The Class War

Good for the New York Daily News.
They totally nailed the MTA for giving out free EZ Passes to the millionaires who serve (or served) on its board. How pathetically cheap can these individuals, like Peter Kalikow, be for saving a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand dollars a year they can easily afford and passing the expense on to a strapped system in whose interests they agreed to altruistically act?
This is just one of the egregious perks that came to light in just a few days in the tabloid life of New York.
Look through the pages and you’d be remiss in noticing a trend:

Item in Newsday on 5-27: Doctors and other officials at the non-profit North Shore-Long Island Jewish Hospital system get up to a $600 monthly stipend for leasing cars, which allows them the luxury of driving in free Cadillacs and Porsches and, until recently, a Jaguar for one lucky official who paid the balance of his or her lease through payroll deduction. (The hospital dumped that car when Newsday phoned about it.) According to Newsday the cost of these leases are passed on the patient, although sloppy reporting doesn’t detail how.
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Item in the Daily News on 5-25: Disgraced public officials, even those convicted of crimes, will still collect city and/or state pensions when they hit retirement age.

In the 5-27 Daily News, a double header: The free EZ Passes for life scoop, and City Council members, who already make $112,000, racked up $277,000 in perks last fiscal year, such as Metrocards, cleaning services, photographers, travel and tchachkes like crystal apples.

These are legitimate stories, although the one about the hospital fails to disclose the most recent annual budget of the multi-billion dollar institution, so readers may judge for themselves whether the $64 million they raised privately should entitle them to such perks and how likely it is that the relatively small cost is actually passed on to patients (who, in any case, for the most part have their bills paid by insurance or Medicaid.)

Newsday has also led the field in uncovering part-time employees of public school districts, such as retained legal counsel, who manage to wangle staggering pensions for themselves through questionable accounting, now under review by the attorney general.

The zeal with which these papers are carrying out these investigations at a time when Americans are hurting economically suggests that class is beginning to divides us far more as a society than race or politics.
The rising cost of gas and its ripple effects will increasingly fuel (pun intended) more of this kind of coverage as as the empowered upper class in corporate America and in the public sector seem to be increasingly brazen.

Cannibals In The Media

Mayor Mike Bloomberg is upset about the way reporters speak to him, it seems.
He blew up this week at a Newsday scribe who posed a loaded question to him, implying the mayor had been utruthful in the past.
Take heart, your honor. You are not alone. Any celebrity and most politicians can go through their Rodney Dangerfield "no respect" routine with you.
But if you really want some comfort, look at how the media carve up their own for dinner.
The Times devoted four reporters on Tuesday to a story of NBC News4 anchor Sue Simmons' accidental on-air obscenity blooper for Wednesday's paper. This was the second news cycle for what should have been a one-day story: Simmons messed up, she apologized, much embarrassment for her and move on. But the Times had reporters roaming the streets of New York to hear that citizens are "shocked, shocked" to find that famous people sometimes use the f-word.
That's better than the Post. Rupert Murdoch's flagship splashed "Boozy Susie" on its front page wood, and quoted several people, not one of them named, suggesting Sue Simmons drank too much during the break between her two newscasts, strongly implying without ever saying it that she was drunk during the mishap.
The Post and Times and every other paper, including Newsday, also made great hay out of the altercation between Newsday's Michael Frazier and Bloomberg. Frazier prefaced his question by saying the mayor "maintained" that he kept on open dialogue with the family of Sean Bell. Bloomberg blew his stack because the word suggested he has lied. The Times went to the dictionary and showed that the word, in its simplest form, benignly means to assert or claim. But n fairness to the mayor, it does indeed have a negative connotation, as if to say "you persist in saying x, when everyone knows y."
Although he had a point (and probably a prior bone to pick with the reporter) Bloomberg could have been more gracious. He chose the political life, and he knows the adage about when you can't stand the heat.
But at least he can take comfort that there's no double standard among reporters when it comes to watching words.