Timely Embargo Coverage of MA District Four Race by MA PBS

In July, 2009, the dining room table told three college-aged PBS interviewers that

I’m tired, and I think . . . it’d be nice to have some free time, not have to read a lot of stuff I don’t care about.

One would have thought that the easy solution was for Congressman Frank to simply not pull the nomination papers which would once again place him in a job which simultaneously bores and exhausts him.

More troubling than the unfathomable thinking process of the congressman who facilitated the housing and mortgage collapse, however, is the spectacle of a news outlet whose conduct ranges somewhere between gross negligence and the active shielding of a candidate from his own words.

The Boston Herald reports that PBS aired the WGBH “Roadtrip Nation” episode containing this very frank interview just two days ago.

Two days ago. A year and a half after it took place and, more to the point, very comfortably past the point that this information could have been of use to Mass District Four voters mulling over their options for the House of Representatives. It is difficult not to conclude that the public (what does the first letter in PBS stand for again ...?) has been poorly served by a news outlet which failed to release in a timely fashion a revealing and pertinent insight into a candidate - an incumbent candidate at that - for United States Congress.