As far as media-friendly politicians go, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is nowhere near the top of the list. Mr. Bloomberg — a media tycoon is his own right — has been known to bristle at questions he doesn’t like and seems to find the New York media something of an annoyance.
On Thursday, he met with eight award-winning college journalists from around the country at the Hearst Tower in Manhattan to applaud their work and encourage them to keep pursuing their ambitions.
The event, however, was closed to the media.
The students, recipients of the Hearst Journalism Awards, were each permitted to ask the mayor one question. Afterward, they said there were some questions the mayor was happy to answer, and others he didn’t relish.
The general theme of the 45-minute talk was about the city and all it offered, said Nathan Rott, 23, a University of Montana graduate.
“Sort of like with LeBron James, it was a sale pitch,” Mr. Rott said, referring to the city’s video campaign to lure the N.B.A. All-Star to New York. “He was very good about hitting you with a lot of facts, bombarding us with facts and information.”
One student asked the mayor whether he had presidential aspirations. Mr. Bloomberg said he did not, according to Allison Gatlin, 22, who graduated from Arizona State University.
When speaking about the media, Mr. Bloomberg told the students he has no problems with it, but is annoyed when reporters don’t get the facts straight, pass off opinion as news or intrude into his personal life, Ms. Gatlin said.
Asked whether he considered himself a celebrity, Mr. Bloomberg said he left that to entertainers and athletes and wanted to be taken seriously as mayor.
Reading from her notes, Ms. Gatlin quoted the mayor as saying: “My life is fundamentally boring to the press. I live with a woman who is age appropriate. We don’t do drugs, we don’t do flashy stuff. The press fundamentally leaves my private life alone. At one point, one guy wrote a story that said I was gaining weight and so I went on a diet.”
They let the members play the bottom of the seventh (of a seven-inning game) even though technically they couldn’t have tied the game without also invoking the mercy rule they use, which says a team can't score more than five runs in an inning.
Star players on the losing congressional team in the second annual congressional women's softball game were pitcher Kirsten Gillibrand (photo to left), slugger Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Jean Schmidt, and Linda Sanchez. The congressional women are 0-for-2 in two years. Last year, they lost 14-8 to a staffers of the national committees.
The victorious scribes were led by MVP Trisha Turner of Fox and Dana Bash of CNN. Spouse John King was seen on the field in anchorman suit and tie trying to argue with the umpire about the mercy rule.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Yankee fan justice Sonia Sotomayor, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), and other fans were in the stands.
Photo credit: Lez Get Real
Controller William Thompson is down, but he is not out.
He entered the final weekend of his uphill battle against Mayor Bloomberg hustling, looking for encouragement on the fringes of his polls, and plotting out a whistlestop tour of largely minority neighborhoods.
Bloomberg looks instead like a jet coming in for a landing, launching a gorgeous, minute-long TV ad to leave New Yorkers with a warm feeling about him as they get ready to vote.
Behind the scenes, Bloomberg's campaign army has identified 600,000 New Yorkers - by name and address - who they believe are the backbone of their support.
So Thompson has to take heart from pockets of resistance.
He trumpeted segments of two polls last week: an internal poll that showed him closing the gap among hardcore Democrats, African-Americans and Latinos, and a Marist Poll that showed some undecideds breaking his way.
But both of those polls still showed him losing.
Thompson displayed campaign signs last week featuring El Diario's front-page endorsement.
Bloomberg is the one with endorsements from 61 papers - not just the three major dailies, but also dozens of tiny neighborhood weeklies that thrived on Bloomberg advertising dollars.
"A representative of Mayor Bloomberg called me, and he made it very clear to me that I know how it's done. And I had to join the program, and the earlier I endorsed him, the more money I'd get," said Jerry Lippman, publisher of the Manhattan Jewish Sentinel and the Long Island Jewish World.
His papers endorsed Thompson, all 30,000 weekly copies of them.
Bloomberg spokesman Howard Wolfson denied the allegation: "We have advertised in dozens of papers that have not endorsed the mayor. We try not to advertise in publications that don't have significant readership in the five boroughs, like this one."
While Thompson stumps toward Tuesday, others around him are already thinking about the future.
When he campaigned on the streets of the Bronx on Thursday with Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, it wasn't hard to imagine them as a future Democratic dream ticket.
On the stump last week, Thompson was a man talking only about getting into City Hall.
