Posted on 05/10/2006 8:37:19 AM PDT by abb
An Emersonian transformation under way By Christopher Lydon Spring 2006
the town crier is dead and gone, without a successor. We will not hear his hand-bell or his hectoring again. Around his grave the green crocus shoots of new media are growing toward something entirely different: a faster, more diversified, detailed, checkable, and democratic “network of networks” of information and opinion. It could be worthy someday, if we’re lucky, of the great father of all New England conversation, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The Internet is that “better mousetrap” to which, as Emerson said, the world beats a path. I love it for serving a precisely Emersonian vision of expressive democracy. Think of it as a tool for rescuing the individual—“the infinitude of the private man”—from the mass (and from mass media), which was Emerson’s great project. “Masses!” he wailed; “the calamity is the masses.” Think of the rising Internet media as the means by which millions already follow the commandments of Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” That is, “trust thyself,” and speak for thyself, on thy Web site.
The Sage of Concord said: Forsake the authorities and follow the gleam of light flashing across your own mind from within! And now: Blog it! It is a great Emersonian transformation and liberation that’s under way in the public conversation. Or so it seems to one recovering child of the Old School of Boston media.
Our exemplary Town Crier was, of course, the late great Tom Winship, editor of The Boston Globe from 1965 to 1985 and ginger-man in all the town’s gab till his death in 2002. He was a curious mix of the traditionalist and the subversive, a chronic reformer often mistaken for a radical. He’d created his own role in the establishment: a sort of Dennis the Menace from the Tavern Club downtown. Winship’s Globe hit your doorstep like a scribbled note off his personal pad. Maybe 10,000 people around Boston knew they could reach him on the phone. In that sense Winship was a human foreshadowing of the Internet: Everybody had access. He was a muscular practitioner of quirky, agenda-mongering, unconventional journalism who taught us cubs one main premise: The newspaper’s function, first and last, was to be a pain in the ass. Why else, but for the joy of being stylishly contrary, would Winship have hired the nonpareil columnist George Frazier and let him make sport not just of Nixon and Agnew but of Dapper O’Neil and Harvard sacred cow Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s form on the dance floor—all those columns about Little Arthur “punishing the parquet” and such. How else would the cartoonist Paul Szep have come to Pulitzer Prize maturity? Or Mike Barnicle to overripeness and delinquency?
Barnicle wasn’t the only flaw in the Winship formula. I came to hold the Town Crier responsible for a certain local neurosis, an awkward alienation in both of the two towns that form our state of mind. We are, in truth, two newsy, gabby capitals side-by-side: the incomparable teaching and research industries on one shore of the real and metaphorical river, “the frontal lobe of the universe,” led by Harvard and MIT; and on the other side, the ever-evolving ethnic neighborhoods, the city of stately bricks and indestructible three-deckers, and, not least, the Hub of state politics.
The essential trick for Boston journalism, it always seemed to me, was to report and represent both of our cities without apology—with savor, even with enthusiasm. But the Globe’s body language, especially after the busing wars, looked to me like cringing before the smart folks and lording it over the neighborhood dummies; as if it assumed that the Harvard crowd was wedded to the Times and South Boston to the Herald. The Globe stuck itself with a mushy suburban middle that didn’t much appreciate the nuances at either end of the scale. Only when I ran for the mayor’s office did I discover that, as of 1993, among voters in the 22 wards of Boston proper, Herald readers outnumbered Globe readers four to one!
When I moved back to Boston in the late ’70s, after a decade in Washington, I felt this fundamental difference between the Globe and the Washington Post, edited by Winship’s pal Ben Bradlee: The Post, especially its Style section, made Washington seem more interesting than it was; the Globe made Boston seem a lot less vital, cosmopolitan, and conversational than it was coming to be. The Globe read like a paper that wished it could take the Red Sox and move someplace else. And that was the good old Town Crier’s Globe!
