The Boston Globe recently ran a column by Ellen Goodman pointing out the more egregious nonsense that comes out of talk radio. But this seems to be a case of throwing stones in glass houses.
Apparently the Globe hopes people have forgotten about its own columnists, Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle, who stole others’ ideas, outright plagiarized and, when that didn’t work, simply made things up.
When Smith was discovered fabricating things, she was shown the door almost immediately. But Barnicle was (and is) a celebrity and the Globe ran interference for him for years despite plenty of evidence that something was wrong with Barnicle’s too-good-to-be-true columns (columns which other newspapers easily debunked).
As this page about Barnicle notes,
Barnicle spent 20-plus years inventing lies, injuring people, engaging in invective and lowering the tone of many of the debates he was involved in. He made up a vicious lie about a gas station attendant and the Globe paid damages. He wrote an inappropriate column about Alan Dershowitz that may have contained a vicious lie and the Globe paid damages. He stole from Mike Royko and George Carlin. He referred to people in his columns that exhaustive searches by Boston Magazine have never turned up and that he has never produced.
And had he not simply swiped one liners from Carlin and tried to pass them off as his own, he might still be making things up despite the Globe’s legal settlements.
So excuse me for being unimpressed when the Globe gives Goodman a stage to attack one of its competitors for sloppy standards. That’s a bit like China complaining that the U.S. application of the death penalty is unfair.
