James P. Freeman: A bumpy trip though Massachusetts's circus of 2017
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools”
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth (Act V, Scene V)
The struts and frets of 2017 confirm we are on a portentous path to a dusty death.
Is there a doctor still in the house?
The Massachusetts Medical Society rescinded its opposition to physician-assisted suicide. Perhaps that phrase was too forthright in these sensitive times. So, a statement from the society reads “medical aid-in-dying.” The society’s governing board will, for now, adopt of position of “neutral engagement.” Theirs might be a dutiful death.
Newly offensive public statues and monuments were the rage. In Boston a street sign, “Yawkey Way,” so-named 40 years ago, became an object of moral grandstanding. Red Sox owner John Henry is now “haunted” by the racist legacy of a predecessor owner, Tom Yawkey. Never mind that the Yawkey Foundation is one of the largest charitable organizations in the city. Henry and fellow progressives are more concerned about erasing history than improving it.
The Boston Globe — which Henry owns — haunted many subscribers with delivery and production problems. The Globe got it wrong in asking its readers this question: “Does Boston deserve its racist reputation?” More probing would have been: “How does racism still exist after a century of pure-bred progressivism in Boston?”
Bad news. The Boston Herald filed for bankruptcy and was sold for pennies on the dollar.
Boston Public Schools needed a bigger piggy bank, surprisingly, as it paid certain employees with off-the-books payments, revealed an IRS audit. But they won’t be pressing the snooze button. BPS announced (based upon computer research) the rescheduling of most of its starting times next school year.
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh was overwhelmingly re-elected to a second term. No mention during the campaign that Walsh overwhelmingly crushed free speech and freedom of the press during the Free Speech Rally in August.
Andrea Campbell, 35, will be the first African-American woman to lead the Boston City Council. Her presidency, says The Globe, will make the council the “most diverse in the city’s history.” Forget political diversity, though. Republicans need not apply — there are none on the council.
For all the region’s proud progressives, don’t kiss and tell. The following codswallop appeared in wearyourvoicemag.com: “10 Things Every Intersectional Feminist Should Ask on a First Date.” Warning: “What do you do for fun?” isn’t one of them.
Amazon came calling and Massachusetts went groveling. Twenty-six Commonwealth entities submitted bids to become the company’s second headquarters.
Take the long road home. State Sen. Thomas McGee, a Democrat from Lynn, proposed legislation that would bring more toll roads to Greater Boston. Funds would be allocated to all statewide transportation needs, including the troubled MBTA. For roadways, however, Massachusetts already spends an average of $675,939 per state-controlled mile — a figure exceeded only by Florida and New Jersey.
Massachusetts Atty. Gen. Maura Healey continued her quest as progressivism’s most litigious social-justice warrior. Her personal vendetta against the Trump administration included 24 instances of legal intervention in just the first six months of the year. How about Ticketmaster? Drug dealers?
A high school girl golfer beat a high school boy golfer by shooting the best score in the Central Massachusetts Division 3 boys’ golf tournament this fall. But she did not get the trophy, sparking national headlines and progressive incredulity.
In more gender-related news, the Girl Scouts of America advised against children hugging relatives. Such activity, reported The Washington Post, “could muddy the waters when it comes to the notion of consent later in life.” Meantime, the Boy Scouts of America accepted girls into their ranks to “shape the next generation of leaders.” And the singer Pink is raising her daughter gender-neutral. No wonder kids are confused today.
Poor Johnny and Jane.
Liz Phipps Soeiro, a librarian at Cambridgeport School, refused to accept a gift of Dr. Seuss books from First Lady Melania Trump — a gesture recognizing “National Read a Book Day.” The Seuss illustrations are “steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes,” she wrote in a letter to Trump. Shortly thereafter, it was discovered Soeiro posed for a picture in 2015 wearing a Seuss outfit and holding a copy of Green Eggs and Ham book. Only in Cambridge. Well, maybe not …
In a letter to parents, the Boyden Elementary School, in Walpole, bizarrely asserted that its annual Halloween costume parade “is not inclusive of all the students and it is our goal each and every day to ensure all student’s individual differences are respected.” Instead, trading a parade for political correctness, the school laughably said that Halloween would be known as “black and orange” spirit day. Call it Banned in Boyden.
Not on my ocean view! Having faced a “very vicious and very well-funded lobbying organization” to protect Nantucket Sound for 17 years, said Bloomberg, the last gale warnings were issued for America’s largest proposed (and now dead) offshore wind project, known as “Cape Wind.” It’s officially kaput. Some wonder if Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth will now close, as scheduled, in 2019. Power down, green protesters!
Scandals ran down Beacon Hill. Former Democrat state Sen. Brian Joyce was indicted in a sweeping federal corruption case. i And Democrat Stan Rosenberg stepped down as state Senate president amid an investigation of sexual-assault allegations against his civil-law husband, Bryon Hefner — while he conducted state business. Rosenberg said the Senate has a “zero tolerance” policy on sexual harassment.
