile populations in Back Bay and Jamaica Plain. Her excuse that she was creating a "second District of Color" was demographically fraudulent, based as it was on raw numbers, not voting-age populations. There was no media research of Wilkerson's premise, despite the fact that the data was easily available by Voter Tabulation District from the Census Bureau.
(In a related instance, the purjury conviction of then House Speaker Thomas Finneran was due, not to racism, but to his arrogance in protecting the electoral bases of incumbent representatives. Had he been open about his motives, he would still be in office.)
Nothing has changed since then; hostility to the Globe is still a mainstay of black community politics. This is reinforced by the fact that there is no evidence of political literacy on the part of either of the Globe's black political columnists.
In a city such as Boston, where most of the politically germaine information exists in hardcopy minila files, Globe reporters are notorious for their belief that if it's not online, it doesn't exist. Their condescending behavior to low-level governmental staffers robs them of access to the only sources who
really know what's going on. Their absence at neighborhood meetings makes them ignorant of neighborhood issues. Most importantly, their gullibility makes Globe reporters easy to spin.
The
Boston Herald is by far the better of the two daily papers in terms of its political coverage, making up in sweat equity what it lacks in resources. The problems are that the comparitive poverty of the paper makes it subject to spin, and the vacuum in competent political reporting from the
Herald's competators creates a culture of self-indulgence among some of its staff, particularly Howie Carr whose sources are the broadest in local journalism, but whose work too often slides into infantile ax-grinding.
The "alternative weekly"
Boston Phoenix is essentially a corporate bohemian paper, with good media coverage, but nothing beyond recycled conventional wisdom and bad spin in its news.
The best journalism comes from the community and neighborhood newspapers, which, despite a tendency to boosterism, provide visibility to local political issues. As a rule of thumb: if you're working a local campaign in Boston, go to the Newspaper room of the Boston Public Library and read the local papers while ignoring the
Globe. Let your campaign flacks work the dailies.
