Whole lot of lying going on

A STATE SENATOR and the outgoing Boston police commissioner demonstrated that they are not above lying when it comes to getting what they want.

State Sen. Barbara L’Italien showed what she will do to get some exposure in the crowded Democratic primary race in the Third Congressional District. When Fox News reached out to Ann Kirkpatrick, a Democrat running for Congress in Arizona, the network contacted her press spokesman without realizing that the spokesman had moved on many years ago and now holds the same post with L’Italien. Neither the spokesman nor L’Italien fessed up about the mixup, and L’Italien made it on the Fox and Friends First show to deliver a hard-line, anti-Trump message on immigration.

“Fox News is where you go when you want to talk to Donald Trump and Barbara felt she had an obligation to her constituents to take advantage of that opportunity,” said Joe Katz, L’Italien’s spokesman, explaining why he and his boss engaged in the deception.

Three weeks ago, Boston Police Commissioner Bill Evans strongly denied a WBZ report that he was leaving the commissioner’s post to head campus security at Boston College. “I hate these rumors,” he said then. “They’re not true.”

But there he was on Monday announcing he was stepping down to take the job at BC and being replaced by William Gross, who will become Boston’s first black police commissioner.

Media coverage of the L’Italien incident was thorough and balanced, meaning the deception was explained and explored. L’Italien got the national exposure she was seeking, Fox News was embarrassed, and even Kirkpatrick’s controversial pro-ICE positions were fleshed out a bit. But at least followers of the news gained a sense of what was going on behind the scenes.

Not so with Evans. The Boston Globe, in its story on Evans stepping down and being replaced by Gross, never mentioned the earlier denials, denials that Boston Mayor Marty Walsh went along with. The Boston Herald also forgot about the earlier denials, reporting only that the Evans departure had been rumored for weeks. Making the Globe news reporting omission even more puzzling, an editorial in today’s paper that praises the selection of Gross points out the earlier deception by Evans and Walsh, calling it “regrettable that, in the midst of an ongoing national struggle against a flood of disinformation, officials refused to be honest with the press.”

In the grand scheme of things, neither lie was all that bad. But the lies demean public service and confirm the suspicion that public officials are not afraid to bend the truth if it will benefit them or fit a narrative they are trying to create. As for the media, Boston University journalism professor John Carroll on his blog was critical of the press for not doing its job in reporting the full story of the Evans departure.

“We get it that no one wants to be the skunk at the garden party. But c’mon, guys – isn’t that sort of your job?“ he asked.