Charlie Baker is running for Comedian-in-Chief of the Commonwealth. When the popular incumbent announced his re-election, a running joke circulated within the GOP: “For which party?” Confirming his unassailable allegiance to progressivism instead of conservativism, the governor signed bills mandating free birth control and bilingual education.
Always in character, thin-skinned progressive U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren got her feathers ruffled with faux-outrage, once again. She said President Donald Trump used a “racial slur” during a White House celebration of Native Americans when he referred to her as “Pocahontas.” Funny, did she consider the 1995 eponymous movie to be a slur, too? Millions didn’t. The Disney animation grossed over $141 million during its theatrical release in the United States.
Among the initially named visiting fellows at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics for the 2017-2018 school year were two improbable scholars: former Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer, and former U.S. Army intelligence-analyst-turned-traitor Chelsea Manning. Harvard students are falling behind … Fordham students. Two students were kicked out of a coffee shop at Fordham University for violating a “safe space” with their “Make America Great Again” hats.
Shootings were up 18 percent in Boston. There was no evidence, nonetheless, that those weapons were modified with “bump stocks.” But bump stocks were outlawed in Massachusetts as a threat to society.
Fifty years after The Summer of Love, take the flowers out of your hair but be sure to put some LSD in your head. People looking to get an “extra edge at work are turning to [the] illegal drug to boost their focus and creativity,” reported fox25boston.com. They are micro-dosing, which involves taking small amounts of the substance about twice a week. Says computational neuroscientist Selen Atasoy, “It’s really like jazz improvisation, what LSD does to your brain.” Will it block progressive impulses in 5/4 time?
Psychedelic meet-up groups are trending in Portland, Ore.; San Francisco, and New York. Cutting-edge hipster millennials in Boston are likely meeting now.
Meanwhile, the opioid crisis rages on. However, for the first nine months of 2017, Massachusetts reported a 10 percent decline in deaths over the like period in 2016, likely a result of more immediate administration of Naloxone, which reverses the effects of overdose. Theirs is a dusky death.
Needham-based TripAdvisor, the travel and restaurant Web site (which includes reviews and public forums), got into trouble when it repeatedly removed posts warning of alleged rape, assault and other injuries at Mexican resorts. And, forbes.com reported, a writer in London tricked TripAdvisor by creating a “fictional eatery” that became the city’s top rated restaurant. Trust but verify.
Snowflakes actually coated the College of Holy Cross in May. A committee was formed to determine what to do about the fact that its founding president owned slaves, and what to do with a now-objectionable sports name: “Crusaders.” As National Review noted, “where there’s a will, there’s a microaggression.”
Not to be outdone, Pope Francis, a leader in thoughts and words, is considering a change in one word of “The Lord’s Prayer.” The pontiff, conversant in nine languages, is concerned about the word “temptation.” He believes that the phrasing in the Our Father prayer “is not a good translation.” Will this translate to stemming high rates of disaffiliation plaguing the Catholic Church?
Next year, should it be tempted to arrive, marks the 45th commemoration of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to legalize abortion. Since then, it is estimated that over 58 million abortions have taken place in America. As a stark reminder, the only gravestone on the premises of the chapel at Holy Trinity Church in Harwich reads: “In memory of The Unborn – Denied the Precious Right to Life (1973- ).” Theirs was a despicable death.
James P. Freeman, a former banker, is a New England-based writer and former columnist with The Cape Cod Times. His work has also appeared in The Providence Journal, newenglanddiary.com and nationalreview.com
David Warsh: How a 'milking media' company hurt Flint
The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal all agree: the decision to draw drinking water for Flint, Michigan, from its river was an epic failure of government. Where they placed the blame varied widely: Flint’s mayor and the city council; the governor’s office and Michigan’s Emergency Manager Law; the Michigan Departments of Environmental Quality and Health and Human Services; the federal Environmental Protection Agency regional headquarters in Chicago; or the EPA itself.
As Evan Osnos wrote in The New Yorker:
The headwaters of Flint’s crisis are not located in the realm of technical errors; rather, there are harder questions about governance and accountability in some of America’s most vulnerable places. Who controls policy and why? How does the public check those who govern in its name?
Somewhere near those headwaters are the offices of The Flint Journal, a wholly owned subsidiary of Advance Publications, which also owns Condé Nast Publications, which publishes The New Yorker and 20 other magazines, including Vanity Fair, Vogue, W and Wired.
The Journal’s transformation into a four-day-a-week adjunct to a regional Web site, as part of Advance’s retreat from the newspaper business, is an important part of the story.
Advance got its name when Samuel Newhouse bought the Staten Island Advance, in 1922. Newhouse went on acquiring newspapers whenever he could, assembling a chain that included such well-respected dailies as the Newark Star-Ledger, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Portland Oregonian. He bought the Condé Nast magazine group in 1959, by legend on the advice of his wife, and, in 1976, added eight prosperous Michigan dailies when Advance bought the Booth chain, headquartered in Grand Rapids.
