The Boston Herald continues to criticize news organizations that erroneously reported an arrest two days after the Marathon bombings – without noting that the feisty local tabloid itself did exactly the same thing.
Exhibit A: The Herald’s Press Party webbcast on Friday, which the hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider previously chronicled.
Exhibit B : Today’s op-ed by retired Heraldnik Guy Darst . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
In their prime (which is to say the 1940s), the Nazis seized roughly 100,000 works of art – worth maybe $10 billion – from German families who happened to be Jewish.
This is the story of 400 of those artworks and one of those families.
From Saturday’s New York Times:
Family, ‘Not Willing to Forget,’ Pursues Art It Lost to Nazis
Lt. Alexandre Rosenberg of the Free French forces pounded on the boxcars. Hold your fire, he told his men. There might be prisoners inside the train they had stopped outside Paris in August 1944. Slowly, a few of the heavy doors slid open, and a handful of worn German soldiers straggled out.
Inside, the French found the cargo the Germans had been guarding, crates jammed with artwork: sculptures, drawings and framed paintings, some stacked against one another like bread slices, their signatures visible.
Picasso. Renoir. Braque. Cézanne.
The lieutenant did not need to read the names. He had seen many of the works before, hanging in the Paris home of his father, Paul Rosenberg, then one of the world’s leading dealers in Modern art.
Since then, the Times reports, “three generations of Rosenbergs have been engaged in a painstaking search for hundreds of artworks that were looted from their family by the Nazis.”
So far, they have recovered a remarkable 340 of them. And there’s another one in sight:
This month their hunt led to Norway, where the family is negotiating for the return of a Matisse that has hung for 45 years in the Henie Onstad Arts Center, a museum founded by the skater Sonja Henie and her husband.
“We are not willing to forget, or let it go,” said Marianne Rosenberg, Alexandre Rosenberg’s daughter, a New York lawyer. “I think of it as a crusade.”
The original Crusades were about conquest and plundering.
This crusade is about unplundering.
Good for the Rosenbergs. And a good read in the Times.
The Great Boston MediaWatch Dogfight resumed last night, with the Boston Herald’s underdog Press Party webcast featuring this:
The Boston Herald’s “Press Party” gives credit to local media for outperforming the national print and TV networks in our half-hour show devoted to critiquing the virtual nonstop coverage of the Marathon terror bombings and the aftermath.
The Press Party panelists, including former GOP congressman Peter Blute and Boston City Councilor Tito Jackson, acknowledged the media made numerous mistakes but agreed that local TV and print provided the most knowledgeable and accurate coverage. The first segment of the webcast below, taped from Suffolk University’s Studio 73, is devoted to the media’s overall performance, including CNN’s now infamous “exclusive” claiming the suspects were in custody and on their way to federal court – a report that turned out to be completely wrong.
Not to mention a completely wrong report that the Boston Herald also published, as evidenced by this uncharacteristically accurate timeline in the feisty local tabloid last week (see especially 2:23 pm):
There’s also this, from the totally excellent Chart Girl:
To be fair, the Herald’s Press Partiers totally eviscerated CNN for its misreporting, although panelist Jaclyn Cashman did say if you’re on TV for 14 hours straight, you’re gonna say stupid things.
To which Press Party host Joe Battenfeld replied, “That I understand, but getting something that wrong, that they actually had the suspects in custody an were going to federal court when obviously that was not going on, that’s what baffles me.”
Hey, Joe, here’s what baffles us: How come you never mentioned that the Herald MADE THE SAME MISTAKE?
You wanna watchdog the press?
Watchdog yourself first.
Meanwhile, crosstown at WGBH’s Beat the Press, the Big Dog tackled the same topic. (Routine disclosure: The hardwatching staff was a longtime contributor to BTP, but we drifted.)
News organizations have been covering the marathon bombings virtually around the clock for the past two weeks. A lot of that coverage has been outstanding, but as with any breaking news story there’s often a combination of the good, some bad, and a little ugly.
WGBH, to its credit (or not), failed to turn up on this Chart Girl chart of the Marathon bombings coverage.
But the BTP setup piece did take the Boston Herald to task.
One more bit of nonsense to note: A Boston Herald column claiming the liberal media was upset by cheering and flag-waving. Really? Name one. Just one.
The ‘GBH Beaters declined to beat further on the Herald.
That doesn’t mean you should.
From our Don’t Know What to Make of This desk
This is a headscratcher: Carbon-copy photos in the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, attributed to different photographers.
From the Herald’s Inside Track:
Matt Damon: ‘It’s good to be home’
“(Bleeping) disgusting.”
