(A correction has been appended to this story)
Tuesday morning, the Boston Globe and Boston Herald both wrote in-depth stories about Elizabeth Warren’s work for a steel company in Pennsylvania in 1995 that appeared to put her on the opposite side of union workers who feared their pensions were in jeopardy. Both stories were written as if the papers had dug up the 17-year-old case files on their own. But what are the odds of the newspapers doing the same enterprise story on the same day? Could it be they had the same source?
No one is saying one way or another, but it seems likely US Sen. Scott Brown’s campaign came across the case as part of its opposition research and decided to unload a one-two punch on Warren through the newspapers. There’s nothing wrong with that; it happens all the time. But if it happened, it is another indication that the affable Brown has been at least preparing to go negative for some time.
Brown’s strategy may also be tied back to the “People’s Pledge” that he signed with Warren, banning third-party advertising from their campaign. If Brown wants to bloody Warren, he’s going to have to mess up his hair or do it surreptitiously through the press. Which is why the hand-off – with plausible deniability – is important.
The Globe and Herald stories relied on briefs Warren helped write as a paid counsel to LTV Steel, which was suing the Clinton administration. LTV was appealing an order by the Second Circuit Appeals Court to pay health and retirement benefits for its workers as mandated by the Coal Act. Warren, who was paid $10,000, says she was merely sticking up for bankruptcy principles. The stories came on the heels of a weekend of attacks by Brown over Warren’s work for Travelers Insurance in a case involving victims of asbestos exposure. (At the time she filed the brief, Warren was a registered Republican.)
The LTV briefs weren’t easy to find. The Supreme Court denied certiorari in the case – a review of the claim – without issuing an opinion. That means the briefs are not available on the court’s website and anyone who wants them would either have to go to Washington to request hard copies or track them through an online subscription service. Either way, it would take a lot of digging.
What’s unusual about the stories is the lack of reaction from Brown or his campaign spokesman in either one. It’s standard procedure in a campaign when a reporter has a potentially negative story about one candidate to go to the other candidate to get reaction. But the Globe only quoted Brown’s campaign spokesman about a union endorsement independent of the story and neither the Globe nor the Herald had quotes about the LTV case in their stories. The next day, when Brown had an availability to discuss the LTV stories, the Globe again didn’t bother to get his reaction. The two reporters from the Herald’s first day story didn’t even show up at his press availability and the reporter that came didn’t ask any questions, either.
Brown, at the press event, insisted the first he heard about the LTV case was “when I read it in the papers this morning.” His campaign did not return an email or call for further comment. The Herald’s editor-in-chief Joe Sciacca, a longtime political reporter, columnist, and editor, did not respond to a request for comment.
Globe Metro editor Jen Peter, in an email exchange, conceded the union quote didn’t go to the heart of the story and declined to discuss the paper’s sources. “During the course of a campaign, an immense number of tips come across our transom from any number of sources and we rigorously scrub as many as we can with the same question in mind: Does this say something illuminating/important about the candidate we’re covering?” she wrote. “The Globe never reveals its sources or whether it had to rely on sources to obtain a story. And also, when we do obtain stories from sources, we never allow them to dictate what the story will say (sometimes it comes out quite differently than they would like) or to dictate whom we do or do not talk to.”
Boston University professor Tobe Berkovitz, a political and media analyst, says the general public, which rarely questions a story’s genesis, might be better served if they were more curious.
“They need to ask the question I always ask: Who gains?” says Berkovitz. “The public would be better consumers of news, better voters and better citizens if they asked – and saw – how the sausage is made. It’s three basic questions: Who dropped the dime, why did they drop the dime and, most importantly, why did the media bite?”
(Correction: Because of an editing error, the paragraph referring to the Globe and Herald’s attempts to get reaction from Brown was inaccurate in the emailed version of this story. The changes have been added to this version.)