Professor vs. tycoon, Part 2
By Brian McGrory – Globe Columnist / February 3, 2010
It’s not easy being Michael Kettenbach these days.
First, his attempts to use his (wife’s) fortune to convert a gorgeous Back Bay condominium building into one of the city’s most glorious single-owner residences have been thwarted by the 82-year-old professor on the fourth floor who has been reluctant to sell the unit where he’s lived for 32 years.
Then a judge came down on Kettenbach like a ton of bricks for leaving the professor, Jerome Wodinsky, and his 67-year-old wife, Bernadette, to negotiate four flights of steep stairs for eight months and counting, while Kettenbach slowly replaces an elevator that he chose to remove. Likewise, the judge didn’t appreciate that Kettenbach unilaterally installed a new heating system for the building, a new electrical system, a new roof, and new skylights, and then told the Wodinskys they owed more than $209,000 for their portion of the work.
And now comes a new setback for Kettenbach and his ham-handed attempts to push the Wodinskys from 303 Commonwealth Ave.: John Walsh.
Journalism should be subsidized by government, professor says
By Susan Zalkind/BU Daily Free Press – February 2, 2010
The government should subsidize the news media in order to ensure journalistic credibility, author and professor Robert McChesney said in a lecture Tuesday at Boston College.
McChesney, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-author of “The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again,” addressed an audience of about 175.
The book, which McChesney co-authored with John Nichols, a blogger and writer for The Nation, offers an unusual thesis for proponents of democracy – that the government should provide subsidies for the media.
McChesney argued that this idea wasn’t as contradictory as some might think.
“When you look at our founders, they did not only condone government subsidies of journalism, they demanded it,” McChesney said.