"I want to make it clear that I - Bill Thompson - am not the other choice," he told one rally. "I'm the better choice."
The mayor's supporters snicker. Political consultants prepare Thompson's political obituary. His allies shrug and second-guess.
And yet Thompson himself doesn't seem bothered, for one simple reason:
He has been counted out in this election since the day Bloomberg said he was running again. He has campaigned for a year while short on money and behind in the polls.
With two days before the election, Thompson is exactly where he expected to be. And he's still smiling.
One reason for the remarkably charmed life of Mike Bloomberg's administration as he sails toward re-election has been the waning of the city's news business. This is an odd blessing for a man who made his fortune as a media mogul. But just ask Rudy Giuliani, or David Dinkins, or Ed Koch, and they'll painfully explain. When this city enjoyed four fat daily newspapers, editors clamored for strong, tough copy to fill them. Whenever scandal hit—make that even a mini-scandal—each one scrambled after the story. Local TV news, which gets its morning bearings from the dailies, gleefully joined the hunt as well. This happy combination produced many full-strength media pile-ons and visible shivers in City Hall.
There was a keen reminder of this changed world when a man named Raymond Harding put himself back in the news this month by pleading guilty to fraud at the state's pension fund. Back in 1997, Harding, the boss of something called the Liberal Party, was the city's top lobbyist, his law firm raking in millions from clients seeking favors from Giuliani's City Hall. These were easy for Harding to arrange since he had personally invented Giuliani as a political player.
It took a while for the dailies to catch on to this scheme, but when they did, the effect was viral: They became a four-man tag team, taking turns serving up tales of greed and insider trading. Giuliani was then at the top of his game and delighted in telling off reporters. But he knew disaster when he saw it. Claiming ignorance that his mentor was making a fortune off his administration, he publicly chided his aides and ordered his pal to lay low.
These days, the papers are onion-skin thin, and exposés are catch as catch can. Newsday, which once gave rival editors panic attacks every morning, doesn't even have a city edition anymore. When Dinkins was in office, the Long Island tabloid investigated even the type of fertilizer he used on the Gracie Mansion lawn. Nowadays, to fill their meager space, editors prefer colorful yarns to investigations. Until this month, one newspaper carried an entire column about empty rooms. We have the Web, with all of its many hardworking blogs, but most of these spend their energies keeping political scorecards with all the obsession of fantasy baseball addicts: Who's on first, and what coaches are in the dugout? The business of government and its many failings goes largely unexamined.
Poor Ed Koch: He was trashed as a miserable miser in multiple front-page stories because he had some 2,000 homeless families sleeping in shelters. Mike Bloomberg has five times as many, and no one even knows about it.
It's not that there's no investigative spadework being done. What's missing is critical mass. Last week, the Daily News's Juan González delivered some excellent fodder for a full-scale media assault in City Hall's Blue Room. He reported that the mayor's billion-dollar plan to relocate the city's emergency 911 call system has become a fiasco. Not only has Bloomberg's team blown its budget and deadlines, but it has also ignored the findings of its own consultant, which found the project was mired in mismanagement. Rather than dump its lead contractor, as the consultant recommended, Bloomberg's top aides insisted that the plan go ahead as is—defects be damned.
This type of project is supposed to be smack in the mayor's sweet spot since it involves computers and communications, the business that made him the city's richest man. It should also be one of those instances where he runs rings around old-school politicians because of his keen business acumen. Instead, here he is, tripped up by the same cost overruns and bureaucrats that plague ordinary humans. Another mayor in another time might have suffered many tough questions the day after such information surfaced. Instead, only the News chased its own story.
The same thing happened this summer, when the Voice reported a scandal at the city's NYC-TV operation, where the top executive was fired and his deputy arrested ("Inside the Mayor's Studio: NYC-TV's Secrets of New York," August 4). Unlike the perennially tainted buildings department that has plagued every mayor, the problems at NYC-TV came from Bloomberg's own supporters. He had repeatedly hailed the station as an example of his innovative approach to government. But instead of minding the store, his aides had traipsed around the world, making their own private movie. This tale also failed to trip the press alarm that scrambles the media into action.
The big story late last week was the stunning court ruling on the illegal Stuyvesant Town rent hikes. But you'd never know from the coverage that Bloomberg had praised the original deal cut by landlord Tishman-Speyer (headed by one of his strongest allies). Or that his top aides had scotched a plan to keep Stuy Town affordable. Or that a hefty chunk of the financing for the deal came from Merrill Lynch, the late investment firm that was a top Bloomberg LP client and which the mayor was barred from dealing with under a Conflicts of Interest Board ruling. That story—told here in detail by Wayne Barrett just last month—also died an orphan.
