The Media Elected Mike Bloomberg by Ignoring Him

"We still have policy statements that we never put out," one of Michael Bloomberg's campaign advisers, Jonathan Capehart, told me the day after New Yorkers elected Bloomberg as their next mayor. Interestingly, Capehart seemed to be suggesting that on many issues voters hadn't a clue as to where Bloomberg stood. "This is a guy with a blank slate," he commented.

The reason the policy statements weren't released, Capehart explained, is because in the truncated election campaign no one (read: the New York press corps) asked for many of the candidate's positions beyond the issue of economic redevelopment. On the issue of gay rights, for example, an issue that in a city like New York is important to hundreds of thousands of people, Capehart says the campaign eventually just put its positions on its website because citizens hungry for information were calling and asking about them?not because journalists were inquiring about them.

Capehart's observations are interesting in light of the New York media's obsession in the aftermath of the election. Even before half of the precincts were reported last Tuesday night, the predictable finger-pointing among the media types began. It's been fast and furious ever since. The mostly Democratic-leaning New York journalists and editorial writers are bewildered (and seemingly more than a little pissed off), trying to figure out how on earth Mark Green lost this race?particularly since many of them had previously stated with certainty that Bloomberg didn't have a chance. How many NY1 roundtables did you see, after all, where cocky pundits repeated the mantra that this is "a 5-to-1 Democratic town" and a Republican just couldn't win again?

In its reporting and in an editorial, the Times threw out the kitchen sink trying to pinpoint just what went wrong: it was the Freddy Ferrer flap; it was Bloomberg's phenomenal spending; it was St. Rudy Giuliani's endorsement; it was Green's "safe and smug" attitude; it was "the terror attack and its aftermath." Michael Kramer at the Daily News noted all the same things and added that, since Sept. 11, "Bloomberg's business experience" put him "in a particularly favorable light." All of that certainly had an influence, as did the fact that, according to Capehart, several of Ferrer's key people were quietly working with Bloomberg in the last week, helping him to secure the Hispanic vote, which became decisive.

But the media elite, not surprisingly, has yet to identify another major culprit: itself. Bloomberg didn't need Sept. 11 to put him in "a favorable light," as Kramer wrote. He'd already been cast in a light devoid of serious critique, which, in politics, is a favorable light.

Way before Sept. 11 the New York media's royalty decided that Bloomberg was a loser from hell, unimportant and not worth spilling too much ink about?except to cruelly jab at him, like the dunce kid in class. Everyone remembers the Maureen Dowd columns in which she'd interviewed Bloomberg and informed us that he'd never seen The Sopranos, Sex and the City or Seinfeld?which he'd called Steinfeld. Yes, we all cackled over our iced cappuccinos that Sunday morning in July.

Bloomberg, we were being told, was a dolt, a dullard, a weirdo locked in a time warp, a billionaire who was just a bit eccentric and who needed a new hobby, so he was running for mayor. Charming (at best), the journalism pack seemed to be saying, but not anyone to spend any quality time and space seriously focusing on. There were too many Democratic candidates to do exposés about, after all, candidates that mattered more because, the press corps believed, one of them was sure to be the next mayor. So, better to zero in on the unsubstantiated bribe charges against a sinking Alan Hevesi (which got big tv play in August) than do some digging on Bloomberg and find out things such as his indifference to a rape charge and several allegations of sexual harassment at his company in the past (none of which got big play in the media until a week before election day).

Then came the attack on the World Trade Center, and we were bombarded with tv replays of the collapsing buildings, with coverage of mostly everything else?including the mayor's race?virtually blacked out. A couple of weeks of this was understandable and necessary. But eight weeks of it?with tv news packages with titles like "We Shall Overcome," playing the same recycled stories over and over again?was just the same old media self-indulgence and ratings-grabbing.

Osama bin Laden became the new Chandra Levy (and has proven to be as difficult to find), his face leading the 6 o'clock news every night and the subject of endless talk shows. White powder soon began arriving in suspicious envelopes at the offices of media organizations themselves, and from then on the pack went into anthrax overdrive. The mayor's race was buried in the newspapers and relegated to the second half of the television news broadcasts, where a few-seconds soundbite was supposed to explain the complicated and contentious issues that punctuated the primary races.

Even that bit of coverage was focused on the Democrats and their internecine battles as we moved into the primary runoff?Bloomberg was often nowhere to be found. Paid television, radio and direct-mail advertising by the campaigns, rather than being a supplement to media coverage, became the main channel that framed the issues for the public. And in that arena Green was no match for Bloomberg's relentless barrage. In other races in which rich men used their own money to carpet-bomb their opponents with negative ads?like Democrat Jon Corzine's winning Senate race in New Jersey last year, or Republican Michael Huffington's losing one in California a few years back?the opposing candidate at least had the ability to use the media to counter the charges. Not so in the new, all-9/11 media moment.

That is not to suggest that the supremely arrogant Green by any means is blameless; by refusing to do more televised debates he in fact cut off the bit more free media space he might have been able to get. But if journalists, pundits and editorial page writers are going to hang everyone who played a part in giving City Hall to Bloomberg, they should be bringing the noose down on themselves as well.