The Timidity of the Boston Herald. Even It Hides the Truth

Posted on by mtc9393

The headline read: “Mayor Walsh: Huffington Post’s slam of top prosecutor not payback from his staff.” 

The article reads in relevant part:

“A Huffington Post article slamming U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz for prosecuting “the good guys” has raised questions over whether Mayor Martin J. Walsh is waging a PR counteroffensive against the feds after they indicted two top City Hall aides on extortion charges.

Walsh’s chief of staff, Daniel A. Koh, formerly served as chief of staff to Huffington Post Editor Arianna Huffington and as general manager of Huffington Post Live before joining the mayor’s inner circle. Walsh told the Herald last night that he and his staff had no involvement in yesterday’s Huffington Post story titled,  “This Federal Prosecutor is Building a Career indicting The Good Guys” 

But he admitted he knew it was “in the works.” . . . . I didn’t know what it was about, what the premise was, but I knew there was a story being written.”

The article went on: “Walsh also said he discussed the story with Koh, and claimed Koh had no hand in the story, either. Koh was not available for comment yesterday.”

“ . . . The article strung together a series of prosecutions Ortiz has undertaken since her 2009 appointment that critics say were heavy-handed, including former state Probation chief John J. O’Brien and his top aides, as well as computer whiz kid Aaron Swartz, who killed himself after federal prosecutors indicted him for fraud.”

“Ortiz spokeswoman Christina Sterling told the Herald, “. . . Our office is proud of the work we do. We have a very large office. We do lots of cases. … Anybody that picks up a newspaper can see (that). … Our work is not focused on one area as that one article insinuates.”

Sterling avoided mentioning the thrust of the Huffington Post article. That alleged a conspiracy between her office and the Boston Globe. I would agree that any discerning person picking up the Globe could easily figure that out.

It was nice to see that a widely read news source has had the courage to take on the obvious misguided prosecutions by U.S. Attorney Ortiz which I have been writing about for years. It was even better to read how the authors of the article also figured out that there were improper dealings between Ortiz’s office and the Globe.

It was sad to see the Herald left out the most telling part of the Huffington Post article which was the lack of check on Ortiz by the media, and that included the Herald. As of this writing the Globe has not mentioned the article but it will after it figures out how it wants to do a hit job on the Huffington Post writers and assigns the hit to one of its columnists.

The Herald did not mention how the article said: “the only real-time check on a runaway federal prosecutor is the media. That’s welcome news for Ortiz, because the Globe named her “Bostonian of the Year” in 2011. Now the two seem to share a mutual interest. The prosecutor has her eyes set on taking down Boston’s mayor, and the paper is in search of a crusade . . . . Ortiz’s office is suspected of leaking a staggering amount of private information to the Globe, even including details of wiretaps of Walsh, the mayor.”

Finally, some beyond this blog are catching on to the Globe/Ortiz undermining of our system of justice. It is not just in the mayor’s case but it goes back years as I have shown. The Globe makes a profit off the scoops she feeds it; Ortiz gets a pass for all her ill doings.

Not mentioned in the Huffington Post article was the Caswell Motel case where Ortiz tried to steal a motel from a guy who worked there fifty years 24/7. This naked attempt to deprive a man of property worth about two million dollars with no showing of any culpability on his part was never mentioned in the Globe. It was so bad a columnist in the Washington Post wrote about it.

The press was made free so it could report on government malfeasance. In Boston it has become an arm of the government. That is a disservice to all of us.

14 thoughts on “The Timidity of the Boston Herald. Even It Hides the Truth”

  1. I agree, Matt. It was embarrassing as hell to see the Herald carrying water for the Globe. But I think the HuffPo story will slow down Ortiz. She’s bound to be worried that a variant of the story will wind up in the newspapers her bosses pay attention to: The New York Times and/or the Washington Post.

    1. MS:

      Good job. You make a lot of good points. I’d suggest a little more succinctness.

  3. How might Jefferson rewrite thisto reflect certain events of the last few years?

    “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

    Maybe this:

    “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have government buy all newspaper operations, or newspapers buy all government operations, be it done overtly or covertly, I should not hesitate a moment to find not a whit of difference betwixt the two.”

    1. GOK:

      I am sure Jefferson would be appalled at the newspapers in Boston. For one thing he would shake his head in disbelief that the stories most read relate to sports; for another that the newspapers fear criticizing the federal government; and thirdly that the people have access to such limited sources of reporting with the major newspaper being owned by a stock speculator who has as much interest in Boston as he does in Birmingham England.

      Go back to the rush to war with Iraq and see how much opposition our newspapers provide. Most reporters have the desire to be liked by other reporters who they run into every day so they all parrot the same stuff.

