Mike Barnicle
Mike Barnicle | |
|---|---|
| Born | Michael Barnicle October 15, 1943 Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Education | Boston University |
| Occupation(s) | Journalist, commentator |
| Years active | 1965 – present |
| Website | http://mikebarnicle.com |
Michael "Mike" Barnicle (born October 15, 1943) is an award-winning American print and broadcast journalist as well as a social and political commentator. After a long career at the Boston Globe that ended with his dismissal for lying and plagiarizing, he is now a frequent contributor and occasional guest host on MSNBC's Morning Joe and Hardball with Chris Matthews and is frequently 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, since 1986. Barnicle has also appeared on the PBS NewsHour, CBS's 60 Minutes, ESPN, and HBO sports programming.
The Massachusetts native has written more than 4,000 columns collectively for the New York Daily News (1999–2005), Boston Herald (2004–2005 and occasionally contributing from 2006-2010) and The Boston Globe, where he rose to prominence with his biting, satirical, and at times heart-wrenching columns that closely followed the triumphs, travails, and ambitions of Boston's working and middle classes. He also has written articles and commentary for Time magazine, Newsweek, The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, ESPN Magazine, and Esquire, among others.
Early career
Barnicle was born in Worcester, Massachusetts,[1] grew up in Fitchburg and graduated from Boston University in 1965. Barnicle appeared in a small part in the Robert Redford film The Candidate. While visiting Redford's "Sundance" home in Utah, Barnicle was asked to write a column in the Boston Globe, which ran for 24 years between 1973 and 1998. In his first year as a columnist, he was sued by a white gas station owner after quoting him making a racial slur about his predominantly black neighborhood. A judge ruled that the owner had not said those statements and that Barnicle had "interlineated" his notes to include the owner's name. The case, Schrottman v. Barnicle, 437 NE 2d 205 (Mass. 1982) is now a landmark case in state libel law.
The paper and its columnist won praise with their coverage of the political and social upheaval that roiled Boston after the city instituted a mandatory, court-ordered school desegregation plan in the mid 1970s. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (1986), J. Anthony Lukas wrote that Barnicle gave voice to the Boston residents who had been angered by the policy. Lukas singled out Barnicle's column ("Busing Puts Burden on Working Class, Black and White" published in The Boston Globe, October 15, 1974) and interview with Harvard psychiatrist and author Robert Coles as one of the defining moments in the coverage. The paper earned the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Over the next three decades, Barnicle became a prominent voice in New England. His columns mixed pointed criticism of government and bureaucratic failure with personal stories that exemplified people's everyday struggles to make a living and raise a family. Tapping into a rich knowledge of local and national politics, Barnicle had unique takes on the ups and downs of luminaries such as Sen. Ted Kennedy, Sen. John Kerry, and longtime Congressional Speaker of the House Thomas Tip O'Neill as well as Boston mayors Kevin White, Ray Flynn, and Tom Menino. In subsequent years, Barnicle's coverage expanded as he reported from Northern Ireland on the conflict and resolution there to the beaches of Normandy, from where he wrote about the commemorations of World War II veterans.
Barnicle's boast in 1991 that he "knew more about being black in Boston than any black in the city" drew a "Thumbs Down" award from the National Association of Black Journalists,.[2] The same year, Boston Magazine publicly fact-checked several of Barnicle's columns to determine whether they were fiction. In one of these columns, Barnicle wrote about "Fat Jo-Jo Fallego," who drove a delivery truck for Fed-Ex. Despite searching databases and hiring a private detective, the magazine could not find anyone surnamed Fallego anywhere in the United States.[3] In 1992, Barnicle was served a subpoena at his home in Lincoln, Mass. to appear as a witness in a New Hampshire trial, but did not show up, later claiming that his brother, Paul, a Boston detective, had come to the door, not him. The judge found Barnicle in contempt after finding that Barnicle had, in fact, received the subpoena and he was "not above the law."[4]
Barnicle 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.
