Certainly looks like Barnicle and MSNBC have a 10 year contract for his "commentary"….he is on Morning Joe…Typical MSNBC fare….. There is more about this guy below...Wonder if ANYONE at NBC or affiliated EVER checks Bios?
en.wikipedia.org
_______repeat offender
Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle's active imagination finally brings him down.
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BY TOM MASHBERG
salon.com
BOSTON -- After narrowly escaping execution last week, Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle was finally forced to walk the plank today when it was revealed that he had made up yet another column, a 1995 tear-jerker about a black child and a white one who became friends when they were both hospitalized with cancer.
The veteran columnist was a favorite among journalism's old-boy network, as well as a major circulation draw, which is why the Globe continued to cut him slack for so long in the face of mounting evidence that he was a fabulist and plagiarist.
Barnicle's pals in the national media like to paint him as a street scribe who boldly sets foot where J-school nancyboys daren't tread. But the truth is that Barnicle has been making it up and mailing it in from his manse in suburban Lincoln for 15 years. He turned the Globe into clown school by refusing to quit once he was caught lifting jokes from a George Carlin bestseller and then lying about it. While the newspaper's top brass fretted over what to do with their popular bad boy -- finally giving him a slap-on-the-wrist two-month suspension -- Barnicle turned Globe editor Matt Storin into a laughingstock just as the five-year anniversary of New York Times ownership of "the Glob" drew nigh.
But when an ex-Reader's Digest editor came forward this week, informing the Globe that the Digest had decided not to reprint Barnicle's 1995 weeper after they determined it was fabricated, it was finally all over for the columnist.
First, some disclosure: I currently write for the Globe's rival paper, the Boston Herald, and, from 1991 to 1994, I worked as a Globe reporter and had some nasty run-ins with Storin. Far be it from me to stick up for the man, but he was right to try to scrape Barnicle off the Globe's hull after the Carlin fiasco. Storin's mistake was to back down and let Barnicle keep his virtual no-show job once the 54-year-old metro auteur (who reportedly earns $250,000 a year to produce about 130 columns) went national with his refusal to bow out.
For anyone who missed it, here's the slapstick sequence of events. On Aug. 2, Barnicle ran a column of 36 banal bon mots under the headline "I Was Just Thinking ..." (Example: "Someday I'd love to see the Pope appear on his balcony and announce the baseball scores.") On Aug. 5, the Herald pantsed Barnicle by printing a piece showing how he filched 10 of his 36 insipid paragraphs from Carlin's book "Brain Droppings." Much merriment ensued.
Barnicle swore he'd never seen the Carlin book. The Globe, still reeling from the forced resignation two months ago of columnist Patricia Smith after she was caught inventing quotes, characters and stories, suspended Barnicle for one month. Later that day, mortified Globe execs found Barnicle on TV -- in a 6-week-old news clip -- recommending Carlin's book, and they asked him to resign. Barnicle said no.
On Aug. 6, Barnicle again took to the airwaves, telling "Imus," "Today," CNBC, ABC, NPR, et al., that he would not quit because he was being unfairly persecuted for "repeating some jokes." Last week, the Globe's overseers backed down, telling Barnicle he could return after a two-month suspension. End of story, hugs all around.
Until today. "It's obviously a sad day for the Globe in that we have to go through this thing again," a chagrined Globe assistant metro editor Joe Williams, one of several staffers who had called for Barnicle's firing after the Carlin stunt, told the Associated Press. Today's events underlined the fact that "the paper's decision to bring him back was a bad one," added Williams.
That's putting it mildly. Anyone in Beantown with one good eye could have seen that Barnicle was making it up as he went along. Barnicle Mike the Piper, we called him -- that rich feller whose quotes and characters seem a little too good to be true, and who gives the impression he's done his reporting in person when he's in fact done it by phone, if at all. (The term "to pipe" harks to doleful bagpipes you can practically hear in the distance as the fiction-is-better-than-truth tale unfolds, in 750 taut words.)
A little harmless piping has long been evident in big-city reportage. (Think of the "bystander" at a fatal fire or political event who pithily sums up the scene with just the right pinch of everyman poignancy.) But Barnicle was long suspected of piping whole columns and plagiarizing his betters. Here are samples of Barnicle's transgressions over the years, painstakingly re-reported in recent days by Boston Magazine senior editor Sean Flynn, and by the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Herald:
• In 1973, just after he'd begun his thrice-weekly column, Barnicle quoted a Boston gas station owner as making a racial slur at the height of the city's busing crisis. The man sued. In 1982, he was awarded $40,000 after a judge ruled that Barnicle had "interlineated" his notes. In English, that means the judge suspected the racist bits were penciled onto the pad after the fact.
• In 1990, in a column titled "Open Mouth, Get in Paper," Barnicle wrote that lawyer Alan Dershowitz had said to him eight years earlier, "I love Asian women, don't you? They're ... they're so submissive." Dershowitz sued. Barnicle "stood by the quote." Dershowitz settled for $75,000.
• In a third suit, a landlord won an undisclosed settlement from the Globe after Barnicle wrongly described him as "exposing himself" to a tenant.
• In December 1991, Barnicle wrote a latter-day urban parable about Mary, a pregnant woman and her carpenter husband Joey, who purportedly showed up in town looking for a cheap bed and got mugged. Lovely idea. Only Mike Royko had done the "Mary & Joe, Chicago-style" piece every Christmas for 20 years. Royko didn't appreciate the "homage." He was already mad at Barnicle for pilfering a 1987 column idea: Ronald Reagan's "Iran-contra diary." Barnicle, like Royko, had Reagan "sending legs" to Iran.
