Dorchester and Longfellow Street are at the center of Sam Bass Warner’s “Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900.” Some 123 years later, the modern MBTA remains crucial to our community. Furthermore, the trials, tribulations, and failures of the MBTA affect all of us either directly or indirectly in many ways: access to work, street traffic, employees who are neighbors, noise and air pollution.

I recently read a summary of the Iraq War written last week by John Ganz on his Substack platform Unpopular Front and titled “How Start?” In his evaluation of how this war without a purpose came about he mentions the role of the media whose support of the war “was done, not out of fear of the secret police but out of sheer enthusiasm. Many of the nation’s journalists and writers gladly volunteered for that work. They set out to make sure an insane thing became common sense among the elite. In doing all this, they betrayed their role as intellectuals for the cheap rewards of clique, career or conceit.”

A friend, reflecting on this essay, said, “I did not feel relief when reading it.  I felt anger.”

I compare the role of the national media’s failure on that large stage to the failure of the media in Massachusetts to hold former Gov. Charlie Baker accountable for the near collapse of the MBTA, which is unraveling at increasing speed as the slow zones multiply. In 2015, the newly elected governor announced that he expected that the success or failure of his administration would be judged by his success in improving the MBTA.

Rather than documenting the “reforms” of the MBTA by the Baker administration and comparing them to the recommendations of nonpartisan authorities on public transit systems, the local media, by and large, repeatedly crowned Baker as “the most popular governor in the US.” This fawning blindness gave Baker a pass for eight years regarding the continued deterioration of the MBTA.
For its part, the Federal Transportation Administration’s (FTA) gave the Baker administration a failing grade for its oversight of the T after a wide-ranging safety inspection that produced a 90-page report rife with failures of governance:

• An overemphasis on capital projects to the detriment of regular operations and maintenance and without adequate staffing, training or supervision;

• A lack of adequate support of its safety management system;

• A lack of routine, consistent, and meaningful communications on safety issues;

• Inattention to meeting its own safety requirements or adequate ways to ensure them.

• A lack of active engagement by the Department of Public Utilities in oversight of the T’s safety requirements.

As to who appointed the T’s general manager and its board and the DPU’s commissioners from 2015 to 2023? It was the most popular governor in the United States. At the end of his term, Baker stated that the T was not a mess. Who in the local media questioned that assessment? Very few, if any.

We have a new governor now. A woman who won in a landslide victory and is wildly popular across the state, a woman whom I personally endorsed and worked for. She has a mess on her hands that goes back decades, but which was exacerbated by Baker.

To paraphrase my friend’s reaction to Ganz’s piece on Iraq in 2003, I do not feel relief by reciting Baker’s failures toward the MBTA and the commuting public. I feel anger at the majority of the media who stood by in near total silence while the T went up in flames.

He dug a hole so deep that it will take the T many years to climb out of it, even if Healy acts forcefully. My fear is that in the face of her popularity and substantial credentials, the local media will continue their habit of fawning silence if she is slow to bring substantial resources to the T while it continues to collapse.

Our end of the Red Line, Longfellow Street, and Dorchester as a whole are as dependent on the oversight of the media as we are on Maura to act quickly and persistently.