Tag Results for Alex Beam

Our friend and guest panelist Adam Reilly has an intersting series of posts on his Don't Quote Me blog over at the Boston Phoenix about some careless Globe-bashing by the Herald's Howie Carr.

Globe-bashing has always been a key component of Carr's schtick. Repetition and low blows have usually been on the menu when he's taken on the "Boring Broadsheet," but at least you could say he usually got his facts straight.

But yesterday Reilly wrote that he couldn't find any references in the Globe to Scott Brown's supporters being "thugs" and "goons," an accusation Carr made in his Wednesday column. 

Howie weighed in with a response, but Reilly wasn't buying in a follow-up post today.

According to the post, Carr said the term "goons" (his quotation marks) came from an Alex Beam column that mentioned "afternoon sports goons" supporting Brown, but Reilly says that column was clearing talking about sports talk hosts, not the 1.1 million ordinary voters who sent Brown to Washington.

Reilly writes that Carr then made an even more dubious claim that the term "thugs" came from the Globe's message boards. Web comments on newspaper sites are designed to be a wide-open public forum and there's been plenty of invective of both the anti-Brown and anti-Coakley varieties.

Oh, wait, now Carr has weighed in with another response. This could go on all week ...

Here, verbatim, is an AP NewsAlert we received on US Senate primary night:

BOSTON (AP) - Sen. Brown - ex-centerfold and 'Idol' dad - wins GOP primary in race to fill Kennedy's seat.

"Ex-centerfold"? Please. This is the second time in two weeks the AP has focused on an already-overexposed (no pun intended) episode from Brown's long-ago law school days when he posed for a spread in Cosmopolitan Magazine. Put it together with Globe columnist Alex Beam's revolting column about Martha Coakley's "babe factor" and you have a disturbing trend - usually-responsible media outlets casually resorting to the sort of objectification of political figures once reserved for the gossip columns.

Beam's characterization of Coakley as "a knockout" and dissertation thereon speaks for it stomach-turning self. Brown's Cosmo photo is an amusing detail from his past, no doubt, but has already been dwelled on far too much; I bet more voters know about that than know his position on any of the many crucial issues confronting us.

In these cases, as it usually does, objectification equals trivialization. And there's nothing trivial about this election.