Matt Damon may be a Harvard man, but when he heard Mark Wahlberg’s reaction to the Boston Marathon attacks, he thought it summed up pretty well what everyone from Boston was thinking.
“Being from Boston, that day is sacrosanct,” the Oscar winner said yesterday. “We’re all out of school … My brother, for the first time in 10 years he wasn’t standing at the finish line with my two nephews. Half the time, he ran it. It’s a very life-affirming day. And I’m sorry to say, but I saw a quote Mark Wahlberg had … and you know, being from this community, that’s the perfect description of what we felt.” Photo credit: Ted Fitzgerald.
From the Boston Globe’s Names column . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
As the hardreading staff at Two-Daily Town has chronicled, the Boston Herald is hellbent on blaming the Massachusetts welfare system for the Marathon bombings last week.
Now comes the cavalry, compliments of Fox News (via Mediaite).
The Five Rails Against Boston Bombing Suspect Having Received Welfare: ‘Taxpayer-Funded Jihad’
Reacting to a Wednesday morning report that deceased Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his wife received Massachusetts state welfare payments, Fox’s The Five tore into the system for enabling a “taxpayer-funded jihad.”
According to the Boston Herald, Tsarnaev was receiving state benefits, along with his wife Katherine and their 3-year-old daughter, until 2012 when the family ceased to meet the income eligibility limits required by the state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services. The paper also reported that both of Tsarnaev’s parents received state welfare payments at some point.
The video:
That’s a stunning stew of misinformation and xenophobia, but why get technical about it.
Meanwhile, today’s Boston Herald has this lead story:
Lawmakers to eye welfare records
The Patrick administration is still keeping the welfare records of the slain marathon bombing mastermind under wraps — after agreeing, under political and public pressure, to release the information only to a House oversight committee where it will remain a secret.
Gov. Deval Patrick’s top spokesperson said last night there is an “exception in the law” that allows the welfare records to be shown to state legislators, but that’s where the transparency ends.
“The Legislature is not allowed to share it,” said Jesse Mermell, the governor’s director of communications.
But the Herald will share as much as it can, yeah?
From our Two Different Worlds desk
Luckily for us, our feisty local tabloid has dug deep and unearthed the real villains in the Boston Marathon bombings.
Deval Patrick and the Massachusetts welfare system.
The action gets started on Page One:
Then it really picks up steam on pages 4 and 5 . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times’ intrepid book reviewer, had a front-page piece in Wednesday’s edition detailing the digital doings of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Unraveling Boston Suspects’ Online Lives, Link by Link
It is America’s first fully interactive national tragedy of the social media age.
The Boston Marathon bombings quickly turned into an Internet mystery that sent a horde of amateur sleuths surging onto the Web in a search for clues to the suspects’ identity. And once the search focused on Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers’ social media postings provided a rich vein of material to mine and sift.
There are more than a thousand messages on Dzhokhar’s Twitter account in addition to a profile page on VKontakte, a popular Russian social networking site, and in Tamerlan’s case, a list of favorite videos on YouTube and what appears to be an Amazon wish list belonging to him (Amazon would not confirm whose list it was, citing its privacy policy.)
These posts instantly became dots that people began trying to connect.
Which Kakutani proceeds to do at length.
Whatever you think of the Times, this is worth reading.
Above all others, the New York Times has taken to the web like a duck (web-footed!) to water (see the Pulitzer awarded to the paper’s eye-popping multimedia feature Snow Fall for further details).
Now comes 4:09:43 (A Moment From the Boston Marathon, Audio and Stories).
It’s a staggering compilation of narratives, including this:
And this:
And far too many others.
Which will likely be the next Pulitzer for the Times.
Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal front page (via The Newseum):
Close-up of the photo by David L. Ryan for the Boston Globe:
Funny, but the hardwatching staff can’t remember seeing this photo in the Globe itself.
Then again, we could be wrong. As we’ve so often been told we are.
Chalk up yet another homophobic tweet, this time from Boston Bruins player Tyler Seguin. As Track Gal Gayle Fee noted in today’s Boston Herald:
Seguin sorry for tweet
Bruins baby Tyler Seguin apologized yesterday for a tweet he sent out that some have called homophobic. Seguin, who appeared in a video with Boston rapper Slaine, sent out a missive about it saying, “Just listened to the song in my bed. Gave me goosebumps no homo…” The tweet came at an inopportune time, seeing as how the NHL just became the first professional league to partner with the gay rights organization You Can Play.
Seguin apparently realized he’d done something dumb almost immediately and deleted the tweet and apologized within minutes of sending it.
Of course, tweet-and-delete is sort of a flawed gameplan, as, say, Anthony Weiner could tell you . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
Click to subscribe to RSS
Campaign Outsider 