Newhouse died in 1979; and his sons, Samuel I. “Si” Jr. (b. 1927) and Donald (b. 1930), took over. The magazines lost money for a time in the 1980s and ’90s, but the newspapers’ earnings more than made up for it. The brothers bought Random House from RCA Corp. in 1980 and sold the firm in 1998 to the German publisher Bertelsmann SE & Co. Meanwhile, Donald was gradually moving Advance into cable television. If Charter Communications’ $67 billion bid for Time Warner and Bright House Networks is permitted, Advance, which started Bright House, stands to become one of the largest shareholders in the nation’s second-largest cable company, after Comcast. Forbes in 2014 ranked Advance 44th largest among privately owned companies in the US.
Much changed with the advent of search advertising in 2002, as the traditional semi-monopoly of newspapers on mind-share and many sorts of advertising was shattered. Even before that, Steven Newhouse, a third-generation family leader, had turned enthusiastic about the prospects for digital news. After that, Advance began cutting back on the frequency of print editions of its newspapers and consolidated many of their operations in centralized digital hubs – first in New Orleans, then New Jersey, Michigan, and Oregon.
In 2009, Advance closed the Ann Arbor, Mich., News and replaced it with a Web site, annarbor.com, only to resume printing two days a week, in 2013, while folding the Arbor Web site into a a large site, MLive,com, covering most major cities in southern Michigan, including Flint. Alan Mutter, an influential columnist as “Newsosauer,’’described the Advance strategy as “milking” their newspapers, as opposed to Warren Buffet’s custom of “farming” and Rupert Murdoch’s practice of “feeding” them.
How did the Flint paper do on the story? One metric (from Advance-affiliated Reddit) notes that veteran reporter Ron Fonger contributed 250 stories on the water crisis; MLive lists500 stories by Journal reporters since the crisis began, and offers a timeline of how the story emerged.
I couldn’t find a story explaining why all the surrounding townships in Genesee County had elected to continue to buy their water from Detroit until a new pipeline from Lake Huron could be completed, and only the Flint emergency manager decided to go it alone, without the backing of the city council. Only when Genesee County officials finallyblew the whistle last October, warning citizens of the city not to drink the water, did the local crisis turn into a state-wide scandal, and then a national one. Certainly the MLive effort was nothing like the all-out coverage of Hurricane Katrina for which the Times-Picayune won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006.
But that was before Advance applied the “digital first” treatment to the New Orleans paper. Since then, key staffers have left and the Baton Rouge Advocate has moved of its rival in circulation to become Louisiana’s largest newspaper. (The cities are 80 miles apart along the Mississippi River.)
After James Warren, of the Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism school, published “How the Media Blew Flint,’’ John Hiner, vice president of content at Michigan's MLive Media Group, who previously was executive editor of the Flint Journal, sent the rejoinder “The Local Media Didn’t Whiff on Flint Coverage’’.
Warren quoted David Poulson of Michigan State University's Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, who gave good marks to the Journal’s Fonger:
I daresay a well-placed FOIA (Freedom of Information Act request) several months ago regarding the Flint situation may have earned some mainstream news publication a Pulitzer nomination. Or perhaps aggressive coverage of local government under the state-appointed financial manager would have caught the issue earlier, or even prevented it from happening. And a well-trained reporter covering local health or the environment and deeply versed in those issues may have really watch-dogged the transition from one water source to another and asked questions about required testing. Or an aggressive news organization may have even invested in independent water testing once questions arose and brought attention, testing and treatment much earlier than when it happened. That didn't happen because, well, they don't exist.
What’s the alternative to Newhouse’s “milking” model? The company could indicate a willingness to sell local newspapers wherever there are willing buyers. A citizens group in New Orleans tried that, but as Warren Buffett dryly noted at the time, “They do not have a history of selling anything.”
Of course it makes a world of difference how it is done. A couple of years ago the New York Times Co. sold The Boston Globe for a pittance to Boston Red Sox owner John Henry, its former business partner. Henry made headlines recently by firing the newspaper’s home-delivery contractor without having a capable alternative vendor in place. You probably won’t read the backstory to that one, either, in The Times.
I have a feeling this watchdog function of the press will regenerate itself, over another 20 years or so, with non-profits, free-lancers, and bloggers taking up the slack. In the Flint case, it was water-quality engineer Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech professor, who produced the critical tests for lead as a consultant to community activists; Jake Blumgart, a Philadelphia free-lancer, contributed a good piece for Slate. And last week the Michigan Press Association gave its Journalist of the Year Award to Curt Guyette, who covered the Flint story online for the Michigan chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Meanwhile, pay a little closer attention to the behavior of the press lords. It was not just government that failed Flint.
David Warsh, a long-time financial columnist and economic historian, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this first appeared.