Turner vs. Henriquez, however, never generated much media. (Neither the Globe nor the Herald endorsed in the race; a Herald columnist wrote about it, but Henriquez didn’t get a single column or article in the Globe.) And in the end, the incumbent won in a blowout: Turner got 82 percent of the vote, Henriquez 18.
Maybe this outcome vindicates the press’s disinterest: if Henriquez was a doomed candidate, there wasn’t much reason to pay attention to him. But Turner’s landslide win could also be seen as an indictment of the press. When the media acknowledge a novice candidate such as Henriquez, they’re telling the public that he or she deserves to be taken seriously; when they don’t, they’re doing the opposite.
Not surprising, Henriquez thinks the media herd gave him short shrift. “The only real way to transcend [the lack of coverage] was to actually spend money to create your own press,” he tells the Phoenix. “I actually created a newspaper for myself this summer — we printed 3000 copies of an eight-page newsletter and went out delivering it door to door. There was a little bit of response to it. Still, it’s not the same as someone picking up a periodical and reading your name in it.
“People say the neighborhood is apathetic about voting,” he adds. “They blame the candidates — they say the candidates didn’t do a good job getting out the vote. But myself and Chuck probably put out over twenty or thirty thousand pieces of campaign literature. At what point are they going to say, ‘The media’s got to generate some help too?’ ”
Brian McGrory, the Globe’s metro editor, allows that the paper erred in not covering Henriquez’s race — but he vigorously defends the paper’s broader coverage. He notes that the Globe ran a story on July 2 suggesting that Felix Arroyo — Boston’s first Latino city councilor, who lost his seat on November 6 — was in trouble. And he insists that the candidates got precisely as much ink as they deserved.
“What you saw this year isn’t really Boston politics,” argues McGrory. “We had an incredibly lackluster campaign, with a field of candidates who weren’t campaigning all that hard. This cannot be in any way confused with what would happen in a mayoral election in which we had two candidates offering sharply divergent views on how to run the city.
“The council hasn’t exactly distinguished itself with accomplishments over the last 16 years or so, since [Menino] has been in office,” he continues. “If the council proved to be a major policymaking body — if they had incredible enthusiasm for the campaign — we would have covered that very enthusiastically.”
McGrory’s points are worth pondering. Granted, the Boston City Council’s powers are limited, but that’s no excuse for its long-standing reluctance to exercise its oversight powers and challenge the mayor. (The fact that most of the councilors dream of being mayor and are afraid of pissing off Menino isn’t an excuse, either — just an explanation.) And compared with 2005, when there were four credible at-large challengers — including Sam Yoon, who became Boston’s first elected Asian-American politician, and Patricia White, daughter of legendary former mayor Kevin White — instead of just one, this year was a bit of a snoozer.