  4. Matt, an unrelated response to an earlier post. WASPs did not stir the Revolutionary Melting Pot. High Church Anglicans (church of England) predominantly were the Loyalists who fled the country. Moreover, genetic studies show only 30% of white English genes are Anglo-Saxon. Central and Western English haveeven less Anglo-Saxon genes and are predominantly of French (40%), Danish (12%) and Belgium (9%) genetic origin and these genes are older than the Viking-Norman infusions. So, the term WASP is an anachronism. Also, among the Founding Fathers I’ve discovered only 1 Church of England member; three were Roman Catholic, several Quackers, one Lutheran, one Huguenot, a few Deists or Theists; 20% unaffiliated or unknown; most were Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians. Only one self-identified as “Protestant”. Assuredly, the founders were mainly Christians, but of many denominations.
    Ethnically, the Founders were English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, French Huguenot, Dutch. Pennsylvania was 40% of German descent. Large numbers of Irish served in Washington’s army. George Rogers Clark regiment was over 50% French, Spanish, Native-American. Spanish and Italian brigades assisted the colonists down South. The German Von Steuben and Poles Kosciusko and Polaski and French Lafayette and Rochambeau were indispensable to victory. 20,000 French sailors and thousands of French troops joined Washington at Yorktown.
    The Founding Fathers were REBELS, who thought “all men are created equal” and who guaranteed “freedom of religion.” They risked and sacrificed all to sever ties with the king.

    1. GOK:

      Thanks – it was good to see others have picked up on the same things as I have. Let us hope it is only a beginning in getting back to the truth.

      1. Rather:

        Joe Walsh, an Illinois Republican, who was elected for one turn wrote just before midnight that comment. I would be willing to bet a substantial amount of money that he had been sitting down with Jack Daniels or Jim Beam for much of the evening. What a moron – no wonder he lasted on term.

    2. Rather:

      I wish I knew what it was coming to. There is enough blame to go all around. There is a vacuum in leadership.

  7. Someone has to speak up for working people. Someone has to fight back against the concerted plan here to undermine labor law and the continuance of the business model that relies on wage theft and the underground economy. I for one will never cower to perceived power. We are the irrefutable truth. If these charges stand, it will be a blow to labor relationships nationwide. That is transparent. Carmen Ortiz understands those implications and is building her republican credentials in a blue-dog state by painting labor as corrupt with its champion as her target.

    1. John:

      Good comment. Right on the money. Ortiz’s lack of understanding of what working people must do to gain a decent wage is appalling. Her indictment of the Teamsters for some foul language and a little pushing and shoving on the picket line demonstrated this. Her understanding is that anything that coerces a business owner to do something he would not want to do amounts to extortion would outlaw every type of work action to gain better wages, hours or working conditions. After all, the strike is a way a union uses to get thing the employer wants to deprive its members of. It is an attempt to coerce him into giving up on his plans to reduce wages, increase hours, or some other way to increase his profits. That is the only way the working man has ever been able to survive is by organized action against hostile employers.

      The great overlooked fact is how wage stagnation is related to the decrease in union membership in the private sector. it was the union movement that brought about the great American middle class from the Fifties into the Seventies. Even those employers who fought unions had to do so by providing their workers with wages commensurate with those of union workers. When unions were great American prospered; now with them being attacked on all sides it is suffering.

      You make one mistake. Ortiz is a Democrat. She was appointed by a Democrat. She was recommended by Ted Kennedy to Obama. You are not wrong when you think she is acting like a Republican. What the unions fail to grasp is that the Democrats have walked away from them; they say the right things but their actions do not follow their words. Unions have suffered because truth be told neither party has use for them. Democrats are more concerned with people’s rights than helping unions.

      The problem unions have is they have no one really interested in helping them. They live in the past thinking that the Democrats do even when someone like Ortiz shows them otherwise. It is time they get it back. They can only do this not by hitching on to the Democrats but by forming their own party and electing their own people who can begin to represent them. They can become the “swing votes” that can be bargained for and in return get what they need to rebuild the union movement in the country. It will be a rough slog but it is better than seeing its members treated as Ortiz feels free to do.

      Even now rather than cowering they should have some pickets outside the federal courthouse in Boston suggesting Ortiz is unfair to unions. The idea that if some in the mayor’s office cannot urge non-union businesses to hire union workers they are engaged in criminal acts is really an alien thought. This is America where we all have the right to free speech for the purpose of advancing our ideas or causes.

      You say “someone has to fight back” and I agree. It is the unions. Some of their leaders should review what the unions went through in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century to see how those men had courage. They might realize it is time to get off their soft chairs and do something more than lament.

Comments are closed.

Discover more from Trekking Toward the Truth

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading