Though certainly not the first media baron to seek or win public office in this country (the tradition goes back at least as far as Poor Richard’s Almanac editor and publisher Benjamin Franklin), Michael Bloomberg (R) is the first to be mayor of New York. Over the last six years, the man who built an unlikely media empire has, as mayor, become the most visible citizen of the media capital of the world. The mogul has become the story, the man who started news divisions in every medium now the daily bait for the press corps himself.

Bloomberg understands the media, he understands its duties and needs, said New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, introducing him to the Newspaper Association of America.

“In many ways,” Sulzberger said, “the mayor is one of us.”

 

Indeed, when Bloomberg takes to the podium on the other side of the stage, he custom tailors a favorite from his current stock of speech lines for his special relationship with the crowd.

The page one story to bring back to their hometowns, he said, is that life expectancy is now higher in New York than the rest of the country. 

“The question is what explains this remarkable success,” he said. “Obviously, a great mayor. In case you forgot to put that in paragraph one and the headline, I wanted to help you a little bit.”

Jokes aside, Bloomberg’s time in office has been marked by, among other things, an ongoing attempt to determine exactly which stories about his administration are covered. This is, of course, nothing remarkable for a politician—every political reporter has been bullied at least once by an official or aide—but Bloomberg’s take is that his time at the helm of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg News gave him a deeper understanding of what the media is meant to do, said his former communications director, Bill Cunningham.

He summarized the mayor’s thinking as “I’m reporting to the people through you. Here’s the topic we’re talking about today.”

According to Cunningham, Bloomberg believes reporters have an obligation to their bosses and consumers to report whatever it is that he puts forward as the news of the day.

He also puts a major premium on his own time, setting aside predetermined amounts for press interaction, and around City Hall likes to keep them in the Blue Room, the traditional press pen. Reporters who do not know this quickly learn it: those who try the time-honored tradition of ambushing politicians on the steps of City Hall or on the way out of an event looking for comment get nothing. He keeps his lips firmly closed before and after his prepared statements and the time he has determined he will set aside from questions. Reporters who try to get him to do otherwise are lucky to get eye contact. If he says anything, it is only to point out his press secretary, trailing close behind.

He does not do many one-on-one interviews. When he does, he keeps them mainly off-the-record. Those looking to get him to sound off on any hot button issue of the day, whether Anna Nicole Smith or Don Imus or anything else, face an even tougher task. Unlike Ed Koch, who drove his press secretaries mad by stomping on his own headlines with pontifications on nearly any topic posed to him, Bloomberg refuses to engage topics which he feels are beyond the purview of city agencies. Or, at least, not much.

“It’s not important to him to play that game,” Cunningham said.

Those who do seem to quickly lose his respect, as he rarely takes pains to hide.

“In Mike’s mind, the press corps knows how long a press event lasts, they know there’s one general press event a day where they can ask a question,” Cunningham said. “So if you waste it on the latest celebrity in the news, Mike would wonder what your priorities are.”

He is a long way from Koch, who held so many press conferences—almost all of them followed by secondary availabilities at the nearby radiator—that his press secretaries recall several reporters begging that there be fewer. He is a long way as well from Rudolph Giuliani, who alternated between intense sparring with reporters and constant access, to the point of calling in traffic reports to local radio stations when they held up his motorcade.

Those were the days of the “ubiquitous message, the ubiquitous mayor,” recalled Cristyne Nicholas, Giuliani’s press secretary for his 1993 campaign who went on to spend nearly six years running the administration’s press office.

“If there ever was a message that he needed to get out, all we needed was to walk down the hall, and it was instant press conference,” she said.

But Bloomberg is also a long way from Mayor Abraham Beame, who usually had one interview with reporters each year, and is often remembered as a man who deliberately hid from the press, leaving them to deal with his press secretary instead.

For Bloomberg, “there’s a respectful distance between the mayor and the media,” Nicholas said. “You’ve got someone who’s acutely aware of how the media works and what they react to, and now he’s being covered by them.”

Sulzberger seems convinced of Bloomberg’s heightened awareness of how the media works. But for reporters who cover Bloomberg regularly, like Daily News City Hall bureau chief Michael Saul, not so much.

