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Posted November 19, 2001
The Bad-News Machine
By Charles Mahtesian
No American mayor has ever faced a task quite like the one that confronts New York’s mayor-elect, Michael Bloomberg. Astronomic budget deficits await him. The devastated downtown financial district must be rebuilt. Aside from the complexities of governing a city with nearly a quarter of a million full-time public employees, he must also minister to a teeming, spiritually wounded megalopolis.
Bloomberg will receive a brief honeymoon, but it won’t be long before he discovers why there is hardly a mayor in America who doesn’t feel beset by the local press. City Hall is rarely on good terms with the city desk, but in recent years, even those who governed big cities capably through the best of economic times left office angry and embittered at the tenor of news coverage.
In Cleveland earlier this year, Mayor Mike White barred reporters working for the city’s largest daily from the press conference announcing his retirement. Around the same time, Hartford, Connecticut, Mayor Mike Peters leaked his decision not to run for re-election to an alternative newspaper in a bid to pay back his tormentors at the city’s newspaper of record. Former Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell — “America’s Mayor” before Rudy Giuliani’s recent ascendance to that title — also left office on bad terms with the daily broadsheet. In one appearance, he assailed the Philadelphia Inquirer as the “most destructive force in the city.”
Bloomberg, as the billionaire founder of a New York-based financial media empire, is no doubt familiar with the querulous and intemperate nature of this peculiar beast. Curiously, though, he’s managed to do nearly everything possible to provoke its ire. By playing peek-a-boo with reporters over the release of his tax returns — a customary practice for those seeking high office — Bloomberg simply whetted the appetites of enterprising scribes. His carefully scripted and managed campaign press appearances undermined his chances of earning the respect and goodwill of those who will cover his every move for the next four years.
A mayor isn’t required to like the press, but in a city like New York, winning its respect is crucial. Giuliani had chilly relations with the media prior to September 11. But back then, Giuliani had an advantage that Bloomberg is currently in the process of squandering. By tackling the press head on, Giuliani won their grudging admiration as a mayor as big, scary and reckless as the Big Apple itself. Though often pilloried as reformist martinet, no one in the media ever wondered whether Giuliani was tough enough for the job.
Bloomberg’s early missteps in media management, on the other hand, beg that question. As he embarks on what figures to be the single most difficult act of governance in American municipal history, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to take a closer look at the Giuliani model. When it comes for taming the New York City press corps, it’s better to be a martinet than a shrinking violet.
Charles Mahtesian is a former staff writer for Governing.
Recently in View:
Now It’s ‘Our’ Government: why the attacks didn’t — and did — matter (posted November 13, 2001)
Election Reform, Now or Never: will an opportunity be missed? (posted November 7, 2001)
Issues Unchanged: the post-September 11 electoral landscape (posted November 7, 2001)
Where Is City Hall?: a small victory for the terrorists (posted October 31, 2001)
Governing in the Age of Bioterrorism: new challenges (posted October 21, 2001)
Complete index of previous columns
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But of all the staggering challenges assigned to him, the New York City press corps promises to be among the most maddening and unmanageable. So far, Bloomberg has received what amounts to a free pass from the press. Between the World Trade Center attacks, the baseball World Series and the sharp-elbowed Democratic mayoral primary and runoff, he managed to slip into office under the radar. By the time the distracted media realized he might actually be the next mayor, it was too late to devote the kind of investigative attention that makes public life so miserable.