Say what you will about Don Imus. He let loose a string of bigoted comments over his nearly four decades in radio. But, at the very least, he never plagiarized other people’s work or invented stories out of whole cloth. The same cannot be said of the man who almost replaced him.
Up until the last minute, CBS radio executives were planning on hiring Mike Barnicle — MSNBC commentator and Boston-area radio host — as a temporary, and perhaps permanent, replacement for Imus. But Barnicle isno stranger to the racist blather that filled the Imus show.
In 2004, referring to Clinton Defense Secretary Bill Cohen’s African-American wife Janet Langhart, Barnicle said, “Yeah. I know them both. Bill Cohen. Janet Langhart. Kind of like Mandingo.” The Boston chapter of the NAACP complained to CBS, which ultimately scuttled Barnicle as a replacement. But it was not Barnicle’s racist joke that ought to have ruined his chances; it is that he is a plagiarist and a fabulist.
In August of 1998, Barnicle was suspended from The Boston Globe, where he had worked for nearly three decades, for stealing one-liners from comedian George Carlin’s book “Brain Droppings.” Barnicle claimed he had never read the book, but even in the pre-YouTube age, such blatant lying could not fly.
The same day that Barnicle was suspended by the paper for a month without pay, video surfaced of him recommending “Brain Droppings” on a local newsmagazine show a mere two months earlier. In the segment, Barnicle held up a copy of Carlin’s book and said, “A yuk on every page.”
Two weeks later, allegations arose that Barnicle had invented a story for a column written three years earlier. Barnicle had written of a white wealthy family and a poor black one, both with sons dying of cancer. According to Barnicle, when the black child died, the white family sent the black couple a check for $10,000.
Asked to verify the story, Barnicle said he had heard it from a nurse whose name he couldn’t supply. When a Globe editor confronted Barnicle about using a third hand source as the basis for an entire column, Barnicle told him, “That’s the way that I do it.” Finally, Barnicle was forced to resign.
But this wasn’t the first instance of journalistic malfeasance. In 1973, during the height of Boston’s racial troubles, Barnicle quoted a white gas station owner in the black neighborhood of Roxbury calling his African-American neighbors”n—ers.” A judge ruled that Barnicle fabricated the anecdote, and the Globe was forced to pay $40,000.
In 1990, he quoted Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz (an outspoken critic of Barnicle’s longtime friend, former state Senate President Billy Bulger) as saying that he loved Asian women because “they’re so submissive.” Dershowitz threatened to sue and the Globe settled for $75,000.
In 1992, the legendary Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko accused Barnicle of mimicking a column he had written 30 years earlier imagining Joseph and the Virgin Mary as a homeless couple in Chicago, with Barnicle transplanting the couple to Boston. In 1999, then at the New York Daily News and after Royko had died, Barnicle wrote another column reimagining the couple in New York City.
One of Royko’s former editors at the Tribune said that “once again [Barnicle] proves himself to be an unadulterated journalistic thief and a serial plagiarist.”
In 1991 and again in 1998, Boston magazine attempted to track down the many anonymous colorful individuals Barnicle wrote about in his punchy metro columns, going so far as to hire a private investigator. The magazine could not turn up a single one.
It is galling that Barnicle — despite repeatedly breaking the most sacred codes of journalistic ethics — is not only still able to find work as a journalist, but that he has moved up the media ladder, from the Boston Globe to the New York Daily News to MSNBC and Boston’s WTKK FM.
Barnicle’s ability to coast through a series of disgraceful and what ought to have been career-ending episodes (while never losing the support of the old boys’ club that preened before Imus) should reassure the I-Man that he too will recover from his fall from grace.
Examiner columnist James Kirchick is assistant to the editor in chief of The New Republic.