Boston Globe controversy
In 1998, Barnicle resigned from the Boston Globe amid allegations of fabrication and plagiarism. Barnicle's October 8, 1995, 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. When the Globe could not locate the people who had not been publicly identified, Barnicle insisted nonetheless that the story was true. He said he did not obtain the story from the parents but from a nurse, whom he declined to identify. Mrs. Patricia Shairs later contacted the Globe to indicate that the story Barnicle wrote was about her family, although she said some of the facts were incorrect.
The second column in question contained more than 80 lines of humorous observations dated August 2, 1998, about a third of which plagiarized observations from the 1997 book Brain Droppings by George Carlin.[5] Although Barnicle said he had never read the book, the editor of the Globe issued a temporary suspension. WCVB-TV then aired a video clip of Barnicle recommending the book to viewers for upcoming summer reading, saying it had a "yuk on every page." Globe editor called for his resignation but this was rescinded under fire from readers, advertisers and a group of media personalities. Instead the suspension period doubled.[6]
1998–present
Six years later, the New York Daily News and the Boston Herald recruited Barnicle to write for them.[7] When he was hired by the Herald, the Herald's union protested the decision. "It wasn't long ago that the Herald took an aggressive role in helping expose the numerous transgressions -- among them plagiarism and fabrication -- that led to Mike Barnicle's rightful banishment from the Globe. We cannot remain silent in the face of such a troubling decision."[8] Barnicle told reporters that he had nothing but "fond feelings for 25 years at the Globe."[7] Until recently[when?], Barnicle was on the radio three times a week with Barnicle's View.
Barnicle has since become a staple on MSNBC, including on Morning Joe and Hardball with Chris Matthews as well as on specials on breaking news topics.
Mike Barnicle was interviewed in Ken Burns's film Baseball in the Tenth Inning movie, where he mostly commented on the 2003-2004 Boston Red Sox.
In June 2011, Barnicle was criticized by Steve Kornacki of Salon.com for his tone in a 1991 column about the Boston area mobster Whitey Bulger and for an alleged friendship with Whitey's brother Billy Bulger.[9] Boston journalist Dan Kennedy publicly took Kornacki to task for not recognizing the column's satirical voice. Kornacki responded with a gracious retraction. "Kennedy is right: My portrayal of Barnicle's July 1991 column is inaccurate, and I'm sorry -- and embarrassed -- that I screwed it up," wrote Kornacki on the Salon.com site. But he added: "This doesn’t mean that Barnicle didn't consistently use his voice in the 1990s to paint a very misleading image of Whitey Bulger's world. Kennedy notes that "there is no question that Barnicle was and is close to Bill Bulger…and has been an unconscionable apologist for former FBI agent John Connolly, now serving a prison term for his corrupt dealings with Bulger." He also quotes from a 1998 piece he wrote about Barnicle, in which Kennedy argued that "[W]hen it comes to the other Bulger, Whitey, Barnicle crosses the line from irresponsibility into journalistic corruption."
See also
- Mike Barnicle's official website
- Alan Dershowitz: Controversies: Mike Barnicle
- Kennedy, Dan (August 20, 1998). "Barnicle's Game: Why he should have been fired — and why he wasn't". Boston Phoenix. Retrieved June 6, 2010.
Notes and references
- ^ City of Worcester Birth Record Search. Accessed 21 April 2010.
- ^ [1]. Accessed 25 February 2012.
- ^ Repeat Offender Tom Mashberg, Salon. Accessed 25 February 2012.
- ^ In re Barnicle Subpoena, 800 F. Supp. 1021 (DNH 1992)
- ^ 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 December 18, 2009.
- ^ a b Barnicle signs on as Herald columnist The Boston Globe. Accessed 12 July 2007.
- ^ [>[http://old.dailybabenews.com/article.php?article_id=1670&type=comment/
- ^ http://www.salon.com/news/crime/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/06/23/whitey_bulger_barnicle