Boston Globe

The Boston Herald has broken the story -- a scoop even the Boston Globe has acknowledged -- that "Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep into the world of radical anti-American Islamism."

A responsible national establishment press would treat this as an important story, because, as the Herald's Chris Cassidy noted in the understatement of the day, it "raises questions over whether Tsarnaev financed his radicalization on taxpayer money." Several paragraphs from the Herald story, followed by a look at how Todd Wallack and Beth Healy at the Globe handled their story on the family's finances, follow the jump.

On Monday's CBS This Morning, open liberal Gayle King ballyhooed a guest's fear that Americans might target Muslims in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. The news host thought it was "very important" to point out Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen's "concern about a backlash", and quoted Cullen's assertion that "these two don't speak for Muslims any more than I speak for overweight Irish-American guys who like to play hockey." [audio available here; video below the jump]

King didn't mention, however, that Cullen also took aim at the blame-America-first portion of the left in his Sunday column: "I was on an NPR show...and a caller...started talking about how we've got to look in the mirror and ask what we as Americans have done to create angry young men like this. I almost drove off the road. No one who lost their life or their limbs on Boylston Street last Monday did anything to create angry young men like this."

The New York Times Company, owners of the Boston Globe newspaper, is once again trying to find someone to take the struggling Massachusetts newspaper off its hands.

The Times previously tried to sell the Globe in 2009 but canceled the sale process after it received concessions from is unions (love the irony there).

Glen Johnson, formerly the politics editor for Boston.com, the website of the Boston Globe, has become the latest journalist to join the Obama Administration working as a senior adviser for new secretary of state John Kerry.

In a hilariously self-unaware press release, Kerry is quoted touting Johnson's supposed neutrality. Even though his new senior aide has accepted a political appointment in the administration, everyone needs to understand that Johnson is "not a partisan."

One reason, I'm guessing, for still subscribing to The Boston Globe is to laugh at "self-loathing" black conservatives...even in Quentin Tarantino movie reviews. Globe film critic Wesley Morris is at is again. On NPR in May 2011, Morris hailed "The Fast and The Furious" movies as very "progressive" and "equal-opportunity shallow." When challenged on it, Morris shot darts instead at "The Blind Side."

In his Christmas Day review of the new movie "Django Unchained," Morris found "a hard mix of meticulous cartoonishness and unexpected power," especially in the "house Negro" Samuel L. Jackson, who apparently channels Clarence Thomas, Alan Keyes, Herman Cain, and Michael Steele:

Each morning, NewsBusters is showcasing the most egregious bias the Media Research Center has uncovered over the years — four quotes for each of the 25 years of the MRC, 100 quotes total — all leading up to our big 25th Anniversary Gala on September 27. (Click here for ticket information)

Already this week, we’ve published the worst quotes of 1988, 1989 and 1990; today, the worst bias of 1991. Highlights include journalists saluting Anita Hill while disparaging Clarence Thomas (“if you gave Clarence Thomas a little flour on his face, you’d think you had [former KKK Grand Wizard] David Duke talking”), and a Boston Globe arts critic writing about patriotism: “Oh, say, we’ve seen too much. The Star-Spangled Banner pushes like a cough through America’s mouth...” [Quotes and video below the jump.]

In his weekend syndicated column, Deroy Murdock unearthed and relayed information the establishment press hasn't told the nation about how certain public-sector pension funds and university endowments have chosen to invest money entrusted to them in Bain Capital. Yes, Bain Capital.

Until three weeks ago, it would have been somewhat understandable if the business press didn't expect to find a story here. After all, who would expect that the organizations complaining the loudest and longest about the conduct of Bain, the private-equity firm GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney left over a decade ago, would actually have significant funds invested there? These people couldn't possibly be that hypocritical, could they? Oh yes they could.

NPR's idea of Republican convention coverage is to expose Mitt Romney as a flip-flopping fraud flirting with the "extremist camp within the Republican Party." On the very liberal show Fresh Air on Tuesday, host Terry Gross brought on two Boston Globe reporters who've penned an expose called The Real Romney. They talked for 43 and a half minutes.

