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November 11, 2009
An academic looks at NYC politics, relies on a New York Times clip file, gets Atlantic Yards mostly wrong
Atlantic Yards Report
Last week’s opportunity to have Bruce Berg, a Fordham University professor of political science, answer questions from readers on the New York Times’s CityRoom blog, sent me to Berg’s January 2008 book New York City Politics: Governing Gotham, a book that treats the West Side Stadium and Atlantic Yards as prominent examples.
In covering AY, he gets part of the story right, notably the bypass of local elected officials, but he gets a lot wrong, proving that a reliance mainly on clips from the New York Times (hardly the "paper of record" when it comes to AY) is simply irresponsible.
The "modern blueprint"
Notably, he relies on an article listed as "Confessore 2005b," which is academic-speak for To Build Arena in Brooklyn, Developer First Builds Bridges, the notorious 10/14/05 Times article that posited that Forest City Ratner had achieved a "modern blueprint" in outreach, a statement that was dubious from the start and more dubious today.
Berg should have done a lot more digging. In fact, his citation of Times articles, unencumbered by his own fact-checking or a willingness to seek out critiques of those articles, suggests that academic research ossified into a book can be far less incisive than continuing coverage via a blog.
And because academics like Berg rely on the Times, it's important for the newspaper to get things right and, when it doesn't, to correct the record. And the Times so often doesn't--still, as shown in its recent assertion that the city agreed to finance Atlantic Yards affordable housing.
Posted by eric at November 11, 2009 10:23 AM