The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [193]
The press, too, often abandoned its adversary role. The fiscal crisis was not just another story. The life and death of a city—our city—was thought to be at stake. We were now all on the same side. New York against the reactionaries, the bigots, the Huns out there who hated us. The issue almost became one of patriotism. Unite to save New York. If New York was threatened, it followed that businesses here were threatened as well. And the city’s three major newspapers, ninety-five radio stations and thirteen television stations are very much businesses. The publishers of the Times and the News, Punch Sulzberger and Tex James, respectively, had their papers invest $500,000 and $100,000 in MAC securities, served on various Big Apple committees, including one urging the construction of Westway, and encouraged editorials supporting their local gladiators. Why did the Times make the investment? According to their spokesman, Lin Whitehouse, the purchase came “at a time when the city was trying to corral big companies. It was a show of good faith.”
With the exception of the New York Post’s Rupert Murdoch, who doubles as editor-in-chief, the publishers do not control the news that appears in their papers. Reporters often wrote stories that displeased the local team “partners.” Still, the pattern of their coverage was friendly. So friendly that Rohatyn, in a July 12, 1978, Op-Ed page article in the Times, unself-consciously thanked them. Rohatyn claimed the city’s progress was largely “due to the public support we gained as a result of a supportive press.… The press … once it understood what we were trying to do and why, treated us with fairness, supported us and created the climate in which political leaders could do difficult and painful things.” Clearly, a “supportive press” was not infused with the same zeal to puncture untruths or wrongdoing as they were, say, in the case of Vietnam, CIA spying, Watergate or Bert Lance. Implicitly, the press took the city’s side. During Senate Banking Committee hearings on the city’s loan legislation in June 1978, I asked a Post reporter why the critics of the legislation—Senators John Tower, Richard Luger, Jake Garn—were not attending. “It’s just as well the critics are not attending,” he said. “They’d hurt our case.” Former Treasury Secretary William Simon describes being confronted in 1975 by one of New York’s better reporters, WNEW-TV’s Gabe Pressman: “On camera, he lunged at me with the question ‘Do you mean to say you’re going to let millions of innocent people go down the drain?’ ”
The daily press also operated with a handicap not of its own making. Journalists are trained to search out at least two sides of an issue. But what happens when both sides are really one? When Felix agrees with Jack? Or Jack agrees with Walter? Abe with Barry? And because the story is so complex, the numbers so confusing, journalists are compelled to keep going back to the same handful of “experts” for information. Dependency, trust, friendships, develop. Felix Rohatyn and Victor Gotbaum, for instance, are not only very smart men, they are also very charming, open, helpful to reporters. It was not hard for those covering the story to grow too close to the people involved; to assume they were all trying to save New