By Kyle Smith
Monday, August 13, 2018
‘This is a president who doesn’t really believe in
democratic norms,” Bill de Blasio said on CNN Sunday, the same day he watched
as two of his bodyguards hustled a credentialed newspaper reporter away from
him for asking a question.
Like President Trump, New York City’s mayor regularly
bashes the media for being insufficiently deferential to him and his
administration. De Blasio is best known for his attacks on the New York Post (for which I worked for
many years) and another Rupert Murdoch–controlled media company, Fox News
Channel, but he has also vilified New York’s other major media outlets, the Daily News and the New York Times. Why are the media being so forgiving to de Blasio’s
tactics toward the media, which include angry tongue-lashings, snubbing
reporters at press briefings, accusing reporting he doesn’t like of being
“fabricated,” and muscling reporters out of his presence? Why are all of these
actions shocking and unconscionable when Trump does them but barely worth
attention when de Blasio follows suit?
“Kevin, you have to leave. You can’t be here,” a
plainclothes cop told the Post’s
Kevin Sheehan Sunday after he asked de Blasio a question about his
administration’s 136 meetings with lobbyists in a recent three-month period.
Two bodyguards pulled Sheehan half a block away from the mayor, where a
public-information officer told the reporter, “Come on, Kevin. No stunts
today.”
The Post —
whose alumni include Maggie Haberman, William Neuman, Jim Rutenberg, and Tim
Arango of the New York Times, John
Cassidy of the New Yorker, Jonathan
Karl and Tara Palmeri of ABC News, Devlin Barrett of the Washington Post, and Annie Karni of Politico — is a legitimate news outlet that does what news outlets
are supposed to do: Question and investigate those in power. De Blasio doesn’t
like how the Post covers his
administration and often says so. The media shouldn’t take the bait and allow
de Blasio to change the subject to the Post’s
or Fox News’s supposed racism, of which, in his interview with CNN’s Brian
Stelter, he supplied no examples that withstand scrutiny.
“We would be a more unified country” without the
Murdoch-controlled properties, de Blasio said, as though it were the media’s
job to sing from the same hymnal and as though this sentiment didn’t contradict
this claim, later in the same interview: “I hope you can hear that I believe in
a free, strong media, diverse views.” Which is it? A range of freely expressed
voices is vital, or “we’ve been changed for the worst” by the existence of the
Murdoch companies, as he also told Stelter?
De Blasio’s contempt for the media goes back years. “The
news media is pitiful and it’s sad for our city and nation,” he wrote in one
email later made public after a Freedom of Information Law request forced its
release. “I have no use for these people,” de Blasio said in a 2015 email about
an unflattering portrait of him in The
Atlantic by Molly Ball, who called him “ungainly” and compared him to the
Muppet Sam the Eagle. De Blasio mused about whether it would be good for his
administration if the Daily News
ceased to print and then said in a radio interview, “I will not shed a tear” if
the Post shut down, inspiring Daily News City Hall bureau chief
Jillian Jorgenson to tweet, “Can you imagine the mayor saying this about any
other company that employs people in his city?” Times investigative reporter Brian Rosenthal called de Blasio’s
remarks “yet another sign of lack of respect that NY has for public access to
govt.” Alex Burns of the Times
tweeted, “If you’re a politician and you think that every single major outlet
covering you is compromised and biased for a different reason . . . maybe ask
yourself what’s the variable and what’s the constant.” De Blasio publicly described the Times as “not my cup of tea.”
In his attack on the Murdoch companies Sunday, de Blasio
cited only their coverage of Trump and two supposed journalistic outrages that
predate the existence of FNC. One is that the Post vigorously opposed the city’s first black mayor, David
Dinkins, who left office 25 years ago and for whom de Blasio worked. Dinkins
was widely seen as an incompetent who was unable to rein in crime in New York
City. The worst, second-worst, third-worst, and fourth-worst years for murder
in New York City are the four years in which Dinkins was mayor. The city’s most
recent lethal multi-day riots took place on Dinkins’s watch in 1991 in Brooklyn
and 1992 in Manhattan. The Post was
hardly the only news outlet to call attention to the chaos in the city, and it
would hardly have gone easier on Dinkins if he were white.
The only other piece of evidence that de Blasio cites is
the Post’s coverage of the 1989
Central Park Five case, nearly 30 years ago. But the Post properly reported what was known at the time, which was that a
young female jogger was horrifically attacked, raped, and nearly murdered in
Central Park by a gang of some 30 youths. It turned out, years later, that five
young men who were convicted in the assault, based on their own statements,
might not have been involved in that well-known attack, although they probably
did participate in a less serious assault on the same person earlier that
evening. (A persistent myth about the case is that the Central Park Five were innocent
of any misconduct. In fact they had physically assaulted others that night in
the same area and richly deserved to go to prison.)
As for the Post’s
four-alarm tone in covering the case, every media outlet emphasizes stories it
thinks illustrate larger issues, but its take was hardly unique or unjustified
given the shocking and depraved nature of the crime, which led to a nationwide
conversation about how badly things were going in New York City. De Blasio
hopes that the dulling of memories and the misunderstanding of the case’s
details will suffice to make people think the Post was responsible for the conviction of five innocent black men.
It’s even more absurd for de Blasio to use an
appearance on CNN, which was happy to turn itself into the club with which
Trump bashed his way through the Republican primaries, to say, “There is no
Donald Trump without News Corp. I firmly believe that.” (De Blasio incorrectly
believes that the Post and FNC are
units of News Corp. FNC is part of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc.)
“Today,” declared de Blasio on CNN, “you have one outlet
and one outlet only that is constantly sowing division.” Reminded of the
existence of the Daily News, which
has been aggressively covering the lead-paint scandal in the de Blasio–run city
housing projects, though, the mayor had this to say: “Sensationalism . . . has
infected the Daily News too much as
well. . . . We want a respectful, high road, intelligent civic discourse. What
I think is happening to the tabloid culture has actually created a lot of
division in my city.”
Oh, so, come to think of it, it’s not just “one outlet
and one outlet only.” It’s that pesky “tabloid culture” that is creating
“division” by not being “respectful” to . . . Bill de Blasio. Got it. For a guy
whose political awakening took place in Nicaragua and Cuba, it must be
frustrating to recall how much more respectful the press was to leaders in
those countries.
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