Flashback 1998 . The Washington Post reports:
The Boston Globe demanded the resignation of controversial Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle last night after concluding he had stolen someone else's punch lines and misled the paper about it.MSNBC sure knows how to celebrate "white privilege".
The Globe initially suspended Barnicle, 54, yesterday for one month without pay after learning that he had used a series of one-liners in his Sunday column that had been lifted from comedian George Carlin's best-selling 1997 book, "Brain Droppings." But Editor Matthew Storin asked the 25-year veteran to leave the paper after learning that Barnicle, who claimed never to have read Carlin's book, had held it in his hand and recommended it on Boston's WCVB-TV in June.
Barnicle refused to quit, and a Globe spokesman would not say whether he was about to be fired.
"In the past few days and particularly the past few hours, his relationship with his readers and his employers had become untenable," Storin said in a statement last night. In light of the TV clip, "it is clear he misrepresented himself either to his television audience or to his editors. This contradiction is unacceptable."
Earlier yesterday, before the punishment was decided, Barnicle said in an interview that a bartender had given him the jokes and that he did not know they came from the Carlin book. "I did something truly {expletive} stupid and highly embarrassing," he said.
