By Tom Allon
Now that we’ve mostly resolved the city’s vexing stop-and-frisk crime policy, the media has now invented a new frivolous issue to focus on: stop and speed.
While Mayor Bill de Blasio is earnestly tackling frequent snowstorms, a battle over pre-K funding with the state and putting together his team of commissioners and agency leaders, CBS News and the tabloids have been dogging him about his team’s lack of attention to traffic laws.
The news peg for this story, of course, is the mayor’s ambitious Vision Zero campaign, which seeks to reduce traffic fatalities to the ambitious goal of zero in the next decade. That would be a huge accomplishment, and we should applaud de Blasio’s quick action to reduce speed limits and make the city safer for pedestrians.
But veteran CBS News reporter Marcia Kramer did some old-fashioned intrepid reporting and decided to have her news team trail de Blasio’s security cars to see whether the mayor’s drivers are following the same laws the mayor is supposed to uphold.
This is what we used to call “gotcha journalism,” where a reporter tries to catch a public official in a lie or behaving in inappropriate or unethical ways.
Kramer’s entertaining television footage showed that the mayor’s cars not only exceeded the speed limit consistently, but also failed to stop at a few stop signs, a big violation if you’re John Q. Driver.
OK, it was a fun little piece, but this story got way too much momentum as the press hounded the mayor and police commissioner for answers on this and the tabloids had more fun as one got a photo of the mayor jaywalking while speaking on the phone near his Brooklyn home.
Tsk. Tsk.
Let’s get back to reality: The mayor’s drivers have to whisk him around to many different events and meetings each day, and as long as they’re not driving recklessly, we can probably cut them quite a bit of slack if they go slightly above the speed limit.
And haven’t we all jaywalked from time to time when no cars are coming or the light is about to change?
The larger issue here is that de Blasio’s honeymoon with the press was short-lived and now he, like many mayors before him, has to suffer the daily slings and arrows of a large and restless media corps that constantly tries to come up with some original stories.
It is hard for the media to stick to serious stories about policy issues, new appointments and attempts to tackle inequality in our city day in and day out without the occasional zinging of people in power who even slightly misbehave, like the mayor and his drivers have appeared to have done in this case.
When I went to Columbia journalism school in the 1980s, we were taught that the media is supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted.” Although de Blasio may take umbrage at being lumped in with the “comfortable” — aka the 1 percent — he is now in power and a target of the Fourth Estate.
What can we learn from this? If you’re the mayor of New York and you’re going to speed, do it the old-fashioned way: Turn on the siren and hit the accelerator.
Tom Allon, president of City & State NY, was a Republican and Liberal Party-backed mayoral candidate in 2013 before he left to return to the private sector. Reach him at tallon@cityandstateny.com.
