Theft, Or Cutting Corners?

By Joel Stein

Two signs that MIKE BARNICLE, Boston Globe columnist, has yet to move into the '90s: 1) after getting caught allegedly lifting jokes from George Carlin, he failed to be at all contrite; 2) he lifted jokes from George Carlin. Carlin? What year is this? That's like stealing lyrics from Pete Seeger.

Barnicle, a beloved, tough-guy metro columnist for the past 25 years, was suspended by the paper after a reader noticed that many of the gags in an Aug. 2 column seemed to be thinly disguised versions of material in Carlin's best-selling 1997 book, Brain Droppings. Barnicle claimed he'd never read the book and got the jokes from a bartender friend. "I had a friend familiar with the Internet, and we came up with all kinds of hits for every one of those jokes," Barnicle claims. "They're just out there floating in the air in the public domain." But when Boston's WCVB-TV, where he is a contributor, produced a tape of a June 22 segment in which Barnicle held up the book and said it had "a yuk on every page," the paper asked for his resignation; he refused. At week's end, word was the Globe was about to fire him. Last Friday, Barnicle met with publisher Ben Taylor; it was not a happy session. Afterward, Barnicle said, "walking to my car, I was reduced to tears."

It hasn't been a very good summer for columnists at the Globe. Six weeks ago, the newspaper fired popular columnist Patricia Smith for making up 48 different characters in her columns; now Barnicle, 54, gets caught with 10 stolen jokes for a column of 38 one-liners. It can be argued that Barnicle's crime is of a lesser degree--more an act of slothful corner cutting than corrupt journalism. Should he fall, many believe it will have less to do with the Carlin incident than an arrogance that has long irked colleagues--and the need for the paper to act as tough toward a white man as it did toward Smith, a black woman.

Fans, including sharp-tongued radio deejay Don Imus, rallied around Barnicle. "He's obviously sloppy and lazy. He's admitted that," said Imus. "But you shouldn't be fired for that." Meantime, Channel 5, the station on which Barnicle reviewed the Carlin book, says it will keep him on, as will MSNBC, where he is a frequent commentator.

Barnicle has taken heat before. The late Chicago columnist Mike Royko twice accused him of plagiarism; in another incident the Globe settled for $75,000 after lawyer Alan Dershowitz charged that Barnicle had attributed a phony quote to him. So when Smith was fired, many thought Barnicle should go with her. Last week Dershowitz was feeling vindicated: "It was the most open secret in all of Boston that Barnicle was a fiction writer." Though Barnicle's popularity could get him employed elsewhere, he says he doesn't want to go anywhere else. "If they end up firing me, jeez, I've always wanted to be a policeman. Maybe I'll take the test," he says. "I tell you one thing I won't do. I won't be a joke writer."

--By Joel Stein