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October 21, 2008
Has the Times presented readers with AY information they need to make up their own minds?
Atlantic Yards Report
Norman Oder's blog started out as a white paper examining the partnership between The NY Times and Forest City Ratner and to what extent, if any, it affected the coverage of Atlantic Yards. From time to time, he revisits the topic to see if anything has really changed.
After a few choice quotes from the Times ombudsman and editor that seem to make the case for better coverage of the largest single-source private development project in NYC history, Oder finds:
When developer Forest City Ratner promoted its own "Brooklyn Day" rally, which was, as New York Daily News sports columnist Michael O'Keeffe observed, "a dud," the Daily News headlined its coverage Ratner cooks up rally for Brooklyn project.
The Times ignored it completely.
The Times has similarly ignored the information people "need to make up their own minds." It has never published any rendering of the project's scale in neighborhood context.
And, in coverage of the Atlantic Yards Community Benefits Agreement (CBA), the Times deemed the project a "modern blueprint", without acknowledging definitive testimony by Bettina Damiani of Good Jobs New York, who told City Council in 2005 about "several major differences between CBAs as they have been used in other parts of the country and the series of negotiations that FCRC is calling a CBA."
There's more, but these three examples are striking enough. In fact, "it's Orwellian almost," to reprise a comment by former Forest City Ratner front man Jim Stuckey to the credulous Times.
Posted by lumi at October 21, 2008 6:21 AM