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| The Bulletin. Keeping a finger on the pulse of the nearly pulseless. |
See, for example, the July 25, 2013 edition of the Boston
Bulletin[i]
(I’d love to link to the actual stories, but the Bulletin, a free paper,
doesn’t post their stories online unless you buy a subscription, and then it’s
just a PDF. All this despite the fact that there’s an ad in the paper that
reads “What drives the internet? CONTENT. Read the Bulletin online at www.buletinnewspapers.com). In it,
among a lot of advertising for things you won’t use, ten actual stories, some
event listings, one editorial and two op-eds. We’ll start with the op-eds.
In “If I Had A Son,” Frank Sullivan (regular writer of the
“Frank Reflections” column) nails the tone-deaf white Irish-American attitude,
implying that President Obama is a racist because the latter had the temerity
to suggest that if
he had a son, that son would resemble Trayvon Martin. Frank, who totally
recognizes that America’s racial history is “disgusting,” argues “I thought we
are not supposed to use phrases that suggest ‘They all look the same,’ [sic]
when describing a black teenager.” His whole follow-up, where he pretends that
if he had a son he’d explain to them that they should respect Rosa Parks and
MLK, but that any present-day racial struggles are fabricated race baiting, is
based on this idea, which is to say “Obama thinks all black kids look alike.”
Except that’s not what Obama is saying. He’s saying if he had a son, that son would
look black and black teenagers, in his experience, are profiled and in the
instance of Trayvon Martin, stalked and ultimately killed for being black. His
point is not that all black kids look the same. It’s that all black kids look
the same to white people.
Frank goes on to say if he had a son “if he is lucky, he
will look like his mother and his sisters [nice self-effacing family plug here,
Frank]. He won’t look like any random white teen who dies in the midst of
pounding a victim’s head on the pavement.” The implication here, of course, is
that any kid, white or black, who is defending himself against somebody who he
perceives (and in the case of George Zimmerman, clearly is) a threat, they
deserve what’s coming to them. Note that George Zimmerman, in Frank's eyes, is the victim here. But let’s not do hypotheticals about imaginary
sons here, Frank. Let’s talk about one of those daughters you mentioned. If your daughter was being
stalked by a middle aged man with a gun, decided she was in a position where
she was threatened enough to have to try to defend herself, and was shot in the
process, what would your opinion be then? This might seem like a harsh
question, but since it’s
all right to ask a presidential candidate a similar question, I think it’s
fair to ask a columnist who’s saying someone else’s kid got what they deserved.
And if your daughter died in an instance like this, Frank,
and the guy who shot her wasn’t even detained for 24 hours, as Zimmerman
wasn’t, what then? Would this be a clear “justice has been served” situation?
Frank also calls race baiting on black Boston leaders, who
he says are making a bigger deal out of the Martin case than of a triple
murder on Intervale St. in Roxbury, which he said is getting no attention
because there is no race element. Now, assuming these two cases are even sort
of similar, which they aren’t, the outrage about the Trayvon Martin/George
Zimmerman case was entirely about George Zimmerman going free. Since there
isn’t even a suspect in this triple murder, these crimes are totally
incomparable. A better (though still not good or parallel) comparison would be
of the Amy
Lord murder in South Boston, for which there have been plenty of community
meetings and much organization and press. Is Frank Sullivan equally outraged that the Amy
Lord case is getting this much media and community attention while the Roxbury murders remain on the
back burner?
A few pages away, next to a temper tantrum column by Joe Galeota
(My Kind of Town, p. 4) about how the terrorists have won because it’s harder
to park near the esplanade on the 4th of July (I’m not exaggerating.
The column is actually called “Another victory for the brothers Tsarnaev,”
where he calls parking on Storrow Drive for the Pops a “short but meaningful
Boston tradition” that “bites the dust.” Apparently nobody’s told Mr. Galeota
about the Green Line), an unsigned editorial, which actually takes a pretty
reasonable position on student debt (something needs to be done about student
debt, author is open to legislation bringing down student interest rates and
proposes an Obamacare-like policy on schools where they are required to spend
80 percent of their spending on education), shows the author’s total lack of
understanding of all things under forty in an arbitrary (not to mention
incredibly dated) dig on Occupy Wall Street.
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| This is Farhad Ebrahimi. He might look like a hippy to the Bulletin, but he's actually worth more than their entire company. Also, if you think he looks like a hippy, you don't know what hippies are. Look into it. |
In bringing up Occupy, the author writes “Frankly, many of
those protestors were dumbfounded that a degree in art history doesn’t make you
rich, and that forces of supply and demand won’t allow you to pay a mortgage by
selling hemp-made hacky sacks.” The
economic falsehood of the second half of that statement notwithstanding,
this nonsense talk shows both a total lack of understanding about what Occupy was
about (most people there didn’t want to be rich, they just didn’t like that
other people were getting rich exploiting the labors of people who were poor)
and who was supporting it. I, for example, have a real job (totally hemp-free,
I might add), as did and do many of the people I know who were involved with
Occupy. There were college professors, retail workers, office drones, managers,
and even
millionaires involved and/or supporting the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Perpetuating this myth that there was nothing but a bunch of hippies and
slackers at Occupy is a baseless lie, and the language the Bulletin chose to use really
reflects hostility toward what happened in the 1960s more than the modern day.
Were there deadbeats at Occupy? Sure there were, but saying
it’s the norm for those protests, or even particularly common, is a statement
from a person who couldn’t even have been bothered to go down to Dewey Square
and talk to some of the folks he decided to write about. If the editors of the
Boston Bulletin had bothered to read a single edition of The Occupied Wall Street Journal (which I’d
bet gets a hell of a lot more readers than that Boston Bulletin site) as
closely as I read the Bulletin, they’d be hard-pressed to find a word about
anyone trying to get rich, nor a single pitch for a hemp cooperative start-up.
There are a lot of reasons why local newspapers are dying.
The internet is a huge part of it, as are budget cuts[ii]
and willingness by writers to trade their writing for “experience.” But more
than anything, newspapers like the Bulletin are losing readership
because they’re catering to a population that is going extinct. The target
market of the Boston Bulletin’s editorial pages is older, white, reactionary,
and resistant to change – all things that a modern Boston (and a modern
America) is not conducive to. I’m not saying these columns and columnists
should all be booted to the curb – quite the contrary, I think their opinions
are very valuable in characterizing what stupidity looks like in print – but what
I am saying is that these papers need the voices of younger people who aren’t
ready to scream “get off my lawn” every time a stranger comes by next to those of the old guard if they want to continue past 2020.
Boston is changing, and if small weeklies like the Bulletin don’t
change with it, they’ll be as gone as the days of Whitey, Yaz, and Honey Fitz.
1 comment:
Galeota's column has always been a joke.
When he wrote for the Parkway Transcript years ago, his column often consisted, literally, of a list of 30-40 of his friends in West Roxbury. Nothing more.
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