• In late April 1992, Barnicle wrote a column about how a bunch of drunks were misdialing the number of a cab company at night and calling his house instead. His revenge, he said, was to pretend to be the dispatcher and insult the callers. Turns out, Royko had in fact gone through just such a hassle in the 1980s, leading to many funny columns about his subsequent battle with AT&T. ("A guy who works only three days a week ought to come up with his own ideas," Royko told interviewers.)
• Here, from March 1985, is one of the longest sentences ever run in the Boston Globe: "Correction: Because of reporting errors, it was erroneously stated in a Mike Barnicle column on Feb. 5 that a juvenile charged with robbery and attempted murder in a Dorchester shooting on Jan. 31 had in his possession at the time of his arrest a 'pocketful of .22 caliber bullets,' had a 'good, long' criminal record, was wanted for questioning in connection with two other recent armed robberies, and had been arraigned in Roxbury District Court as well as in Dorchester District Court."
• In 1991, Boston Magazine tried to find five people who formed the basis of two of Barnicle's formulaic hard-luck-love columns. One fellow, "Fat Jo-Jo Fallego," supposedly drove a truck for Fed-Ex. Despite the services of a private eye and vast new electronic databases, Boston Magazine had no luck. In fact, no person surnamed Fallego was found anywhere in the United States.
It went on and on. Long past his third strike, Barnicle played by rules that would deposit run-of-the-mill reporters into Janet Cooke purgatory.
But Barnicle had friends like Don Imus and Tim Russert and Marvin Kalb, and he moved product. When money talks, bullshit apparently doesn't have to walk.
Admit nothing, deny everything, was Barnicle's credo. As George Costanza taught us, "It's not a lie if you believe it." It worked for Barnicle Mike the Piper, just as it worked for President Clinton. Until this week.
SALON | Aug. 20, 1998
Tom Mashberg is a reporter for the Boston Herald.
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<<<<<<<<<<<And then there was these….more pages involved if anyone can stand it..
topics.nytimes.com
Former Boston Globe Columnist Is Returning, but to a Rival
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Mike Barnicle, who resigned as Boston Globe columnist in 1998 after complaints about lapses in journalistic standards in two columns, is hired as columnist at Boston Herald, Globe's main rival
March 9, 2004
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Corrections
Correction of January 23 article about Wayfarer Inn in Bedford, NH, longtime hub for politicians and news people during state primary, which misspelled surname of journalist Mike Barnicle
January 30, 2004
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A Journalist's Mistakes
Thomas F Mulvoy Jr letter hold Bob Herbert's May 19 column unfairly overstates errors that led to columnist Mike Barnicle's resignation from Boston Globe in comparing Barnicle with Jayson Blair
May 29, 2003
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MEDIA; A Forum for Media Feedback and Back Talk
By FELICITY BARRINGER
Jim Romenesko's MediaNews.org is a Web site where journalists can argue, announce their new jobs, toast their friends and denounce their enemies; Eugene Kennedy gets a lot of supportive comment for an article of his on the site that contends that Mike Barnicle, who lost his job as columnist at Boston Globe in 1998, was victim of shifting standards and deeply mixed messages from the Globe's editor, Matthew V Storin; photos
August 7, 2000
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Media Talk; A Magazine Checks Up on Its Investigators
By ALEX KUCZYNSKI
Robert Maas, author of many books on mob-world figures, is angry that George magazine took eight months to print article he co-authored with Mike Barnicle, fearing backlash from scandal involving Barnicle and his former employer, Boston Globe; photo
March 29, 1999
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Corrections
Correction of March 16 article on columnist Mike Barnicle's new job at The Daily News, which misquoted another News columnist
March 20, 1999
MORE ON MIKE BARNICLE AND: NEWSPAPERS, CORRECTION STORIES, DAILY NEWS
Daily News to Feature Ex-Boston Columnist
By FELICITY BARRINGER
Mike Barnicle, columnist who resigned from The Boston Globe last summer amid charges of plagiarism and slipshod reporting, will begin writing column for opinion pages of The Daily News's Sunday paper at end of March
March 16, 1999
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Ex-Boston Columnist to Resume His TV Job
Mike Barnicle, who was forced to resign from The Boston Globe after being accused of fabricating a co\umn, will become commentator and contributor to Chronicle, a program of WCVB-TV, Boston
January 12, 1999
MORE ON MIKE BARNICLE AND: SUSPENSIONS, DISMISSALS AND RESIGNATIONS, APPOINTMENTS AND EXECUTIVE CHANGES, TELEVISION, BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION, BOSTON GLOBE, WCVB-TV
National News Briefs; Boston Globe Fills Vacant Columnist Jobs
Boston Globe fills two metropolitan columnists' jobs left vacant this summer when editors discovered that one columnist, Patricia Smith, had fabricated characters and quotes and that another, Mike Barnicle, had recycled stories he heard from others and publishing them without checking; Globe editor Matthew Storin says that Brian McGrory and Adrian Walker will be new columnists
October 23, 1998
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Media Talk; Globe's Ex-Columnist Defends His Work
By FELICITY BARRINGER
Mike Barnicle, former Boston Globe column, said on Sept 18 he hoped to buy full-page ad in Sept 22 Globe to defend authenticity, if not accuracy, of 1995 column that led to his forced resignation last month; Globe has refused to run Barnicle's defense on its op-ed page
September 21, 1998
MORE ON MIKE BARNICLE AND: SUSPENSIONS, DISMISSALS AND RESIGNATIONS, PLAGIARISM, NEWS AND NEWS MEDIA, BOSTON GLOBE |