“I don’t think his background as a media mogul evokes much sympathy among members the press corps,” he wrote in an email. “Sometimes, I think, reporters are perplexed when someone who owns a media company (and employs so many talented reporters) seems to have trouble understanding how reporters tick, or that the questions reporters ask don’t reflect their opinions on an issue.”

In the abstract, Bloomberg speaks glowingly of the press, with statements like “quality journalism is what’s kept this country free,” as he told the reporters in the Blue Room May 1.

The question of what counts as quality, as Bloomberg regularly makes clear, remains in dispute.

In April, he said that second only to his longtime adversaries at the United Federation of Teachers, the main obstacle to his education reform agenda was “the newspapers that can never find anything good enough. They’re in favor of change, but they’ve yet in their whole publishing history seen a change that was good enough.”

As recently as May 4, he was still complaining to a Regional Plan Association luncheon about the stories done on the expensive bicycle he purchased during the 2005 transit strike. This was just one of the many stories he thinks reveal some reporters as petty, too often looking for the easy story.

“What would have happened if the courageous people of the past got hauled into court, got beaten up in the press?” he asked the luncheon crowd, pledging not to back off his congestion pricing plan.

Nonetheless, the mayor maintains a decent relationship with reporters, said David Seifman, who has covered four mayors over his 25 years reporting from City Hall for the New York Post.

More than anything, Seifman said, that is a consequence of the good times in the city and the mayor’s generally high approval rating and not about coming to embrace the press’s role in his own life.

When he does go in front of reporters, Seifman said, “you don’t get a sense that Bloomberg really particularly enjoys these sessions.”

They are usually short, consisting mostly of prepared comments quickly read verbatim, and followed by only a few questions, after which he quickly rushes from the room. That leaves the firm impression, Seifman said, that Bloomberg thinks meeting with the press “is certainly part of his job, but it’s not as important as other parts.”

His administration insists it focuses on policy over politics and personality. He and his aides like to cover reporters in charts and figures like a recent report delineating how the claim that 96 percent of his 2005 campaign pledges were fulfilled. He is a man who helped pioneer a system at Bloomberg News of automated article writing (and even automated television and radio reports) by merging pre-set data fields.

In his 1997 autobiography, he explained his view of business reporters, both among those he employed at Bloomberg News and those who covered him for other publications.

“Journalists are just like you and me—well, sort of,” he wrote. “They try to do their jobs and get home to their kids. If you make filling inches and minutes easier for them, they’ll help you every time.”

The business press is very different, though, explained former Koch press secretary Maureen Connelly. Articles about him in the business press usually put him “on the receiving end of accolades,” concerned with examining “why he was a success, looking at the formula of his success.”

Connelly paused.

“That’s not the approach of political reporters,” she said.

Seifman agreed Bloomberg is still defined by his experience with business reporters. 

“That has colored his view of the press,” he said. “It hasn’t colored our view of him.”

Bloomberg is an unlikely media star. He lacks the chiseled looks of a politician like John Lindsay. He wears finely-tailored, expensive suits, though not flashy ones. He likes to stand with his arms fully crossed in front of him, one hand firmly grasped around the opposite arm’s triceps. He is, depending on who is giving the assessment, either shy or reserved or well-mannered or patrician. One way or another, he generally pulls back from the spotlight.

He is no stranger to traditional show business, either. Aside from his careers in business and politics, he produced the film adaptation of Arthur Miller’s  Focus just before he entered the 2001 campaign. Thanks to a few cameos on The Apprentice and Law & Order, he is even a member of the Screen Actors Guild.

Each time, he played himself.

“I’m still waiting for the Oscar, Emmy, whatever they give out,” he joked, as he prepared to sign a new anti-film piracy statute meant to protect his fellow union members. 

He continues Giuliani’s tradition of appearing each Friday at 10 with John Gambling on WABC Radio, where he schmoozes and muses about New York and the news of the moment, laying out his opinions on the airwaves and parrying with callers to the show.

Gambling, who himself is the third-generation radio host in his family, said that other than showing the mayor the cough button and other technical aspects of being in the studio, he never had to offer much advice.

“He’s a natural,” Gambling said.