Veteran Globe editor Michael Kranish found “disaster” in the GOP platform “which takes a very hard line on abortion, and he's picked Paul Ryan, who in the past has voiced a very hard line on abortion....And it's a disaster on the left and certainly in the center because Mitt Romney wants to talk about the economy.” Gross also wanted the Boston authors to trash Romney for his birth-certificate joke, and expose Romney's polygamous Mexico-based ancestors:

While many liberals cheer the harsh words that Democratic Mayors Thomas Menino (Boston) and Rahm Emanuel (Chicago) have had for the Chick-fil-A fast-food chain as a result of its conservative, pro-traditional marriage president, editorial boards at liberal newspapers in those two cities have come out with strong criticisms for the anti-conservative bullying.

"[W]hich part of the First Amendment does Menino not understand? A business owner’s political or religious beliefs should not be a test for the worthiness of his or her application for a business license," the Boston Globe complained in a July 25 editorial. "History will render judgment on the views of Chick-fil-A executives. City Hall doesn’t have to," the editorial board concluding, having noted that there's no evidence that Chick-fil-A breaks any anti-discrimination laws.

One of the recent lies told by the Obama campaign and the liberal media is that companies owned by Bain Capital outsourced thousands of jobs while Mitt Romney was CEO.

A headline in the July 12  Boston Globe blared, “Mitt Romney stayed at Bain 3 years longer than he stated” causing the liberal media and MSNBC to jump on the story.  The story hyped SEC filings by Bain Capitol listing Mitt Romney as CEO of Bain for three years after he left his official duties with the organization suggesting that he had a far more active role at Bain far after he claims he left the company.

The Boston Globe is reporting on a Massachusetts solar company that received state loans under Governor Romney, and is now filing for bankruptcy.  The Globe insists that this news means that Romney's attacks on the President's failed Solyndra investment have backfired, and are implying that it opens up the Republican presidential contender up to charges of hypocrisy. 

An excerpt:

At the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, Jesse Washington's Friday evening coverage ("Who's an American Indian? Warren case stirs query") of the nuances involved in claiming Native American Indian heritage -- or ancestry, or biology, or allegiance, or identity, or identification, or membership (and I've probably missed a couple) -- occasioned by Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts is the journalistic equivalent of what the occasional Atlantic Coast Conference men's basketball game was like (with final scores sometimes in the 20s) before the NCAA legislated the shot clock: a continuous exercise in stalling.

Washington's report is time-stamped at 10:31 P.M., meaning that its last rendition was at least 18 hours after the Boston Globe performed a rare exercise in journalism and found the following, of which there is no hint in the AP story:

Elizabeth Warren's credibility took another hit today with stories in both major Boston daily newspapers stating that Warren was listed as a minority in a professional directory for nine years before she was hired by Harvard Law School in 1995.

The Boston Herald broke the story on Friday that Harvard Law School described Warren as its sole Native American professor during the mid-1990s when Harvard was under fire for lack of diversity among its faculty.

Yet another example of the fluid, ever-evolving liberal concept of diversity.

Back in 1996, the Coalition for Civil Rights, a student group at Harvard Law School, ran a survey to determine whether law students at the school were happy with "the level of representation of women and minorities" on the faculty, according to the Harvard Crimson.

Leave it to the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Propagandists, to cover for Barack Obama's Uncle Omar, formally known as Onyango Obama. Today, Uncle Omar was given a slap on the wrists so light it's hard to imagine he even felt it.

Today's AP cleanup in Massachusetts arrives via Denise Lavoie, whose principal contribution to the spin is to tell readers that Uncle Omar is "appealing a deportation order," when in fact he ignored an order for 19 years until his arrest for "operating under the influence" in August of last year. Excerpts, including the "say as little as possible" headline, follow:

The media are falling over themselves to relay a salacious report that the Catholic Church in the Netherlands may have surgically castrated "as many as 10 young men" over a half a century ago, in the 1950's.

Perpetual Catholic bashers such as the New York Times, NPR, and the Boston Globe are having a field day trumpeting the tale.

