| Well, just about everyone in the mainstream media is saying it, so it must be true, right? Deval Patrick is "accusing" Kerry Healey or her campaign of dropping the dime on his brother-in-law.
Problem: it's false.
Let's look closely at Patrick's statement, which we reprinted in full yesterday. Let's focus on those portions of it that could even remotely be interpreted as "accusing" Healey or her campaign of the leak.
By no rules of common decency should their private struggles become a public issue. But this is the politics of Kerry Healey.
Read it again. "This is the politics of Kerry Healey." Deval Patrick has been talking about changing "politics" for well over a year now. And what he's saying here is that this incident is emblematic of the kind of politics he wants to change -- the politics of vicious attack ads, the politics of personal destruction, the politics of Kerry Healey. It's a tough charge, and obviously some will disagree with it. But it is not an accusation that Kerry Healey herself, or her campaign, actually dropped the dime on his brother-in-law.
Here's another passage:
Her record on jobs and the economy, on health care, on higher education, on crime has been one of shortcuts, gimmicks and failure. And so rather than deal with that, she has done everything she can to change the subject.
Well, hard to argue with that. Healey has done everything she can to change the subject. She's running ads about work Patrick did years ago, and about whether a particular convict should be paroled, not about the lame Romney/Healey record, or about her vision for the state. Sounds like changing the subject to me. But again, there's no accusation that Healey or her campaign is responsible for this particular incident of subject-changing.
You can try all you want to change the subject and shift the blame, but we are going to expose for all just how your failed policies and your failed politics are the reason so many people are stuck and struggling and losing hope. The garbage peddlers who shopped this story around town are part of that failed politics, too.
Does he identify the "garbage peddlers"? No -- because he doesn't know who they are. But he states, correctly, that whoever they are, they are part of a "failed politics" that Karl Rove et al. have gotten very, very good at.
That's it, folks -- there's nothing else in the statement that even remotely suggests who might have been responsible for the story.
Now, I don't actually expect the Globe, the Herald, WBUR, and anyone else who's been incorrectly reporting this story to issue a correction. (Interestingly, Jon Keller, despite his peculiar rant about the "faux Deval," correctly avoids saying that Patrick blames Healey directly for the incident, and the Channel 4 TV report ("Battle for Governor features war of words") also finessed that issue. Kudos to them for not mindlessly parroting the rest of the MSM line.) That would be too good. But I do hope that maybe they'll alter the way they report this story, just in this one fairly important respect, from here on out.
UPDATE: The Patriot Ledger also reports this story correctly: "While Patrick stopped short of explicitly blaming Healey for leaking the story, Patrick supporters say the leak fits Healey’s pattern of hammering Patrick over criminal justice matters."
See? It's not that hard. The Globe, Herald, WBUR, and other slackers who are screwing this up need to clean up their act. |
