Mike Barnicle
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Michael Barnicle (born October 15, 1943 in Worcester, Massachusetts[1]) is an American newspaper writer and has been a newspaper columnist for more than 30 years for The Boston Globe (1974–1998), the New York Daily News (1999–2005) and the Boston Herald (2004–present). He has also written for Esquire, George, ESPN Magazine, and most recently Newsweek.com and The Huffington Post.
Barnicle also provides commentary on MSNBC, where he has been under contract for the last 10 years. He is a regular commentator and occasional guest host on Morning Joe and Hardball with Chris Matthews, and frequently is seen on NBC's Today Show with news/feature segments. He has been a regular contributor to the country's longest-running, award-winning local television news magazine, "Chronicle" on WCVB-TV. Barnicle has also appeared on PBS's NewsHour, CBS's 60 Minutes, ESPN and HBO sports programming.
He has won local and national awards for both his print and broadcast work over the last three decades, including from the Associated Press, United Press International, National Headliners and duPont-Columbia University. He holds honorary degrees from the University of Massachusetts and Colby College.
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[edit] Early career
Barnicle graduated from Boston University in 1965, and began working for Robert F. Kennedy. He was a speechwriter for John Tunney, Edmund Muskie, and Sargent Shriver. Barnicle appeared in the Robert Redford film, The Candidate.
[edit] Boston Globe
Barnicle worked for The Boston Globe for 25 years and wrote nearly 4,000 columns as one of their most popular columnists. He joined the paper in 1973, and "his role was never more valuable than it was in the mid-1970s, when school desegregation threw the city into racial turmoil. As the late J. Anthony Lukas describes it in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Common Ground (1985), "Barnicle was one of the few at the Globe who had the guts or the sense to criticize white suburban liberals for imposing their social-engineering schemes on the urban poor." (The Boston Phoenix, August 1998). A November 1983 Boston Magazine profile explained: To Barnicle's loyal fans he is to Boston what Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin is to New York: an extremely talented and funny storyteller; a student of the streets and the pols; a master of Dragnet-like style staccato, three words to a line; a writer influenced by Hemingway imagery and Damon Runyon scenes and the one-liner columns immortalized by New York Post writer Jimmy Cannon, whose sad and witty tales Barnicle's father used to read to him when he was small." Rival Boston Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis said in that same article: "At this stage he’s become an institution. Like Fenway Park. He is his creation, MIKE BARNICLE.” In 1998 Barnicle was forced to resign from the Boston Globe amid questions about two of those columns. The first column, more than 80 lines of humorous observations dated August 2, 1998, contained a handful of observations that resembled jokes in the 1997 book Brain Droppings by George Carlin.[2]
Barnicle made the transition to television in Fall 1986, when WCVB-TV asked him to do a once-a-week commentary on the station's 11pm Friday newscast. Barnicle is "a proven commodity on television .... He's one of the few persons I've seen who can transfer from print to television. He gives it to you straight. He virtually doesn't need any video support, he's so riveting," Charles Kravetz, senior executive producer for news at WCVB, told the Washington Journalism Review (May 1987). The assignment got Barnicle in a bit of hot water with his Globe bosses, who were concerned that the local TV appearances were competition for the newspaper. The matter was resolved quickly, when WCVB assured the The Globe management that Barnicle would always be identified as being with the Globe and that he would not be covering news for the television station (WJR, May 1987).
[edit] Controversy
A complete review of all of Barnicle's thousands of Globe columns revealed an alleged fabrication in a column from three years earlier, dated October 8, 1995. The column recounted the story of two sets of parents with cancer-stricken children. When one of the boys, a black child, died, the parents of the other boy, a white child who had begun to recover, sent the dead child's parents a check for $10,000 USD. When the Globe could not locate the people in the story, who had not been publicly identified, Barnicle insisted that the story was true. He said he did not obtain the story from the parents, but from a nurse. [3]
[edit] 1998–present
Soon afterward, the New York Daily News and the Boston Herald recruited Barnicle to write for them.[4] Barnicle told reporters that he had nothing but “fond feelings for 25 years at the Globe."[4] Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy served as a regular commentator and guest host on Barnicle’s daily radio program on WTKK.[5] Barnicle is currently on the radio three times a week with Barnicle's View, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6:55am and 8:55am [1].
As of 2009[update], Barnicle has also become a regular guest on the MSNBC early morning program Morning Joe as a commentator. He also is a frequent guest host for Chris Matthews on Hardball.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes and references
- ^ City of Worcester Birth Record Search. Accessed 24 July 2008.
- ^ Former Boston Globe Columnist Is Returning, but to a Rival The New York Times. Accessed 12 July 2007.
- ^ Barnicle resigns from Globe The Boston Globe. Accessed 12 July 2007.
- ^ a b Barnicle signs on as Herald columnist The Boston Globe. Accessed 12 July 2007.
- ^ Mike Barnicle's Bio 96.9 FM Talk. Accessed 13 September 2006.
