Jacoby and Liars, Part II

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, winner of the not-much-coveted Breindel "Wingnut With The Golden Arm" award, wrote the following about Democratic Senator John Kerry last week:

Yet there is no sign that Kerry or his staff ever alerted the Globe when it mistakenly labeled him Irish, sometimes in front-page stories he couldn't possibly have missed.

The meaning of this sentence is clear: The Boston Globe incorrectly stated that Kerry was Irish in multiple "stories" on the front page, as well as in a story or stories that didn't make the front page. It turns out that Jacoby is wrong -- that he's no more accurate when he's reporting the facts than he is when he's passing off junk e-mails as his own work.

A reader of this blog sent me the following e-mail:

I entered "John Kerry" and Irish [in a Lexis-Nexis search of the Globe], receiving 93 results. Most of the articles were from the chattier, snippets portions of the paper. Most of the hits on Irish were descriptions of other politicians. The 92nd article on the list, from 7/10/1989 (Metro Region pg 1, Renee Loth), titled "Delicate Balance of the Ticket a Tricky Matter for Democrats" - is the only one to identify him as Irish and had the following passage:

Since issues have little relevance to the near-vestigial office of lieutenant governor, ethnic, gender and regional loyalties often come into play.

At the Democratic state convention in 1982, for example, delegates pledged to John Kerry, a candidate that year for lieutenant governor, threw their support to Murphy, Lois Pines, Sam Rotondi and Louis Nickinello on second and subsequent ballots in order to ensure there would be two Italians and two women as candidates for lieutenant governor on the ballot in September. Kerry, the lone Irish male, won the primary.

Given the degree to which "raised Irish Catholic" seemed to attach to so many other politicians, I found it very interesting that in the past 14 years Kerry was only identified as Irish once. Of course the whole mess is motivated by a disturbing anti-semitism and personal dislike for Kerry, but it wouldn't have surprised me if people genuinely thought the guy was Irish. The fact that the Globe has not identified Kerry as Irish since 1989 is pretty strong evidence that being Irish is not an element of the guy's public persona.

There you have it. According to Lexis, in the past 13 and a half years, only one Boston Globe article identified Kerry as Irish. It wasn't done on the paper's front page, either once or multiple times, as Jacoby claims.

Jacoby owes not only Kerry but also the editors of his paper an apology. So does Mickey Kaus, friend to plagiarists everywhere, who reprinted Jacoby's drivel as fact (see Feb. 10).

Update (2/17): Over at Eschaton, Boston blogger Jeff T has searched the archives at the Boston Public Library found additional articles in which the Boston Globe identified Kerry as Irish. Searching the Globe's archives online only turned up one of the three new articles, the one from October 1996. There are many reasons the online archive wouldn't be complete, including the fact that articles by free-lancers aren't available because of copyright issues. I don't know if the same is true with Lexis-Nexis.

Jeff T. points out that none of the articles he found were on the front page of the Globe, though Jacoby claimed multiple front page references ("front-page stories") to the Kerry-Irish connection. And the last of the three articles is quoting someone as saying that Kerry is half-Irish, which isn't the same as paper saying it (unless it's a columnist quoting herself, which would count, in my opinion). So Jacoby still has it wrong, although less wrong than before.

Correction and Update (2/18): Please see above.