MEDIA GROWN OLD
And then there’s the new Globe—Times-owned since 1994; Times-operated, under Taylor-family replacement Richard Gilman, since 1999; and led by Times-certified editor Marty Baron since 2001. The new Globe practices computer-assisted research journalism, with profoundly redemptive effect in the epic of child- and sex-abuse in the Catholic Church. In truth I often wonder if Tom Winship would have taken on that Herculean cleaning of those stinking diocesan stables. At the same time, this new, notionally professionalized Globe more often strikes me as denatured, almost voiceless.
The strategic effect of Times ownership, and perhaps the intent, has been to push the Globe down-market toward extinguishing the Herald, not to charge up the Globe with Times standards or style. We get no flavor of Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, or Nicholas Kristoff from Morrissey Boulevard. The Globe editorial page may be the most predictable rectangle in print, and the least remarked. The only collectable op-ed columnist, James Carroll, is a once-a-week freelance. The Globe ’s must-read bylines—just for keeping your dukes up around town—are the passionate, well-informed Joan Vennochi; Alex Beam, the cheerful keeper of the Winship pain-in-the-ass flame; and the best-connected all-around listener, Steve Bailey.
But where is the institutional memory of Marty Nolan, who retired too soon, or the intellectual range of David Warsh, who got the gate? Where is the tempered political judgment of Brian Mooney, once a regular treat but now on display only rarely, in profiles? What of the most faithful beat writer on the paper, music maven Richard Dyer, who is leaving with a sore heart this spring? A friend of mine, talking with a Globe City Hall reporter last fall, remarked how different things were “under Ray.” Came the response: “Who is Ray?” A Globe court reporter asked another person I know: “Who is Wayne Budd?”
Does the Globe really live in our city? Do we live in theirs? You see those green-and-white Globe brain-caption posters all over the MBTA, asking such cute Boston questions as “Where’s the best pizza in the North End?” But it’s a shock now when you see someone on the T actually reading the Globe. Or the Herald, for that matter, even when they’re giving it away free. What the straphangers are reading, if anything, is that moronic poison-pill of non-journalism, or anti-journalism, the Metro, of which the Globe has cynically, or defensively, bought a piece—recalling Lenin’s line about capitalists investing in the rope factory that makes their noose!
The Globe is, in so many ways, a diminished institution: its culture and political coverage slowly hollowed out, its staff ranks shrinking through buy-outs, its circulation down. In a community that obsesses about becoming a franchise town (no thanks, Bank of America), it’s an all-around downer, for the Globe and its readers, that the first forum of the town’s conversation is itself a franchise—a dim sort of colonial voice—of The New York Times.
The Globe would claim still to “set the agenda” for other media around Boston, as in Marcella Bombardieri’s tenacious accounting of Larry Summers’s troubles with the Harvard faculty this winter. But in truth the Globe is calling the tune for TV and radio shows that move people less and less.
I don’t watch much television, but seriously: Who do you know that actually registers on the local snooze shows? I hear that Smiling Jack Williams (my vintage) has gone back to the future at Channel 4, where Jon Keller is said to report real politics. But where are the stars in that star-struck medium? As I write this, the Herald has just dispatched a reporter to the college campuses with snapshots of all the local news anchors. Only one kid could identify any of them. On New England Cable News, Jim Braude, who talks faster than I can think, gives off sparks when I catch him, and sometimes fire. Another eminent friend in the business e-mails me: “Can you name a single TV anchor who’s come along in the last 10 years? Maybe we’re like polar bears as the ice cap recedes. John Dennis leaps off Channel 7 onto the WEEI radio ice floe, but what happens if—when?—they lose the Red Sox to FM?” Indeed, it has come to pass: At this writing, there is talk of the Sox heading to WBOS, even buying a share of the FM station.
There may be no harbor for any of the old brands in this technological storm. “Who listens to Gary LaPierre read the list of school closings on snowy mornings?” my weatherman asks. “I know my kids don’t. I taught them to go to wbz1030.com to get the news instantly. I don’t know how the FM music stations are going to survive either. Consider WZLX, ‘classic rock.’ Does anybody think that their male target audience isn’t going to have either XM or Sirius in the next two to three years?”
