Checking Our Rear View "Mirror"

Introspection, it has been said, is good for the soul. This thought sprang to mind during the January 10 Board of Aldermen meeting and has been playing over and over since then.

Both Jason Marcus and Michael Marchese made statements on Monday evening accusing Mayor Ragucci of planting personally damning statements about them in the local press related to their actions in reviewing a request to purchase new trucks for the City Services Department. Stories on the subject have appeared in the local papers, and we wrote a piece on the subject ourselves, so we will not bother to recap it here.

Alderman Marcus claimed that the Mayor accused him of ducking his responsibility by feigning illness on the night of the vote; Alderman Marchese was a little less direct in his accusation, but his meaning was clear. What caught our attention, however, was when Alderman Marchese mentioned "websites" that were printing critical commentary about the City Council, and he insinuated that the Mayor is responsible for the creation and content of these sites. "We all know where this comes from," claimed Marchese.

This statement got us at the Mirror thinking (since Marchese references websites, we assume he was including us in his condemnation), are we guilty of being overly critical of the City Council or of giving the Administration a free pass in the articles we post? After all, our goal when we started out was to minimize the "spin" we felt to be so prevalent in the local press. The only way we could answer that question was to engage in our own introspective analysis of our postings over the last four months. Here's what we found:

Since our debut in September 2004, we have posted 33 articles. We reviewed these articles and organized them into eight separate categories, which break out as follows:

Cultural/current events -- 9 articles
Local interest -- 5 articles
Political/General -- 1 article
Political/Administration -- 1 article
Political/Board of Aldermen -- 3 articles
Political/Common Council -- 1 article
Political/School Committee -- 8 articles
Public Service -- 5 articles


These numbers indicate that more than half of our articles are non-politically focused. The one political article that we categorized as "administration" was actually critical of the way the Administration had handled a particular piece of business -- in fact, the very piece of business that prompted the comments made by Aldermen Marcus and Marchese ("Under Suspension -- Thoughtful Planning").

The bulk of our politically-based articles focus on the School Committee and the Superintendent, the controversy surrounding MCAS scores, and the budget overages incurred by the School Department.

At this point in our introspective analysis, we found no evidence to support Alderman Marchese's claim that the Mayor controls "The Mirror." In fact, if that contention were true, we would have to advise the Mayor to find some new writers for this blog, because the current staff is falling short of any goal of self-promotion on the Mayor's part.

Be that as it may, we took our analysis a little further by delving into the comments posted by our readers. We reviewed 88 comments posted on eight of our politically focused articles, including those that were less than flattering to certain members of the Board of Aldermen. Here is how things broke down. Please note that the numbers may not equal the 88 comments we reveiwed, as some of the comments contained more than one "opinion" and could be included under several categories:

Pro-Ragucci administration -- 5 comments
Anti-Ragucci administration -- 7 comments
Pro-School Committee/Superintendent -- 3 comments
Anti-School Committee/Superintendent -- 7 comments
Pro-City Council -- 3 comments
Anti-City Council -- 20 comments
Miscellaneous -- 37 comments
Coments removed -- 12 comments

Note: "Miscellaneous" includes comments that could not be clearly categorized, general discussion, or clarifying comments

Note: Comments were removed because of duplication (a comment posted more than once), inappropriate language, or personal attacks on individuals.

The pro-Ragucci, anti-Ragucci and anti-School Committee comments run just about neck and neck. Taking the miscellaneous comments out of the mix, the majority of the comments were focused on the City Council, and the majority of those were specifically negative toward the City Council. These comments did not indicate any comment on the Administration per se -- good or bad -- and referred just to the actions of either the Board of Aldermen or the Common Council.

Our analysis led us to this conclusion -- rather than railing against the Administration or the content of this or our sister blog, everettpolitics.blogspot.com, perhaps Alderman Marchese and his colleagues should engage in a little introspection of their own.