Leaders rip Tito’s media coverage
Cite anger over negative news
Leaders in Boston’s black community are slamming recent media coverage of City Councilor Tito Jackson’s campaign to unseat incumbent Mayor Martin J. Walsh as far too dismissive and piling on.
Pastor Bruce Wall of Global Ministries Christian Church in Dorchester, leader of Black Ministers United For Change, said there is particular anger over recent news articles that cast aspersions on Jackson’s past job in pharmaceutical sales, focused on his parking tickets and even pondered if the elections should be held amid long odds.
“It’s more, ‘He has a nerve to go against an incumbent,’ ” Wall said of the coverage’s tone. “I’m hearing a lot of talk at the ground level as to how upset people are regarding the coverage, but no one’s really going on the offensive.”
The venting comes after a rough week for Jackson. A Boston Globe article last week framed Jackson’s past job marketing a painkiller for a pharmaceutical company as contradicting his stance on combating opiate addiction. Darnell Williams of the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts ripped the article for “the gall to call somebody who works for a pharmaceutical company a drug dealer, as opposed to, that was his job.”
Jackson also was forced to apologize to WGBH after the station publicly complained to his campaign over his grabbing a reporter’s arm to move a tape recorder away from his face.
The Herald recently highlighted Jackson’s more than 100 parking tickets he said he ran up doing constituent work — all of which were paid — and property and excise tax late fees.
A Globe column published yesterday said mayoral contests in Boston are “just a waste of time and money” if the incumbent is running for re-election, considering how rare it’s been that one has been unseated.
Jackson said in a statement last night: “I am not interested in reviewing the press. I am running for mayor because it is time somebody cared about what voters care about: rents, schools, and an economy that works for everybody.”
But Williams said he sees imbalance in the way Jackson’s chances have been cast compared to other recent white mayoral challengers such as City Councilor Michael Flaherty, who challenged incumbent Thomas M. Menino eight years ago.
“Nobody said that we have an Irish guy running against an Italian mayor, you had a city councilor at-large running,” Williams said. “It is those kind of disparities that are just glaring,” Williams said.
“It’s called an election, not a coronation, and when a person is constantly being berated in the media about their viability, you’re making that steep terrain even more challenging.”
Some said they see unflattering Jackson coverage as part of an unsettling trend — political figures of color framed as unworthy for misdeeds that could also be pegged on white officials, from Suffolk Register Felix D. Arroyo’s alleged mismanagement of an already beleaguered court system, to gubernatorial candidate Setti Warren’s speeding tickets, to University of Massachusetts Boston Chancellor J. Keith Motley presiding over a large deficit.
“I am disturbed, because the media is portraying men of color in a very negative light as it relates to their candidacies,” Williams said.