Romney and the Boston Press

According to Media Bistro, Governor Romney took the opportunity at The American Spectator’s Robert L. Bartley dinner to bash local reporters.

“We have two factions of media in Boston. On the one hand, we have the Hillary-loving, Ted Kennedy apologists. And on the other, we have the liberals.”

There are plenty of real reasons for Romney to be frustrated with daily beat reporters. Remember, I was a press secretary in Boston and, as such, had to contend with an aggressive broadsheet (Exhibit A: Donovan Slack’s latest) and a tabloid fighting for its life. Having dealt with reporters, such as Slack and Andrea Estes and Frank Phillips of The Boston Globe and Dave Wedge and Michele McPhee of The Boston Herald, I can assert that their tough coverage has absolutely nothing in common with the Red State fantasy put forward by Mitt Romney. (Both Estes and Wedge feasted on the anti-Patrick Ben Laguer story for days.) These people live for stories and scoops.

Here’s a guess of what’s really going on. The governor is getting worried that Deval Patrick will soon takeover the keys of the State House and Patrick’s Democratic staffers will have access to all the executive agencies and all their files. This is, in short, a treasure trove for a Democratic opposition research operative. I forsee some of the above mentioned reporters getting those tough, national stories, and Romney is trying to proactively discredit that.

If Romney doesn’t like his relationship with the local press, maybe it has something to do with his propensity to leak big stories to The New York Times — not known as a bastion of Bartleyan Conservatism.