Boston News Today - RIPS AND PIECES: RANDOM NEWS RANTS AND A BRIEF RETURN TO MEDIA FARM FORM

Image by Kent Buckley

Boy oh boy have we sailed off on some tangents recently—old books, that moronic bomber kid who the feds are killing on behalf of Massachusetts. We almost forgot what it’s like to execute a regular column, one of our compendiums of news raves and waves, successes and unconscionable stinkers. Time to climb back on the horse …

BDC KILLS

We are no longer traveling to a certain corner of Connecticut where Boston.com Senior Writer Sara Morrison’s grandparents live. As we learned from her informative and downright gripping longform piece last week, at least eight bodies have been dumped in the woods nearby, and there appears to be a serial killer on the loose (in addition to those two escaped cons from New York who are believed to be anywhere from Mexico to Canada!). As entertainment, Morrison’s personal touch made the story sing; on the service side, like all great works of journalism, the feature also had a larger mission. As she reports:

From Los Angeles to New York, serial killers prey on prostitutes and drug addicts. Their crimes sometimes go unnoticed for years. Victims’ families sometimes say the police didn’t take their disappearances seriously enough … The news media’s tendency to focus hard on victims who are clean-living, well-off, and white is so well-documented it even has a name: Missing White Woman Syndrome. None of the victims who were reported missing fit that description.

Finally, at the risk of dampening our praise we’ll simply add that it would be awesome if BDC honchos allowed their content farmers to overachieve more often, and perhaps even encouraged them to explore stories like this—ideas for which reporters are passionate—rather than embarrassing clickbait that fails to advance any meaningful conversation.

UNDER HONOR

It may may be the most obvious joke since comedians started pointing out that Under Armour is like FUBU for white people: Last week, Under Armour chief executive Kevin Plank, in referring to Deflategate (which we’ve now reluctantly added to our Google Docs dictionary), said New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is “as honest as the day is long.” Brady lends his pretty face to the brand, and the Boston Globe reported that while he “stands to lose $1.9 million in salary from a four-game Deflategate suspension, he doesn’t appear to be in danger of losing any endorsement income from Under Armour.” As for Plank and his exaggerative cliche-mongering; last month, the guy who claims that Brady is as honest as the day is long told Investor’s Business Daily that there aren’t enough hours in that very same day: “I wake up in the morning and I think about one brand,” Plank said. “I don’t have enough time to wake up twice and think about two.” In other words: Brady ain’t so honest after all.

THE HERALD IS TRYING TO KILL YOU

There are several reasons that we rarely dive into the Boston Herald cesspool and slap around their so-called journalists. Mostly it’s because the world already knows that they’re a silly bunch of bigots and faux-populists, and that their editors are hellbent on scaring people to tears. While on their site this week to chuckle over former Boston Mayor Ray Flynn’s hilariously bad #Boston2024 advice column, we glimpsed the smorgasbord of fear the Herald is currently pushing, and thought to share some of the scare in case you didn’t know that everyone from gangsters and escaped cons to the MBTA is trying to murder you …