The message from these outlets is clear: "The Catholic Church is bad, bad, bad. The news gets worse every day!"

A closer examination of the facts, however, reveals that there is a lot more to this story than meets the eye.

It would appear that if Kevin Paul Dupont were king, he would be exploring how to send the Stanley Cup Finals exploits of Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas last year down the memory hole. Thomas "held the Canucks to eight goals in seven games" and became the first goalie ever to shut out his team's opponent in a deciding Game 7 on the road, helping the Bruins win their first Cup in almost 40 years.

Since he can't do that, the Boston Globe sportswriter appears to want to use Thomas's absence from the team's White House visit three weeks ago and subsequent Facebook postings as evidence that Thomas's "legacy" is in danger (his column's headline states that Thomas needs to "restore" it). In making his supposed case, the self-professed "confused" Dupont made and repeated a fundamental factual error. Those errors destroy any credibility he may have had in portraying Thomas's decision and subsequent Facebook postings as somehow disrupting team unity:

Awwww. Don Berwick is unhappy. In a speech at the annual conference of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement excerpted at the Boston Globe's White Coat Notes blog, the man whom Congress would not confirm as Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator seventeen months after President Obama gave him a recess appointment lashed out at his critics, especially their use of the terms "rationing" and "death panels," describing the employment of the latter term as "beyond cruelty."

Neither Chelsea Conaboy's introduction at the Globe excerpt nor Sam Baker's coverage at the Hill's Healthwatch blog brought up why the two terms Berwick despises so accurately describe his health care views, which include his belief that the Affordable Care Act passed by Congress and signed by President Obama last year -- the one where, as Nancy Pelosi warned, we're still figuring out what's really in it -- is, as he told Boston station WBUR, "majestic." What follows is most of Conaboy's intro, which almost completely ignored the overheated rhetoric in the speech excerpts which followed:

Barney Frank's retirement announcement could have come as early as 1989 but back then the Democratic congressman from Massachusetts relied on the liberal attitudes of his constituents and his friends in the media to see him through a prostitution scandal, friends like the Boston Globe's Tom Oliphant. On the August 26, 1989 edition of the syndicated Inside Washington, Oliphant had no fear that Frank would survive the scandal of his apartment being used for a male prostitution ring as he proclaimed Frank to be "a man of surpassing integrity."(video after the jump)

“Bring the Family: Looking for Adventure with the Kids” reads the tag line over a weekly series of tips to Boston Globe readers suggesting what to do with them on weekends. In Saturday’s “g” section, the headline announced the “what,” a bizarre recommendation to expose them to a volatile, unsanitary and politically heated situation: “Occupying Boston with the kids.” The who: “Globe reporter Mark Shanahan and his daughter, Julia.”

Shanahan, who “covers the comings and goings of Boston’s celebrity class in the newspaper’s daily ‘Names’ column,” decided “it was time to visit Dewey Square so my 11-year-old daughter could see for herself what Occupy Boston is all about, to hear what the protesters are saying about ‘corporate greed’ and ‘income disparity,’ and maybe to get a few ideas for our next camping trip to Baxter State Park.”

Imagine if a newspaper disproportionately and endlessly harped upon decades-old crimes committed by black people. Even if the stories were all true, people would be rightfully outraged at the paper’s overt racism in consistently and repeatedly targeting the past misdeeds of people of one particular race. The public would never allow such blatant bigotry.

Such a comparison can be applied to the Boston Globe and the Catholic Church, except this bigotry is real, and there is no public outrage.

Won't someone please make New York Times columnist Gail Collins happy, and bring up the tale of Mitt Romney’s dog Seamus? Collins is apparently frustrated that the image of Romney's habit of strapping the family dog to the roof of the car in a crate on family vacations to Canada has not become the iconic image of the Romney campaign (like the media tried to make Gingrich’s big bill at Tiffany's).

Since the Boston Globe revealed crate-gate in the summer of 2007, Collins has (according to a Nexis search) mentioned the dog's dilemma in 23 columns since her August 4, 2007 manifesto, “Haunted by Seamus.” The motif is only increasing in frequency as the 2012 campaign goes on. Here is Collins relaying the details in 2007:

Is the Boston Globe endangering the life of an Icelandic woman who led the FBI last June to capture the notorious and dangerous Boston gangster, James “Whitey” Bulger?

