Reporters make mistakes.

I know, I’ve made mine.

But we all don’t get fired over them.

That is why it came as quite a shock when the Boston Globe abruptly threw long-time investigative reporter Andrea Estes under the bus following her disputed MBTA story that had transit executives living far from the workplace.

Estes was unceremoniously fired just days after her April 23 Globe story appeared, and it immediately sent a chilling wave of uncertainty among young and aspiring investigative reporters.

If the paper could treat a reporter of Estes’ stature so badly, what does that mean for novice or much lesser established reporters? And exactly what was her “crime?” The paper did not say.

And the paper acted as though the muddled MBTA story its editors approved to run was the first time the Globe had been forced to retract, revise, bury or “eat” a story, as we used to say in the newspaper business.

The management of the Globe, which demands transparency and accountability in all things, has gone dark over Estes’ firing.

Nancy Barnes, the new blow in Globe editor, who is still learning the difference between the Boston Common and the Public Garden, told the staff she was “working to unravel all of this,” which indicates that she had no hand in the firing.

This shows that the decision to fire Estes could only have come from Linda Pizzuti Henry, the wife of Boston Red Sox and Globe owner John Henry. John Henry bought the paper in 2013 for $70 million and gave it to his wife to run.

And run it she has, turning the once liberal and relatively balanced publication into a left-wing broadsheet that is all woke all the time.

In the meantime, many veteran journalists like Estes, trained in objective and balanced journalism — the “ink-stained wretches” of the past — were forced out, retired or disappeared, taking their memories with them. Estes, for instance, knows more about Boston politicians and journalism than does Pizzuti.

These vanishing reporters knew how to mix it up with politicians and sources to ferret out truth, and not be conned by politicians talking ragtime about equity, transparency and accountability.

They were replaced by young, well-educated, left-leaning, activist and politically correct reporters who cannot write a straight news story without slanting it to the left.

I do not know Estes or ever talked to her, although she worked at the Boston Herald before joining the Globe before Henry bought it. She made her bones as a hard-nosed investigative reporter, the type you seldom find.

She had a solid reputation as a top-notch investigative reporter who was widely read. She was, for instance, the lead investigative reporter on the series that led to the bribery conviction of former House Speaker Sal DiMasi.

Now she is gone. But it is incumbent upon the Globe to reveal why she was fired.

Whatever she did does not compare to my screwup.

In 1983, as the political world anxiously awaited Boston Mayor Kevin White’s decision on running for a fifth term, I broke the story, based on anonymous sources, that he would run. The source was Kevin White who called me up to tell me he was running.

The Herald headline the next morning read “WHITE WILL RUN.”  Only that night on television he said he would not.

It did not matter that White was my protected anonymous source, as he later gleefully revealed. It was my mistake. I had been set up.

It was his way of paying me back for mocking him. I called him Kevin DeLuxe over his tax-funded lavish political lifestyle and labeled him the Mayor of America for his national political pretensions.

Anyway, I wrote a letter of resignation and I handed it to Bob Page, the publisher, the next morning at a big meeting in the Herald City Room. I figured the next headline would be “LUCAS GETS FIRED.”

Page, a classy newspaperman, read the letter, ripped it up, and threw the pieces over his shoulder, saying “It’s good for circulation. Now let’s all get to work.”

If Pizzuti had that kind of newspaper class, she would have Estes back in the newsroom today.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.

HERALD Page 1 from May 26, 1983

HERALD Page 1 May 27, 1983

HERALD Page 2 may 27, 1983

HERALD Page 3 May 27, 1983