08/19/98

Last week I announced a decision that Mike Barnicle would remain employed by the Globe, but under suspension, as a result of his not meeting professional standards. In answer to questions about why I rescinded an earlier call for his resignation, I said that my research indicated the punishment did not fit the crime.

Yesterday I received a letter from Kenneth Tomlinson, retired editor in chief of the Readers Digest. He told me how Readers Digest fact-checkers had been unable to confirm any part of a story that Barnicle told in an October 8, 1995, column regarding two young patients who became friends at Children's Hospital in the summer of 1994. In the story, one of the patients, son of black parents, dies. The parents of the other child, an affluent Connecticut couple, remember the deceased child with a $10,000 check to the black family.

After the Readers Digest fact checkers could not verify the column, which Mr. Tomlinson had wanted to reprint, he concluded it was "a fabrication." Neither the Globe nor officials at Children's Hospital nor Mike Barnicle have been able to confirm the story's authenticity. Barnicle told his editor, Walter V. Robinson, that he heard the story from a nurse from another hospital. He was unable to name the nurse. He could offer no account of attempting to check out details of the story by calling Children's Hospital or either set of parents. In fact, he said he did not know the parents' names. Yet he quoted the black parents in the story and quoted from the letter the white parents had purportedly sent with the check.

In light of his failure to follow the most basic reporting requirements as well as the duplicitous way in which the story was written, it is clear that Mike Barnicle can no longer write for the Boston Globe. Therefore we have asked for and received his resignation today.

Mike Barnicle is a very talented writer who became an important voice in Boston. He wrote many inspirational and eloquent columns on the fabric of this city. He was also controversial, and his practices were challenged on occasion by outside critics and also by his editors, though, in the latter case, clearly not well enough. I think our action today ends an unfortunate chapter that began in what was probably a less ethical journalistic age. I'm glad we can now move forward with everyone operating from the same ethical page.