JURASSIC PARK
Such is the eerily stripped and becalmed media landscape on which a few fine old dinosaurs yet romp, and where any number of furry little mammals—bloggers and other online upstarts—are munching on the last dinosaurs’ eggs.
Let’s hear it for the dinosaurs that still walk among us. Solid brands that friends of mine count on include Tom Palmer and John Powers at large in the Globe, and Peter Howe and Bruce Mohl in the Globe business pages. Others I know and admire specially: Peter Gelzinis, the most substantial local columnist we have, Margery Eagan for her sense and sensibility, and Wayne Woodlief for his sanity in the nutty Herald. And at the Globe: Eileen McNamara, the last bleeding heart; Frank Phillips, the last walking compendium of state politics; and Sunday “Observer” Sam Allis, the last “boulevardier” on the Boulevard. Others I treasure, in person and in print, include book-wise Mark Feeney and Katherine A. Powers, and the peerless sports authority Bob Ryan of the Globe. Among the younger practitioners I don’t know well but admire hugely are Glen Johnson, late of the Globe, who covers the State House for the AP, and Adam Reilly, who writes politics for the Phoenix.
There may be no harbor for the old brands, including the Globe. Let’s hear it, above all, for the only true Tyrannosaurus Rex still rampaging across the land. Howie Carr gets less respect than Rodney Dangerfield ever did—because he’s printed in the Herald and because on the even less respectable WRKO he carries on with his callers about such burning questions as the TV stars they’d love to see naked. But Howie must be acknowledged someday as our bravest and best, if only for his coverage of the rise, reign, and fall of The Brothers Bulger, as he calls the book version. It has been the biggest Boston story of our times, maybe the only really important political story since the Kennedys. Ask yourself: In how many places could it have been said with authority that the overlord of the drug cartel and the overlord of local politics were brothers and intimates? Medellín, perhaps, in Colombia. Marseilles, perhaps, in France, once upon a time. And Massachusetts, from the late 1970s into the new century.
Though Kevin Cullen did some admirable reporting on the Bulgers, and in Black Mass Gerry O’Neill and Dick Lehr made a fine book of the story, the Globe master-narrative over the years was about the “good” brother and the “bad” brother, not about the perverse partnership that corrupted the city and the State House with fear. When Paul Corsetti of the Herald got a death threat directly from Whitey, he bought a gun, then quit the news business. Most reporters just decided not to mention the Bulgers. Mike Barnicle’s real sin was fronting continually for John Connolly, the FBI hack now in prison for fronting for Whitey. Brian McGrory extended the worst of the Globe tradition when Billy, as UMass president, decided to take the Fifth Amendment before Congress rather than detail his contacts with his on-the-lam brother. McGrory wrote that poor Billy’s silence was an exercise of “brotherly love”—not contempt for the public or anything like that. (That defense earned McGrory a ride through Washington with Bulger after the “say nothing” testimony.) No matter his disreputability in many other matters, nobody over the years took more chances to tell the story straight than Howie Carr. And nobody gave more people courage and some consolation through the Bulger siege.
The Globe will die a long and hard death.....
Even so, I find this style of writing to be painfully obtuse:
"Bob was at Stan's retirement party and you know what Judy said to Bob? Well, she mentioned Mary's thing with Leo! Can you believe it? It's a good thing Jack wasn't there!"
Who the heck are all these people?? I'm sorry I'm not part of your clique, but if I don't recognize more than half the names, then you're clearly not writing for the public.
And this is why the Dinosaur Media is a dinosaur.
Ayuh! Time was a Kennedy could get away with murder.
Now, it's a quick trip to rehab.
Times they are a changin'.
Christopher Lydon ... as in former host and wannabe wunderkind of public broadcasting "The Connection" ... and banished from BeanTown years ago.
He gets in a good jab at everyone, even offering the subtile analysis of our "local neurosis" above, without mentioning Cambridge by name. The new media may be a better mousetrap that today's Globe, but then, so was the old Globe.
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