By Brian Carnell

Tuesday, July 11, 2000

David Horowitz is claiming that Jeff Jacoby, the conservative columnist who was basically fired by the Boston Globe the other day, is a victim of a leftist witch hunt. According to Horowitz,

If anyone ever doubted the totalitarian mentality that lurks right below the surface of every "liberal" brain, the outrageous firing ofJeff Jacoby should put those doubts to rest. The excuse given for the firing of Jacoby is laughable. (Of course the Globe lefties didn't have the spine to do even this honestly, covering it up as a "suspension" without pay for four months). The reckless cruelty towards Jacoby, a talented young man who has no blemish on his career is inexcusable. It is self-evident that no one but a conservative would have been treated this way.

A more likely explanation is that the people who run the Boston Globe are spineless morons. Horowitz thinks the reason Jacoby was given for his four month suspension -- that his July 3 column was unoriginal -- is just an excuse. Jacoby wrote a piece on what happened to the heroes of the Revolutionary War after the war was over. A number of other conservatives have written similar pieces, unfortunately also at times incorporating historical errors. So, by his own account, Jacoby collected various accounts he'd read over the years, supplementing them with his own historical research and fact checking, and wrote his own version of "What happened to the Founding Fathers." And for that, his editors suspended him for four months for producing an "unoriginal" column.

Horowitz is correct that this is an insane standard, and even the Globe won't go so far as to claim Jacoby plagiarized (it would certainly be a good thing, in my opinion, of political columnists were required to do more citing of their sources, but they almost never do), because he clearly didn't. But Horowitz is forgetting the Mike Barnicle scandal, which is the real reason Jacoby is being shown the door.

A couple years ago, the Globe fired a black female columnist after she admitted inventing a few quotes for some of her columns. She was out the door as soon as the revelations hit. Fine, they don't pay people to invent quotes. But then it came out that another Globe columnist, Mike Barnicle, had not only invented quotes but pretty much made up entire columns. In one column, for example, Barnacle wrote about a black family and a white family meeting at the hospital where they each had children waiting for organ transplants. They become friends, break down racial barriers, and the white family eventually helps the black family pay for the organ transplant. The only problem -- Barnacle made the whole thing up.

But rather than fire him, the Globe made excuse after excuse for Barnacle. They had been alerted on several occasions that some of his stories didn't check out, but apparently because he was very popular they didn't take any action. Finally, Barnicle got caught plagiarizing -- he copied material from a George Carlin book and put it in his column as if it was his original material. Even then the Globe did not want to fire him, but gave him a brief suspension.

This caused an outrage in Massachusetts, with minority leaders arguing there was one standard for black columnists and another standard for white columnists. Only after evidence started mounting that Barnicle had simply invented many of the things he wrote about was he finally terminated (though he was still making a good living as a radio and television commentator the last time I checked).

This is why the Globe took such drastic action against Jacoby. It is the paper's chance to show the minority community of Massachusetts that it's not afraid to take such action against white writers. Jacoby is paying for Barnicle's sins, not for his right wing views.

Sources:

56 great risk-takers. Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, July 3, 2000.

An Unfree Press: The Jeff Jacoby Affair. David Horowitz, FrontPageMag.Com, July 10, 2000.

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