Joe Strupp of Editor & Publisher (7/21/09) is reporting that newspaper union representatives claim a victory of sorts in the Boston Newspaper Guild's refusal to accept a deal that "called for smaller benefit cuts and a furlough, but a higher 8.3 percent salary reduction." The Boston Globe eventually agreed instead to "a 5.94 percent salary cut, a one-week furlough, a pension freeze and healthcare cost increase."

Strupp quotes Guild president Bernie Lunzer saying the result "does demonstrate that there is strength in bargaining," that "people can push back" and they "are correct now to question what management is doing, to pursue more control over their futures":

Boston is among the few guild locals in the past year to reject contracts that called for concessions. In many cases, from the Denver Post to the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, guild members have approved furloughs, pay cuts and various benefit reductions when management asked....

"People will take concessions and take less when they believe it is being done fairly," says Lunzer. "There is not a [guild contract] situation out there that isn't a difficult one."

But Boston was somewhat different in that the guild rejected an initial offer even amid threats of a shutdown and sale of the paper, a sale that appears inevitable. In recent weeks, guild locals at the Times Union in Albany, N.Y., and the Indianapolis Star have also rejected contract proposals. But leaders in both of those units believe new contracts will be approved.

On the subject of negotiations "being done fairly," Lunzer goes into details when describing how the "New York Times Company, which owns the Globe, used the controversial lifetime job guarantees of some 170 guild members as an unfair issue in the recent bargaining." While "the guild agreed to give up that protection in this latest agreement," Lunzer asserts that "the issue was exploited by New York Times management... to cause divisiveness."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: Jonathan Tasini on the Boston Globe/GM (6/12/09).

If you've ever wondered why the New York Times' labor coverage is just so bad, a lot can be learned by looking at the company's treatment of its own workers. Newspaper Guild president Dan Totten has published an open letter (6/3/09) about how the Boston Globe-owning Times has chosen to "behave in a highly challenging situation" and what his union has "learned about New York Times Company management--and its unwillingness to share the pain of overcoming this crisis":

Guild members haven't seen a pay raise in four years. And they are well prepared to take a pay cut to help preserve the Globe and its mission. Management, on the other hand, received healthy bonus payments in February 2009--just weeks before New York threatened to shut down the Globe.

Indeed, while this entire process began with one threat, the Times Company now hopes to finish things with another--the prospect of an immediate 23-percent pay cut.

The company's best offer to Guild members effectively cuts pay 10.3 percent forever. Management, however, will endure a 5 percent pay cut only through December 31. Guild members have been preparing for significant pension and retirement plan cuts, including an end to any 401k match. Unbelievably, the Times Company has actually boosted the matching contribution for management 401k plans by 66 percent.

Totten goes on to say that even "under tremendous financial pressure, there are good examples being set elsewhere," citing Gatehouse Media New England--"which owns 100 community newspapers in Massachusetts"--where "senior managers will shoulder the largest pay cuts (up to 15 percent)" and the Boston Phoenix owners who "also reserved the biggest hits for top management in a recent round of costcutting." Totten notes that "that's one way to cope with such a challenge--sharing the pain and being a true partner with workers. It's just not the Times Company's way."

Pointing to a May 9 Boston Globe editorial saying that Barack "Obama conveyed the right message last week by hosting Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari" to emphasize "the close link between Pakistan and the anti-Taliban struggle in Afghanistan," before admitting that "U.S. military strikes against militants in both countries inevitably provoke anger and indignation among civilians," Palestine Chronicle editor Ramzy Baroud (5/14/09) notes that "this is as much as most U.S. media... are willing to concede as far as U.S. responsibility in lethal wars, civil strife and militancy in both countries is concerned."

Baroud elaborates in ways unheard in corporate media:

The escalation in Pakistan is not entirely surprising, however, as U.S. officials and media pundits have been adamant in advising the new administration that it was not Afghanistan that posed the greater threat to U.S. interests, but Pakistan. It was similar to the attitude of neoconservatives in the Bush administration after its failure in Iraq. It was not Iraq that the U.S. should have attacked, but Iran, they tirelessly parroted, hoping to generate yet another war.

What we are not told, however, is that unremitting U.S. bombings of the utterly poor and neglected northern provinces of Pakistan have garnered untold animosity towards the U.S. and its central government allies. It provoked, in some areas, total chaos and lawlessness, which in turn gave rise to the Pakistani "Taliban."

Closing with distressing estimates of "1 million Pakistanis already on the run in the northern and eastern parts of the country," Baroud tells us how "they are threatened by fighting, hunger and all sorts of predators, including U.S. drones circling overhead"--which U.S. media also are keen to push as the latest bloody solution in the region. See the new FAIR Action Alert: "CBS Pro-Drone Propaganda: 60 Minutes Slights Critics of Controversial Weapons" (5/12/09).

Reporting on how "Jay Severin, the fiery right-wing talkshow host on Boston's WTKK-FM radio station, was suspended yesterday," (5/1/09), the Boston Globe's David Abel lists just a few of the "fiery" jock's "incendiary comments":

In one of his broadcasts this week, Severin said: "So now, in addition to venereal disease and the other leading exports of Mexico--women with mustaches and VD--now we have swine flu."

