By Bill Forry
Reporter News Editor

The sound-bite from Harvard law professor Wendy Murphy, pretty well sums up the frightening media stampede that followed the three-ring circus Congressman Dan Burton and his merry men brought to town last week.

Murphy, appearing on NECN's NewsNight program last Friday, was responding to a question from host Jim Braude, who wanted to know why Bill Bulger shouldn't at least be allowed to see a copy of his own grand jury testimony before subjecting himself to a televised Congressional grilling.

"Wouldn't it just be fair to let (Bulger) see that?," Braude wanted to know.

"Fairness schmairness," was the learned response from Murphy, whose kindergarten logic went something like this: Why should we care about fairness, when this guy Bulger is obviously guilty: after all, he took the Fifth, right?

Thankfully, defense attorney Albert Johnson and former Bulger nemesis George Bachrach, of all people, were on hand to offer a far more reasoned, opposing view. No lawyer in their right mind would allow a client to walk into a trap like that under any circumstances.

It was a rare moment of balance in a week of news coverage that was way out of whack, even by Boston standards.

Reasonable people can disagree about Bulger's relationship with Whitey, his efficacy as UMass president and even his guilt or innocence. It's pretty clear from these pages where the Reporter is on this one. We have a point of view and it's pretty clearly in Bulger's corner.

The daily papers, quite clearly, are not. The TV news producers aren't either. And that's fine, as long as they don't let their op-ed screeds and anti-Bulger biases bleed into their news pages and segments without balancing things out. With few exceptions- NECN's NewsNight for example- the whole lot of them failed miserably.

For starters, there was a complete lack of scrutiny given to Burton and his Government Reform committee. The dailies couldn't spare an inch to let us know that Burton was the same man condemned by a vote of his colleagues a few years ago for hiding exculpatory evidence that could have cleared Hillary Clinton, whom he was then hunting on the Whitewater matter. The Boston Phoenix's Dan Kennedy properly made note of it in his online journal, but unless you read his column or the Reporter last week, you wouldn't have heard about it at all. Why the lack of interest in what was clearly an important element in this story? Wouldn't you be wary of a committee headed by someone like Burton, whose reputation for witch-hunting and other improprieties is well documented (See Russ Baker's revealing profile in Salon, www.salon.com/news/1998/12/cov_22newsa.html).

Instead, the scribes at the Herald, Globe and elsewhere turned a blind eye to any of Bulger's reasonable fears and objections and concluded that 'Silent Billy' must have something to hide. Why else would he balk at an opportunity to clear his conscience and his name?

Mostly lost in the shuffle of the Bulger news cycle was the Boston Globe's act of first receiving a copy of sealed grand jury testimony- a document refused Bulger by the U.S. Attorney- and then printing excerpts of it in a front page article. The Globe is fully within its rights to do so under protections granted by the First Amendment. They are also allowed to protect the identity of whomever leaked the stolen material to their reporter.

Why, then, is the Globe so surprised that Bill Bulger would dare exercise his protections under the Bill of Rights?

It's a double-standard that Bulger's attorney, Tom Kiley, appropriately exposed last Friday:

"The press zealously asserts its First Amendment rights, in essence saying that it can publish what it wishes, even if that includes publishing materials that by law are supposed to remain private. The press says it has the right to act in its best interest, even if that means being directly proximate to an unlawful act, such as the leaking of grand jury minutes.

"Today, my client, who has broken no laws, has chosen to assert the constitutional rights that apply to us all," said Mr. Kiley.

The irony, of course, is that if Marty Baron, the Globe's editor- or Shelly Murphy, the reporter who received the stolen grand jury transcript- were hauled in front of a Congressional panel to explain themselves, they would invoke their constitutional rights to protect themselves and their sources. They'd do it, because if they didn't, they would be out of the newspaper business real fast.

There were a lot of other injustices done to Bulger over the last week: there was Howie Carr's obligatory torching, so hackneyed it hardly got noticed; Peter Gelzinis' ugly tirade in which he actually called Bill Bulger a 'mutt'; WBZ's newsreader Garry LaPierre, who could hardly contain his glee at the chance to 'get' Billy Bulger; Wayne Woodlief's painful dance in Sunday's Herald, in which he first excoriated Bulger as a 'disgrace' for taking the Fifth before acknowledging he had no other choice given Burton's record; the Phoenix's Dan Kennedy played the same game of twister in his online diary.

Brian McGrory's Dec. 3 column in the Globe was the only attempt at balance- and he should get credit for saying what many thought and were afraid to say.

It took another full week for the Globe's man in Washington, Thomas Oliphant, to say in print what the scribes knew to be true: that Burton's hearing and the companion media coverage was really all about grandstanding- and a total sham.

And he's absolutely right: If Burton, Steve Lynch, Marty Meehan, Bill Delahunt, John Tierney and company really wanted Bulger to testify (again- he gave testimony for more than two hours in front of a grand jury in 2001), why did they, as a committee, refuse to negotiate with Bulger's attorney? They knew the stakes for Bulger. They know that, as Albert Johnson said on NECN, no practicing lawyer in this state would have allowed Bulger to speak under such conditions. They knew it and still they had the gall to act surprised when he did not take Burton's bait.

It was a shameful period for those of us in the media business. And for those we elected to Congress, too. Indeed, some of those Congressmen are not actually members of Burton's sub-committee, but instead chose the klieg light moments to get some face time on TV.

Let's hope that those who are really interested in the truth will step up and give this story what it desperately needs: balance, and just an ounce or two of fair play.