Thursday’s Boston Globe ran a Page One story about the outcome of Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley’s investigation into the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s kid-glove handling of its General Hospital-style drama – chief executive Paul Levy’s sweetheart hiring and raising and bonusing of his girlfriend.

Headline:

AG urges Beth Israel to rethink CEO’s fitness

Swift action found lacking on Levy

It was a very different story in Thursday’s Boston Herald:

Diagnosis: ‘Unacceptable’

NOW, union blast Levy, Beth Israel as AG takes no action

But that wasn’t the only contrast between the two Boston dailies.  From the Herald:

According to the [AG’s] report, Levy hired his female former Massachusetts Institute of Technology student – whose name was omitted from the report – in 2002 soon after securing his job at Beth Israel. That year, as the hospital shed more than 500 jobs, Levy created a new, $52,000-a-year “special assistant to the president” post for the woman.

She eventually wound up as Levy’s chief of staff at $104,000 per annum. And while her name may have been omitted from the AG’s report, it wasn’t omitted from the Globe’s:

Coakley’s staff said that Levy hired the woman, Farzana Mohamed, in 2002 as a strategic planning analyst at a salary of $52,000, and that he was previously her adviser at MIT. She was not named in [the AG’s] letter [to the BIDMC board].

The Globe never explained why it failed to exercise the same discretion – a decision, of course, that is entirely at the paper’s discretion.

Regardless, it should be noted that in an interview with the Globe, “Coakley said she would be ‘very disappointed’ if the hospital board moved on without further discussion and essentially said, ‘OK, we’re done with this, let’s move onto the next thing.’

Oooooh. Very disappointed. That’s one tough AG.