Transcript
From Media-mogul Billionaire to Mayor Bloomberg
November 10, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: We seem to be back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. As goes Italy, so goes the Big Apple. New York City elected a media mogul this week to succeed the widely-celebrated "Mayor of the Nation," Rudy Giuliani. The mayor-elect is Michael Bloomberg whose campaign had the citizenry shrugging and the pundits chortling just two short weeks ago.
These are certainly strange times in the City of New York, but it seems especially strange that virtually every political reporter in the city was looking the other way when Bloomberg's ship came in. Having the extraordinary good grace to address this question is Michael Tomasky, political correspondent for New York Magazine. Michael, welcome to the show.
MICHAEL TOMASKY: Thanks Brooke, and thank you for not quoting my-- incorrect prediction back to me [LAUGHS] in your introduction.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] First off, that reference I made to Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's media-mogul-turned-president -- I mean beyond the obvious hea no doubt Bloomberg don't have a lot in common, do they?
MICHAEL TOMASKY: I'm sure Bloomberg would insist they don't. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what sort of challenges or advantages do you think Bloomberg's media empire gives him?
MICHAEL TOMASKY: The first and obvious one is the advantage of the wealth that he spent to finance his campaign! He spent-- we think 50 million dollars. Might have been 60 million dollars. Who knows how much money, and what he managed to do with that money chiefly I think was he managed to create a reality about himself in his television ads that wasn't the reality on the ground in the campaign.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you're saying that the campaign that the journalists reported on isn't the campaign that the public saw?
MICHAEL TOMASKY:That's exactly right. The campaign that the journalists saw was a campaign of a guy who never really got very comfortable on the stump, who as late as 6 days before the election exploded at a Daily News reporter and said some really intemperate things including a very clear implication that somebody who made 125,000 dollars a year was making chump change.
This kind of got buried! The New York newspapers, the Times and the tabloids, were covering obviously the war; they were devoting a lot of pages to the aftermath of the World Trade Center tragedy which is a local story here. They were covering the New York Yankees.
By the time you got to mayoral election coverage if you were a Times reader, it was on page B5. If you were a reader of one of the tabloids it was on page 24.
And so you didn't see this! You didn't know that Mike Bloomberg wasn't a good candidate and was fairly vague about a lot of his prescriptions for some of the city's problems. But you did see his ads. [LAUGHS] You couldn't not see his ads no matter who you were or what you watched on television.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Would you say that the Giuliani ads that were everywhere praising Bloomberg were one of those last minute factors that no one could have predicted?
MICHAEL TOMASKY: Yeah! The Giuliani ads were crucial to Bloomberg's campaign, and again, this is an example of what I was talking about earlier about the divide between what journalists saw and what regular voters saw. Giuliani waited a long time to endorse Michael Bloomberg. When he finally did it, it was on a Saturday evening. He made Bloomberg and his entourage wait for 75 minutes before Giuliani [LAUGHS] showed up-- [LAUGHTER] and then when Giuliani finally showed up he was kind of mumbly and he really wasn't that enthusiastic and he didn't say anything bad about Mark Green which everyone expected that he was going to do. So again, we all had the impression that this Giuliani endorsement was extremely half-hearted and wasn't going to amount to much. In the meantime they went back to City Hall, I think right after that endorsement and Giuliani taped this incredibly effective commercial. Watchers of, of televisions and voters had the impression after they saw this ad 18 hundred times that the two guys were best friends.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So how do you assess the job the New York press corps did in covering this campaign in general? Did it give a complete and balanced view of the candidates?-- on page B5 even in the New York Times or in the back pages of the Daily News or the New York Post?
MICHAEL TOMASKY: In campaigns, reporters and newspapers are somewhat loathe to come forward with a lot of original reporting and original analysis on things that either campaign doesn't start. In other words, campaigns have to drive that coverage. Campaigns have to make a statement and make an assertion about the people on the other side that makes reporters go ask the question. Mark Green didn't do that very well against Mike Bloomberg. I don't think Bloomberg did it that well either. One thing I would fault the New York newspapers for is that the investigative reporting took a vacation.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Completely.
MICHAEL TOMASKY:Yeah. And there was never really any serious work -- this is the first time Bloomberg has been in public life in this way. I mean he's been in gossip pages and profiled in business magazines but being a politician invites a new level of scrutiny. But there was never really any serious investigative work done on how he made his money, how he set up his company, you know, why it wasn't a union shop - you know when it actually invested in South Africa or when it didn't; about the sexual harassment charges that, that were leveled against him. That made the papers but only in a sort of piecemeal fashion. There wasn't much investigative work done in this campaign.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Michael Tomasky, thank you very much!
MICHAEL TOMASKY: Thank you, Brooke!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Michael Tomasky is the political columnist for New York Magazine.