Today (Sun., 10/8/11), the Boston Globe has published a compelling, behind-the-scenes story of the capture of Bulger, who was high on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for several years.

The Globe, however, raises eyebrows in its story by publishing the name, background, and picture of the woman who recognized Bulger and his female companion, who hid for several years in Santa Monica, California.

On August 15, the Boston Herald, the Boston Globe, and the Associated Press all reported that Massachusetts-based Evergreen Solar had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Oddly enough (no, not really), The New York Times, which published a 1,600-word report in January (HT to an NB emailer) on the company's competitive difficulties, did not take note of Evergreen's filing.

Each of the three reports cited gave readers the impression that Bay State agencies were the only ones which had provided the company any form of financial assistance during the past several years during which, according to its latest 10-K annual report (large HTML file), it was losing hundreds of millions of dollars annually (about $950 million in the past three calendar years):

Earlier this month, the Archdiocese of Boston felt that a special mass at St. Cecilia's Church in Boston to "commemorate Boston Pride 2011" would give parishioners and the public the false impression that the Church was endorsing the city's annual Gay Pride festivities and its accompanying messages (e.g., acceptance of gay 'marriage'). It therefore asked the parish to postpone the liturgy to a different date. The priest, obedient to his local bishop, obliged.

End of story? Not for the Boston Globe.

Dennis Cauchon at USA Today has been one of a very few establishment press reporters willing to expose federal workers' disproportionate pay and benefits (previous examples here and here) as well as Uncle Sam's precariously dangerous financial situation.

Cauchon has two USAT items today on the latter topic (HT to NB commenter Gary Hall): "U.S. funding for future promises lags by trillions," which reports that federal obligations totaled $61.6 trillion as of September 2010, a $5.3 trillion increase from a year earlier, and "Government's Mountain of Debt," which itemizes those obligations by major source.

Unsurprisingly, 75% of federal obligations, or a combined $46.2 trillion (actually more, which will be seen at the end of this post), relate to Social Security and Medicare, which no one but a few deluded leftists believe (or pretend to believe) are sustainable in their current form. Unfortunately, at the end of his first story, Cauchon quoted one of them, Michael Lind, whom the USAT reporter described as "policy director at the liberal New America Foundation's economic growth program," who said the following:

If you looked out your window at roughly 8:50 Wednesday evening, you may have seen pigs flying.

At that moment, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell was actually taking the side of a conservative newspaper in a dispute with - wait for it - President Obama (video follows with transcript and commentary):

"Today on the program, we'll ask whether Americans are losing the skills of true debate and with it a central pillar of this democracy," BBC's Jonny Dymond informed listeners of the May 15 "Americana" podcast.

Yet when it came to Dymond's guests, there was no dissent from the liberal line. 

Take guest  Charles Pierce, a Boston Globe columnist and author of "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free."

During his segment, Pierce decried the state of debate in America over global warming lamenting that "it is impossible to accept the reality of global climate change and get nominated in the Republican Party."

A round-up from over the weekend of journalists denouncing Republican Congressman Paul Ryan for not including a big tax hike in his deficit-reduction plan and discrediting the Tea Party’s pressure on House Speaker John Boehner as a “far right” impediment to good government.

“He doesn't deal with the revenue side at all,” despaired Newsweek veteran Evan Thomas on Inside Washington, arguing: “We cannot survive on 18, his goal is to do 18 percent of GDP as revenue. That's not enough. We're going to have to raise some taxes...”

On HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night, Katty Kay, anchor of BBC’s World News America, echoed, “He does nothing on the revenue side,” fretting: “There is this allergy, amongst Republicans, about saying ‘you know what, we actually do have to deal with taxes too.’”

Juan Williams charged “the rich get off like scoundrels,” complaining on Fox News Sunday that Ryan is “not doing anything in terms of raising taxes.” Williams also worried: “John Boehner now has the Tea Party wrapped around his neck like an albatross.”