The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [140]
The banks and bond counsel, which also could have blown the whistle, played the game, too. They belonged to the same community of interest. More borrowing meant more profits, more legal fees. They had a good thing going. And the city had a good thing—access to its own money printing plant. To question city or state officials was to risk government retaliation or public abuse. For what? Their friend Nelson said it was okay. The city certified that its books were balanced. Why make waves when business was thriving?
Society’s official whistle blowers—the press—did not do their jobs, either. Wall Street Journal editorials were on target but were read by the wrong audience. On fiscal matters, Daily News editorials should have been read but weren’t. The paper that thinks of itself as the city’s conscience—The New York Times—abdicated. Its editorial bleats—claiming that servile acceptance of new business taxes was “a civic responsibility,” warning of the dire consequences of budget cuts—would appear even more ridiculous if it were not not fatuous New York Post editorials. The editorial page editors of both papers, John Oakes of the Times and James Wechsler of the Post, were too close to Lindsay, serving as advisers. They were not only politically but ideologically coopted. They supported the city’s tax and spending policies. Instead of viewing what the city was doing as harshly as they would Defense Department cost overruns, they permitted their liberal ideology to sway their judgment. Or, as Louis Rukeyser, in a devastating critique of past Times and Post editorials in MORE magazine, once wrote, “New York’s editorialists would often have been more astute if they had forgotten about ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative,’ and remembered to check their addition.”
The reporting press, which would have had more effect on the public and its officials than the editorial writers, paid little attention. The Times never assigned an investigative reporter to go through the city’s books (nor have they since). The Herald Tribune, which might have, folded in the mid-sixties, leaving New York with three citywide dailies—there were six in 1847 and eleven in 1952. With little competition, and less interest, a big story was neglected. Yes, the papers dutifully reported statements from the Citizens Budget Commission, an occasional bleep or dissent—usually on page 63 or down deep in paragraph 26. However, the “pattern” of their coverage, as Martin Mayer once scolded the Times in the Columbia Journalism Review, was to report what officials said, not what they did; to cover their ass, not the story. Even as late as the winter of 1975, when Mayor Beame claimed the deficit would be $641 million, the press reported this as a fact, with no qualifiers. Any challenge of the figure was usually reported as “an allegation.”*
Reporters often filtered the story through their own prism. “No matter how critical we were in the Lindsay years and how we appeared to be in an adversary relationship,” says Richard Reeves, former City Hall Bureau Chief of the Times, “we allowed him to focus the direction of our coverage. And the directions he chose were: Washington was short-changing the city; Albany was anticity; and any questioning of Lindsay’s actions was somehow connected to racism.” Covering the city administration from room 9, the City Hall press room, it is difficult not to allow the mayor “to focus the direction of our coverage.” Undermanned, often overworked, a City Hall reporter becomes a fireman—there’s a twoalarm fire in the Municipal Building, with the comptroller charging waste and mismanagement, the mayor