Valley Advocate Senior Writer Maureen Turner sent me a teasing email last week to ask me if I planned to write a farewell column to Larry McDermott, the longtime editor and, since 1999, publisher of the Springfield Republican.
"Did I dream this," Turner wrote, "or did you once start a column with something like: 'You, Larry McDermott, are a jackass'?"
A horse's ass: that's what I called him. It was the lead sentence in a March 16, 2000 column titled, "You Shameless Shill."
Fact is, while I remembered the barb at the beginning of the column, I couldn't remember exactly when or why I had aimed that particular insult at McDermott. I dug around the archives and found the column. It was a screed against McDermott and his paper for "irresponsible and idiotic coverage of the biggest local political story" of that year: then-Mayor Michael Albano's failed and fraud-ridden effort to build a minor league baseball stadium in the city's North End, displacing existing tax-paying, job-creating businesses in the process.
McDermott and his newspaper supported the dubious project and referred to the opponents as "naysayers" and "opportunistic political zealots" even after the plan was killed by a Superior Court decision that found that Albano had acted in "bad faith," intentionally "misrepresenting material fact" about his proposed financing plan.
"If you hadn't been so eager to slam one past those pain-in-the-ass taxpayers with their niggling questions, you might have used your voice to force a lazy, egotistical mayor to clean up his act. Instead, you shielded Albano from criticism and helped him push a $21 million scheme that was doomed to failure," I wrote. "Your newspaper has now backed two major projects that ultimately were rejected by the public. In both cases—casino gambling and minor league baseball—the economic benefits were questionable at best. …Meanwhile, Springfield has missed the opportunity to invest in many legitimately blighted sections of the city."
The details came back to me—one instance of many in which I leveled harsh criticism at the paper and its top man. In the end, my frustration with McDermott, then and now, has to do mostly with the general failure of Springfield's daily to serve as a watchdog of city government during Albano's tenure from 1996 to 2003. If only to feed the public's interest in so flamboyantly arrogant and shady a character as Albano, McDermott's paper should have focused some critical attention on City Hall. Only after federal prosecutors launched a massive probe of public corruption and organized crime in Springfield and began convicting a number of Albano's aides and allies did the paper even acknowledge that Springfield had a problem.
As McDermott, 61, prepares to hand the reigns off to George Arwady, who has recently served as publisher of the Star-Ledger of Newark (the Star-Ledger and the Republican are both part of the Advance Publications group), he will be feted by many. In the article announcing McDermott's exit published on masslive.com, the Republican's online presence, McDermott, who "received the Yankee Quill Award in 2007, the highest honor afforded a New England journalist," received high praise from Executive Editor Wayne Phaneuf: "During Larry McDermott's tenure we became a better newspaper. We uncovered wrongdoing that led to the biggest corruption probe in Springfield's history. We fought for the rights of our readers. We have made a difference."
The praise is, perhaps, not entirely misplaced. The newspaper, despite its publisher's frequent reluctance to illuminate the halls of power, published solid journalism by many talented reporters during his tenure. And the paper eventually did publish some very fine investigative reporting on the probe in Springfield by reporters such as Jack Flynn and Stephanie Barry. By then, of course, the damage was done; Springfield was broke and broken.
After all the fond farewells have been said, McDermott will be remembered by many of us not as a publisher whose paper made a difference—no doubt, it did make a difference, in big and small ways, in good and bad ways—but as a journalist who missed his opportunity to make a difference when it mattered most. Had McDermott fairly reflected the rising public concern about Albano, his cronies and the staggering debt—more than $50 million—they were saddling the city with, Springfield would be a very different place than it is today.
