A blog post yesterday at Media Matters pretty much sums up what is wrong with the organization.The Boston Globe is about as liberal a newspaper as they come. As we demonstrated during the 2012 Massachusetts Senate campaign, The Globe ran cover for Elizabeth Warren, touting her supposed Native American ancestry but burying the correction when that turned out not to be true, and doing a puff piece trying to resurrect Warren’s flimsy claims of “family lore” when in fact the substance of what the Globe found contradicted Warren.If there is a problem The Boston Globe does not have, it’s too many conservatives on staff or hostility to Elizabeth Warren.Media Matters appears to feel differently, because it found a Boston Globe reporter who apparently was not sufficiently deferential to Warren, and he’s a conservative! It’s not that the writer wrote anything false about Warren, he just didn’t insulate her sufficiently:
The Boston Globe‘s Mattias Gugel covers political issues like Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) reaction to the ongoing government shutdown and the tea party — but he also has a right-wing resume and is a self-described “staunch conservative.”On October 2, Gugel authored an article highlighting which staff members in Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s office were furloughed due to the on-going government shutdown — a shutdown led by conservative Republicans in the House that Warren has argued against. Gugel wrote:
Despite the government shutdown, Bay Staters seeking to contact most members of the Massachusetts delegation in Washington can still reach a staffer by phone, with the exception of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s office .Warren, a Democrat, determined that having staff answer phone calls is not an essential part of her office’s job during a shutdown, leaving constituents to go to voice mail when they call to give their opinion or to seek services or assistance.
Also on October 2, Gugel wrote an article for the Globe centered on congressional tea partiers’ reactions to the shutdown — characterizing them as “combative, defiant, defensive, and resolute.”
But Gugel has previously been vocal about his support for tea party Republicans and once wrote in their defense that, “Bipartisanship ended during the glorious reign of President Barack Obama.”
Gugel also previously worked as an intern for U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and as a staff assistant for State Sen. Joe Leibham (R-WI). He praised a list of “leading conservatives” from Wisconsin that included Republicans Rep. Paul Ryan and Gov. Scott Walker, and hoped that, “someday my name might be added to that list.”
Gugel, who once described himself as “a pretty staunch conservative all around,” believes that Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign slogan “Forward” is a Marxist code-word aimed at “diehard liberals because of these socialist connotations”…
So? Are “staunch conservatives” not allowed at The Boston Globe?
If Media Matters had a gripe about the content of Gugel’s writing, that would be one thing. But to single him out because he is a “self-described ‘staunch conservative'” smacks of a witch hunt.
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