Usually readers call the Ombudsman office to complain about something that has appeared in the paper. But lately it’s what has not appeared that is generating the most ire.
The charge: The Globe has given short shrift to covering antiwar efforts as the country moves toward a dangerous confrontation with Iraq. Some, but not all, of the complaints have come from those helping organize local events.
”I walked with 2,000 people to Faneuil Hall, we were four and five people deep, and we surrounded the marketplace,” said Paul Brailsford, 87, about an Oct. 6 march. ”I would have thought that would have warranted at least an inch of copy in the Globe, but there was not even a line!”
Says reader Thea Paneth, ”The Globe attitude to peace concerns is ”Oh, them again – ho hum – how passe.” Concludes retired teacher and activist Pat McSweeney, ”We expected more from the Globe.” The criticism is focused on the news sections, not the opinion pages.
While there are conflicting views on what happened with coverage of the Oct. 6 event – more on this in a minute – organizers list half a dozen local events over recent months that they say warranted mention in the Globe.
So what deserves coverage?
The paper should apply the same standard to antiwar events as it does to any other: Cover what is news. A thousand or more people marching through the city in protest of a war that feels increasingly imminent deserves mention. A gathering of a couple of hundred for a peace vigil? It’s arguable. A concert or conference? Not unless news is being unveiled.
But the Globe must also acknowledge dissenting voices in venues other than local protests and vigils. After something of a slow start, the Globe has in the past couple of weeks made a more visible effort to include those voices. It has, for example, noted the flood of antiwar phone calls to Congress, the loud protest outside a GOP fund-raiser (although not the march that followed), and presented a Page 1 profile of an Internet organizer of the Oct. 6 rallies.
Perhaps the turning point was Senator Edward Kennedy’s Sept. 27 speech in which he said President George W. Bush had failed to make the case for war. Maybe the dawning reality of war simply fueled the call for alternatives.
Presenting critical views speaks to the public’s considerable ambivalence about going to war. In a New York Times/CBS News poll published Oct. 7, two-thirds of respondents backed the use of US military power to oust Saddam Hussein, but nearly the same margin urged giving the United Nations more time to try to send weapons inspectors into Iraq. The split in Congress further underscores the diversity of views, and the lessons of Vietnam remind us of the importance of the debate.
But back to the local angle: Covering antiwar protest in Boston is the kind of story that can easily fall through the cracks. Day to day, war is the domain of the national and foreign desks, but protest has been largely a local affair, to be covered (or not) by the city desk. Coordinating between three desks is certainly doable – the events of 9/11 proved that – but it requires extra attention.
It was noncoverage of the Oct. 6 event that prompted the most reader complaint. On that day protests were held in more than a dozen US cities. In New York, 15,000 turned out, in LA, more than 3,000. Here in Boston, activists’ own estimates varied between a few hundred to 2,000 or more.
”There was a very successful and colorful march through downtown Boston on Sunday that attracted close to a thousand people, and was witnessed (and often applauded) by many thousands more in the Back Bay, Boston Common, the Faneuil Hall area, and the North End,” e-mailed Paul Lehrman of Medford. ”There were lots of cameras … where was the Globe coverage?”
October 6 was a day of stiff news competition on the walking front; there was the Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge stroll, the Breast Cancer Walk, and the Respect Life Walk.
But the real problem, says Peter Canellos, the Globe’s deputy managing editor/metro, was that his desk did not receive advance notice of the event. ”We were … prepared to cover it, but didn’t get enough information to decide whether it was worthy of our attention or not,” he said. A spokesman for the American Friends Service Committee, which helped organize the event, said that all major media had been notified. Even without notification, some critics say, the Globe should have known big cities around the nation were demonstrating in unison on Oct. 6.
Once the march was underway editors heard about it over the police scanner and sent a reporter, but she arrived too late.
What appeared in the next day’s Globe was a photo of protesters – in Los Angeles. By any measure, it would have been better to have a report from readers’ own back yard.
