The Globe's State of Affairs: Not Good.

As angry as I've been with the Globe for certain stories, I can't help but think that news like this is contributing - more than anything - to the shaky articles that have been printed as of late. From Massachusetts Liberal:

The Boston Globe is about to undergo another round of buy-outs that will be devastating to what was once a great newspaper -- before The New York Times came to town.Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eileen McNamara is bolting for academia. That moves follows a similar one in the last round from investigative reporter extraordinaire Walter Robinson. Also rumored to be looking to the door are veteran reporters and editors such as Steve Kurkjian, Charles Radin, Bob Turner and Peter Howe.

The NY Times is killing the Boston Globe, that much is for certain. They're turning it into a regional paper at best - and not a very good one at that. Mass Lib is right: these cuts are a self-fulfilling prophecy - by creating these cuts, the paper has a smaller depth in the news it covers, therefore less people will read it, necessitating even more cuts.

I can't remember where I read it - which is truly a shame - but there was an interesting article I read within the past year on a new trend in businesses: leaving publicly traded status to return to private hands. Why? Because when you're a publicly traded company, not only is there a responsibility to bring profits, but rather large ones at that. Newspapers are still profitable across the country, but not to the tune that makes investors happy. A 5-10% profit just isn't going to move the stocks up - and in fact could very well go way, way down. However, a private owner may be more than happy with 5-10% profits, especially when that 5-10% could be millions of dollars. An insulated environment would allow those companies to grow, in both profitability and what they deliver to costumers - and you just can't get that when you're pressured to axe jobs and cut expenses.

It's well past time for the NY Times to sell its subsidiaries - at least the ones that were once great papers, like the Boston Globe. The Times has forced the Globe to cut all of its international bureaus, national desk and much, much more. They've cut great columnists like Thomas Oliphant - and now people like Eileen McNamara. When does it end? When will the Times just sell the company, hopefully to someone from Boston - who cares about Boston having an established, at least national newspaper. The people of Boston - and the investors of NY Times, who clearly aren't getting their money's worth - deserve no less.

More on McNamara

Charley destroys McNamara's arguments over at BMG. McNamara's column had a lot of holes in it, but good 'ol Mr. Blandy made them seem like the Grand Canyon.

Turns out, according the the AP, Deval Patrick was right: DSS really was given last minute notice.

BOSTON (AP) - Federal immigration agents notified state officials months in advance of its plans for a massive illegal immigration raid in New Bedford. But they prohibited them from alerting the Department of Social Services -- the agency charged with caring for the workers' children -- until just days before.

Kurt Schwartz with the state's Executive Office of Public Safety says D-S-S Commissioner Harry Spence wasn't told until four days before the raid.

At that time, Schwartz couldn't tell Spence the exact location, only that it would be in southeast Massachusetts.

And Spence was banned from telling any employees until after the raid began.

Charles lands the obvious critique:

There damn well was a problem. There damn well was a failure to coordinate. They were getting phone calls about it from the Governor and the Congressional delegation. It plainly didn't work the way it was supposed to work. And McNamara blithely takes their word for it?

McNamara would do well to learn not to be so trusting of people who tell you what you want to hear. I wonder if we'll see any mea culpa in the next McNamara column? Otherwise, if she can't admit when she makes mistakes, she's right: it's going to be a long four years.

McNamara's Column on the N. Bedford Raid

McNamara came out with another column today and we have another blame-everything-on-Deval piece. Charley has a post with lots of discussion going on, along with various blogs out there on the mass left. However, I do have one point to make: whether or not Patrick knew about the raid beforehand doesn't matter. In fact, he did know; we knew that since the news broke out - fact that changes nothing.

The relevant question is what was Deval supposed to do? He couldn't stop the feds from raiding New Bedford, he just simply doesn't have that kind of power. Furthermore, it's not like he could have gone on the 11 o'clock news and told everyone the state was going to be raided weeks in advance - if he did, it may have been illegal and probably would have created a kind of mass panic that would have been worse than what actually happened (consider the fact that the raid - while a human rights nightmare - only affected the families of 300, instead of the 10,000s of undocumented Americans living in this state).

McNamara's column suggests that the ICE and DSS were planning this raid for months. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. She says there were conference calls and discussions over those months - but that doesn't really mean it was well planned - by either org. A phone call here and a phone call there doth not equal well planned - and it's pretty hard to know what went on during the planning process. Personally, I don't trust a word either organization says.

However, let's give McNamara the benefit of the doubt. After the failure that occurred in New Bedford, one wonders how that reflects on the Patrick administration? McNamara has an answer in the form of a question.

Patrick did not hesitate to appeal directly to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to allow DSS social workers access to the detainees after the raid. Why, then, did he not call Chertoff before the raid to insist that the necessary precautions to protect children be in place?

Yet, her question fails again. Simply put, even if Patrick knew about what was going on as far in advance as he did, it still wasn't his job to organize this raid. It was the federal government's job, a job they were quite happy to drop onto DSS's hands - it was an unfunded mandate of the worst kind (playing with the lives of children). Furthermore, it wasn't Patrick's job to organize the raid. DSS was the organization that should have been in contact with Chertoff. The media has recently criticized Patrick for micromanaging everything, they're their criticizing him for not micromanaging a federal raid. The media needs to pick one or the other, they can't keep having it both ways.

Even if this state government failed in any capacity, the fault lays with DSS, not the Patrick administration. Deval Patrick has had neither the time nor the resources to fix that organization, but it's becoming quite apparent it should become a new priority for him. The fact that Patrick was able to fully step in and use his role as Governor to fix things after the fact speaks well on his part: even though DSS apparently failed at first, at least someone was at the helm to fix the ship's course afterwards.

Ultimately, McNamara's column ignores a key fact: a raid targeting 300 families is a very tall task for any organization, never mind one as discombobulated and underpowered as DSS. It was the ICE that decided to ship families across the country, within a very short period of time and without due process before being removed from the state. They could have just as easily slapped bracelets on the immigrants, giving them some time to figure out what was going to happen to their children while waiting for due process. Furthermore, it's doubtful that the ICE had names and addresses for every undocumented worker in that factory - DSS isn't the FBI, they don't have the capability to find out that kind of information, especially when there are so many people involved and they're all undocumented Americans. There was no way an organization like DSS could cope with that kind of pressure and deal with it in a way we could all be proud of, even if we had a perfect Department of Social Services. Clearly, DSS is far from perfect - we knew that before this raid. McNamara would do well to continue to criticize it. However, she went too far in blaming that organization - and especially the Patrick administration - for the federal government's mistakes in New Bedford.