Last week, the New York Times ran a story saying that the New York City Police Department was doing all it could to keep cops from firing back at gunmen who shoot at them.
The paper offered the case of Derek Gallo, a guy from Bensonhurst who went a little berserk recently and sent a barrage of eight bullets into the streets of his neighborhood, as police officers hid behind cars showing valiant restraint.
Gallo was eventually arrested and politely escorted to secure confines.
The episode, said the Times, showcases “the kind of restraint that police officials say is far more the norm” than incidents like the shooting of Sean Bell in 2006 and Amadou Diallo in 1999.
Almost unbelievably, the Times story about Derek Gallo was placed just above an article on Angel Alvarez, who miraculously survived an onslaught of 46 police shells that left 27 holes in his body as police tried to break up a block party in Harlem.
It’s almost embarrassing to have to say something so obvious, but I’ll say it anyway.
City police have historically treated Harlem, Bed-Stuy, the Bronx and Black Queens a little more aggressively than they’ve treated, say, Bensonhurst–and, no, unfortunately, racial profiling has not disappeared with the election of Barack Obama.
If I were to read that New York Times story to Black and Latino males, say, in a city high school, the reaction would range from stifled cursing ( la Cee Lo Green’s “Ain’t That Some Sh__”) to uncontrollable laughter.
It’s entirely possible that the Times really doesn’t care about the reaction of young Blacks and Latinos. After all, those youngsters aren’t part of the paper’s “demographic,” the cohort of readers it aggressively seeks in order to draw advertisers.
But a bevy of adults, including devoted Times readers, might question its credibility on other stories.
Take the piece from Dec. 9, 2010, which said that Mayor Michael Bloomberg had reportedly tried to hire Harlem educator Geoffrey Canada as schools chancellor. This seemed to me like a Bloomberg-planted article, designed to offset the anger and scorn he faced after appointing Cathie Black to the position.
Bloomberg clearly wanted people to believe he had initially approached someone other than Black, who was singularly, almost embarrassingly, unqualified for the job. And so an obvious person to float as his “real choice” was Canada, a star Harlem charter school executive with a master’s degree from Harvard.
But the contention that Bloomberg went to Canada first, and that Canada turned him down, is not credible. Canada is an ally of the mayor and, what’s more, is the beneficiary of hundreds of thousands of dollars that the mayor has contributed to Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone through the Carnegie Corporation of New York. I think that, if the mayor seriously wanted Canada, he could have got him.
In backing up its story, the Times cited sources “with direct knowledge” who refused to give their names, while Canada himself declined to answer with a clear yes or no–a very wise move, especially if the truthful answer was “no,” given the huge amount of money Bloomberg has contributed to Canada.
More recently, the Times has pushed the “I Really Wanted Canada” story again as uncontested truth.
Last month it published an article boldly stating that Bloomberg’s “first choice to lead the city schools turned him down.” There was not even a pretense of giving a source.
I guess the point is that, once an item appears in the New York Times, it becomes truth, converted by baptism in the holiest of inks.
This arrogance is residue from the reign of the late dictatorial editor of the Times, A. M. Rosenthal, whose pretentious tenure led one of my favorite New York officials, the iconoclastic late judge and poet Bruce McMarion Wright, to routinely refer to the paper as “The New York Times That Tries Men’s Souls.”
It its favor, the Times today strives to stay with the times by making use of a public editor, known otherwise as an ombudsman, to respond to malcontents and disbelievers.
Last month I wrote an e-mail to the current public editor, Arthur S. Brisbane, making the complaint I made here about the Canada story, and Brisbane promptly responded.
(Since Brisbane’s role is “public,” I’ll go ahead and quote from his reply to me.)
He wrote:
“I will pass along your concern to the Metro editor. Regarding the previous story on the schools position, I would think that if Geoffrey Canada had not in fact been asked by Bloomberg to serve in the schools post (as the Times reported) he would have complained about the report later.”
But regarding that last point; um, no. Canada would not necessarily have complained. For one thing, officials largely do not want to complain to the Times, unless the coverage is truly damaging to them. What they fear is unspoken pushback from the reporter or editor, perhaps in the form of less coverage in the future.
Secondly, as I said before, if Bloomberg benefits from having people believe he wanted to hire Canada, why should Canada say it’s not true?
All of which is to say thank goodness for the Amsterdam News, thank goodness for City Limits magazine, and thank goodness for the truth-seeking corners of the World Wide Web.
Those places frequently go further than the New York Times in trying to win that elusive thing that is important to me and millions of other New Yorkers: credibility on the street.
Ron Howell is an associate professor of journalism in the English Department of Brooklyn College.