Later, he described Mexicans as "the world's lowest of primitives."

"When we are the magnet for primitives around the world--and it's not the primitives' fault by the way, I'm not blaming them for being primitives--I'm merely observing they're primitive," he said.

He added that Mexicans are destroying schools and hospitals in the United States. He also criticized their hygiene.

"It's millions of leeches from a primitive country come here to leech off you and, with it, they are ruining the schools, the hospitals, and a lot of life in America," he said.

He added: "We should be, if anything, surprised that Mexico has not visited upon us poxes of more various and serious types already, considering the number of criminaliens already here."

With such a menagerie of hateful statements in just one show, it's perhaps unsurprising that WTKK's spokesperson had trouble picking the one Severin is actually being disciplined for, having "declined to say which of his comments... sparked the suspension." On the other hand, it's not really possible that WTKK has been blind to Severin's true nature this whole time--as Abel tells us:

On a 2004 broadcast, he compared U.S. Muslims to a fifth column, and when a caller suggested that the United States should befriend Muslims, Severin responded: "You think we should befriend them; I think we should kill them."... Severin has also been criticized over the years for falsely saying that he had won a Pulitzer Prize and that he had earned a master's degree from Boston University.

It's worth remembering that in 2005, a year after these genocidal comments, MSNBC gave Severin a job co-hosting a show. Luckily, the show's main host was Tucker Carlson, so few people watched it.

David Swanson has noted (Consortium News, 4/23/09) that, as "much of elite U.S. punditry is backing away from torture," the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby is bucking that trend with an April 22 column in which "he both opposes torture under all circumstances and excuses it given the current circumstances." Jacoby's main justification for U.S. torture tactics are "the successes with which they have been credited"--such as "the foiling of Al-Qaeda's planned 'Second Wave'--a 9/11-like plot to crash a hijacked airliner into a Los Angeles skyscraper." Swanson gives the lie to this zombie resurrected from the graveyard of Bush administration propaganda:

In his 2007 State of the Union address, Bush claimed: "We stopped an Al-Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast."

However, an October 8, 2005, Los Angeles Times story, headlined "Scope of Plots Bush Says Were Foiled Is Questioned," cited "several counter-terrorism officials" as saying that "the plot never progressed past the planning stages.... 'To take that and make it into a disrupted plot is just ludicrous,' said one senior FBI official.... At most it was a plan that was stopped in its initial stages and was not an operational plot that had been disrupted by authorities."

On February 10, 2006, the L.A. Times quoted a "U.S. official familiar with the operational aspects of the war on terrorism," who said that "the Library Tower plot was one of many Al-Qaeda operations that had not gone much past the conceptual stage. … The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying that those familiar with the plot feared political retaliation for providing a different characterization of the plan that that of the president."

Swanson further writes what at this this late date should be common knowledge to all political columnists: "Bush and his supporters have claimed other similar successes that have all turned out to be fictional. Most are more off-base than this one." See FAIR's contemporaneous Media Advisory: "'Terror Plot' Reporting Lacks Skepticism: Networks Treat White House Allegations As Fact" (2/13/06)

Noam Chomsky points out that a Boston Globe analysis (11/9/08) of the Obama victory claims that the president-elect owes nothing to "traditional Democratic constituencies" like labor, women, ethnic minorities and the peace movement, because a "grassroots army of millions"--seemingly unconnected to such constituencies--"propelled" Obama's win.

It's worth noting, however, that this idea of a Democratic Party set free from the voting blocs that support it is a longstanding dream of corporate media and the political establishment--represented in the Globe piece by corporate Democrat Steve McMahon and conservative think-tanker Norman Ornstein. Ornstein, in fact, offers the same argument in the paper that he gave to CNN (11/14/92) during a similar round of "liberal interest group" bashing after Bill Clinton's election in 1992, when Ornstein claimed that Clinton "enters office with the fewest debts owed to interest groups in his own party of any Democratic president in modern times."

But the reality is not exactly as corporate media dream it. The Globe quotes McMahon--who it identifies as a "Democratic strategist," but not as a flak for PhRMA, the prescription drug lobby--as saying that Obama "owes nothing to anyone except the people who elected him." That's not actually how politics works, as any corporate lobbyist knows full well, but it's instructive to look at who the voters were who "propelled" Obama's victory.

Among white voters, according to exit polls, Obama lost by 12 percentage points, but he more than made up this deficit with his margins with African-American (91 points), Latino (36) and Asian (27) and "other" (35) voters. Women gave Obama a decisive 13-point advantage, compared to his narrow 1-point win among men.

Obama won among those making less than $50,000 a year by a 22-point margin; the votes of those who made more than $50,000 were evenly split. Union households went for the Democrat by a 20-point margin, vs. 4 points for non-union households. Seventy-six percent of those who disapprove of the Iraq War supported Obama; 86 percent of Iraq War supporters went for McCain.

Obviously, voters' opinions don't translate directly into politicians' actions; we'd live in a much different world if they did. But voters do matter enough that corporate media routinely try to wish them away.