Our feisty local tabloid is always up for a good class warfare rumpus, and Saturday’s edition of the Boston Herald gets way uppity:
Front page:
Page 2:
Blue bloods boil over noise of medical helicopters
Well-heeled residents of tranquil, cobblestone-lined Beacon Hill — piqued by helicopters hovering in their priceless airspace — are calling on federal aviation officials to investigate the alleged “dangerous practices” of news and medical choppers, including those that carry patients in need of life-saving care.
“We often receive complaints that medevac helicopters transporting patients to Massachusetts General Hospital routinely fly directly over Beacon Hill rather than following the designated flight routes along the Charles River,” reads a letter from The Beacon Hill Civic Association to the Federal Aviation Administration.
Wait – it gets even more piquent:
John Achatz, chairman of the association, said choppers sometimes wake him up in the morning and residents regularly complain about them flying too low.
“Often, if I’m sitting on my terrace outside, I have a helicopter within a few hundred feet and it’s loud enough that I can’t have a conversation,” said Achatz, who also expressed annoyance at the helicopters hired to take publicity shots of the Hub’s dawn skyline.
That’s a big boo-hoo according to the Herald, which reports that “MGH’s helipad, which opened in 1995, has between 500 and 525 landings a year, transporting people suffering heart attacks, major trauma and burns, spinal cord injuries, critical newborns and others.”
“These are really critical patients and they need the rapid access that only a helicopter can allow,” said [Mass General Dr. Alasdair Conn], noting a 2006 New England Journal of Medicine paper that showed the risk of death decreases 25 percent if a severely injured patient is treated at a major trauma center.
In other words: Take your medicine, Beacon Hill.
Campaign Outsider 
I’ll bet if you look closely at the issue, the real problem is the use of hovering news copters rather than a medical copter crossing the neighborhood. The Herald has chosen to emphasize the medical copter aspect in their story because it plays to the populist beliefs of their reader base, and trying to show the pricy Beacon Hill neighbors as insensitive to the emergency transport of seriously ill patients works to that end. The news copters are much more of a problem because they hover for long periods of time and their droning noise is very intrusive. Beacon Hill’s location as the center for state government, and proximity to the Common and its events, make it a major target of these news copters. They should be restricted.
What a disingenuous argument. The GOP – and the Herald for that matter – do not have a monopoly on the working middle class. They always have advocated for elite interests. I’m sure if these helicopters were flying over Sutton, Boxford, Dover, Pepperell, or Howie Carr’s property, the Herald would be up in arms about it. Hypocrites.
I don’t remember saying anything about the GOP, was it the word populist that triggered your reaction? I doubt the Herald would be much interested if helicopters were hovering over those other towns.
CJ, I meant the Boston Herald, not you. But I’ll respond to this:
*** I doubt the Herald would be much interested if helicopters were hovering over those other towns. ***
Oh, I think they would.
*** and trying to show the pricy Beacon Hill neighbors as insensitive to the emergency transport of seriously ill patients works to that end. ***
Why does the Herald do this? What journalistic purpose does that serve? It’s petty, uninformative, and has no news value. The political demographics on Beacon Hill are predominately Democrat. The Herald chose to make an issue out of a molehill and it’s right up there with Fox News in terms of unprofessionalism. Again, if Beacon Hill were GOPers, they wouldn’t be referring them as “Beacon Hill Snobs.”