Michael Barnicle (born 13 October 1943 in Worcester, Massachusetts [1]]) is an American newspaper writer and has been a newspaper columnist for more than 30 years for "The Boston Globe" (1974–1998), the New York Daily News (1999–2005) and the Boston Herald (2004–present). He has also written for Esquire, George, ESPN Magazine, and most recently Newsweek.com and The Huffington Post.
Barnicle also provides commentary on MSNBC, where he has been under contract for the last 10 years, and frequently is seen on NBC's Today Show with news/feature segments. He has been a regular contributor to the country's longest-running, award-winning local television news magazine, "Chronicle" on WCVB-TV. Barnicle has also appeared on PBS's NewsHour, CBS's 60 Minutes, ESPN and HBO sports programming.
He has won local and national awards for both his print and broadcast work over the last three decades, including from the Associated Press, United Press International, National Headliners and duPont-Columbia University. He holds honorary degrees from the University of Massachusetts and Colby College.
Barnicle graduated from Boston University in 1965, and began working for Robert F. Kennedy. He was a speechwriter for John Tunney, Edmund Muskie, and Sargent Shriver. Barnicle appeared in the Robert Redford film, The Candidate.
Barnicle worked for The Boston Globe for 25 years and wrote nearly 4,000 columns as their 'metro" columnist. In 1998 he was forced to resign from the Boston Globe amid questions about two of those columns. The first column, more than 80 lines of humorous observations dated August 2, 1998, contained a handful of observations that resembled jokes in the 1997 book Brain Droppings by George Carlin.[2]
A complete review of all of Barnicle's thousands of Globe columns revealed an alleged fabrication in a column from three years earlier, dated October 8, 1995. The column recounted the story of two sets of parents with cancer-stricken children. When one of the boys, a black child, died, the parents of the other boy, a white child who had begun to recover, sent the dead child's parents a check for $10,000 USD. When the Globe could not locate the people in the story, who had not been publicly identified, Barnicle insisted that the story was true. He said he did not obtain the story from the parents, but from a nurse. Days after Barnicle resigned over the controversy, Patricia Shairs stepped forward to say that the 1995 column was the story of her son and another child at Children's Hospital, but as she had not spoken directly with Barnicle, the column contained some factual errors. [3]
Soon afterward, the New York Daily News and the Boston Herald recruited Barnicle to write for them.[4] Barnicle told reporters that he had nothing but “fond feelings for 25 years at the Globe."[4] Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy served as a regular commentator and guest host on Barnicle’s daily radio program on WTKK.[5]
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