Bloomberg's biggest claim to mayoral fame as he grabs for the third term that he used to insist he would never seek is his success at the business of education. This is a debate worth having. But Bloomberg consistently wins by default because the other side never fully shows up. As the legislature was considering the renewal of Bloomberg's mayoral control law this year, Brooklyn Assemblyman Jim Brennan issued six lengthy reports on the law's impact on the schools. They were detailed and thoughtful critiques on student achievement, school organization, and contracting. Asked recently how much press he received about them, Brennan paused. "I'm not sure there was any," he said.
There have been scattered stories about instances of grade inflation and test-score manipulations (again, with the News in the lead). The startlingly poor results of national student tests this month prompted even the Post, whose news pages have steadily cheered Bloomberg's education policies, to suggest that fraud was afoot somewhere. But the big picture still escapes us, along with whatever role was played by the education bureaucrats at the Tweed Courthouse.
At the mayor's annual Gracie Mansion Christmas party for the press last year, those in attendance report that Bloomberg took the stage to offer his idea of a joke. "I see that my three best friends in the media—Mort, Rupert, and Arthur—aren't here," he quipped. Then he walked out, right past the grunts who cover him all year.
Actually, the joke's on us. Even as newspaper fortunes sank in recent years, Bloomberg diligently courted media barons like Zuckerman, Murdoch, and Sulzberger, who he understood could make his life difficult if they so chose. Minus their support, as Joyce Purnick's new Bloomberg biography proves, he would have never risked his end run around term limits. But he knew he had little to fear. As Purnick's book also tells us, even his weekend disappearing act to go to his mansion in Bermuda has gone unchallenged.
"He does his radio show Friday morning," a former aide told her. "At 11:05, the latest, he's in his car. At 11:30 he is at the airport. His plane is in the air at 11:40, he's in Bermuda at 2:10. He's on the golf course by 2:30. . . . Almost every weekend, spring and fall."
There's a photo op that's been even more closely guarded than military caskets arriving at Dover Air Force Base: Mayor Mike, golf bags over his shoulder, striding across the tarmac toward Air Bloomberg.
Art by Stan Shaw
With two daughters, I'm not buying it either..!
As the sexist tone in the media reaches a fever pitch, the Women's Media Center created this video to illustrate the problem and send a message to the media: Sexism might sell, but we're not buying it!
Sign our petition here:
http://www.womensmediacenter.com/sexism_sells.html
From The Nation:
America's founders understood the First Amendment would be worth little without a postal system that encouraged broad public participation in America's "marketplace of ideas." Thomas Jefferson called for a postal service that allowed ideas to "penetrate the whole mass of the people." Along with James Madison, he paved the way for a system that gave low-cost mailing incentives to small publications.
The postal policies that resulted have helped spur a vibrant political culture in the United States by easing the entry of diverse political viewpoints into a national discourse often dominated by the largest media organizations.
Now, this is all about to change, putting the future of The Nation, along with many other publications, at risk.
Postal regulators have decided to extend special favors to the nation's largest publishers, like Time Warner and Hearst, while unfairly burdening smaller and independent magazines with much higher postal rates--The Nation is being saddled with an unexpected increase of $500,000 in annual postal costs and many smaller publications could be forced to the brink of bankruptcy.
The only way to reverse the decision is if you - and many others - take a minute to sign a letter demanding that the rules are changed. This is not a right/left issue, which is why The Nation and William Buckley's National Review are teaming up in this instance to demand that the Postal Board of Governors reverse its decision.
Please join us in urging postal regulators and Congress to convene public hearings, determine how these rate increases were decided, and reverse the ruling. We only have until April 23--the end of the public comment period--to respond, so please take action today:
Write the Postal Rate Commission and Congress.
Learn more about the issue.
Help promote the campaign.
The Post Office should not use its monopoly power to favor the largest publishers and undermine the ability of smaller publishers to compete. With your help we can reverse this decision and salvage the postal system that has served free speech in America so well for so long.
Thanks for your help.
Best Regards,
Peter Rothberg,
The Nation
Vice President Dick Cheney keeps his distance from the White House Press Corps...
And, lurks behind the Shrub, both actually and metaphorically...
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