In some ways, Bloomberg does whatever he can to avoid press coverage. In others, he does whatever he can to appeal to it, usually pairing his speeches with slick slide shows and other carefully prepared multimedia packages, whether on the large flat screen television he keeps in the Blue Room or just about anywhere else. He is sensitive to how presentation can sell policy, turning to public relations firms and other professionals to help craft that appeal. There is a focus on the big elements—as when he presented his sustainability plan on Earth Day under the giant whale at the American Museum of Natural History, complete with a 155-page glossy book. The smallest detail gets attention as well, like the little green pins handed to guests at the door.

He does not need to court the press.  He is the mayor of New York, often called the second most visible politician in America. Whom he has dinner with is news. How well he speaks Spanish is news. That he calls his 98-year-old mother daily is news.

Reporters will come to him, and if they do not, he and administration officials suggest, he does not care. (Not that he is unaware of how hard they try: Ed Skyler’s weathering four years as press secretary earned him a promotion to deputy mayor.)

Especially with term limits preventing him from seeking reelection in 2009, those around him suggest, he is loose, free, able to do whatever he wants without fear of how any of it will play in the press. He may have grown more comfortable in front of reporters, but he has also grown more comfortable ignoring them, and certainly ignoring whatever they produce about him.

The battle lines are drawn. He will do what he thinks is right, and he will not plead his case in the press.

That is, if they disagree.

When they agree, it is another matter entirely, as is clear from the 61 articles his staff picked for the news section of the just-re-launched MikeBloomberg.com, or what has become his standard rebuttal to the politicians who oppose his congestion pricing plan: all the newspaper editorial boards are for it, he argues, offering that up as justification that he is right.

Bloomberg has made it clear that he wants to be a crusader. He has a vision to change government, politics, public health programs. Now he wants to redefine the world’s attitude to global warming.

But Bloomberg, the man who with his company radically redefined worldwide financial journalism 20 years ago with up-to-the-minute stock information on the famous Bloomberg terminals also seems to be on a subtler crusade to gently prod reporters back on track.

Doing so is a necessary part of his approach to governing, as he hinted at in his autobiography, writing “poll after poll shows that most people rank elected and appointed officials at the bottom of the ‘most respected’ list—right down with us journalists (where maybe I can understand the general contempt).”

He explained what he sees as the media’s mission, and his role in getting it there to the Newspaper Association of America convention.

“I’ve always believed in our democracy, we need the fourth estate to tell the people what’s really going on. That’s the future of this country, if I can do that,” he said. “I do have a vested interest, in all fairness, in the fourth estate: that’s how my daughters eat. But also I have a vested interest in being an American.”

But though the media remains close to his heart and very much on his mind, his press secretary, Stu Loeser, said he can keep the disagreements at arm’s length.

“While there are times that the mayor—like any other prominent person in the public eye—disagrees with his coverage, he doesn’t feel it’s personal,” Loeser wrote, via email.

That is not an argument that The Daily News’ Saul is ready to buy. He has covered Bloomberg longer than any other reporter in the city, starting with the 2001 campaign.

“The mayor often says he wants reporters to press elected officials with tough, probing questions,” Saul wrote, via email. “Yet, when reporters grill him, he can be extremely defensive and, at times, petulant.”

Not that Saul does not sometimes feel for the man.

“To be fair, though,” he admitted, “we’re a surly bunch.”  

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Ready to Play Nationally?

The story about Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) which may have already received more coverage than any other is one that publicly, he constantly insists is one that does not exist: his much-speculated about but never quite dismissed interest in running for president next year.

 

He fanned the flames in early May by re-launching www.MikeBloomberg.com, the domain name which hosted the websites for his 2001 and 2005 campaigns. As many noticed, though the site provides little information not already available on www.nyc.gov, it does give him a new way to reach out to the public without taking his chances with the media filter, often the scourge of politicians looking to start a new campaign. Bloomberg’s press secretary Stu Loeser dismissed this idea.

 

“The website, if you read it, actually contains a whole lot of news stories about him,” Loeser wrote, via email.

 

Of course, of the 61 that are there (not counting the press releases and speech transcripts), few contain anything but wholly positive reviews of the mayor and his administration’s efforts.

 

The website re-launch came the same week as a New York Post story hinting at his plans to run for governor in 2010, a story Bloomberg quickly and convincingly shot down, using decidedly different language than he has ever used to rebut reporters’ question about his purported White House bid.

 

If he did want to kill the story, his response to Fred Dicker’s speculations demonstrate that he knows how. If he did not like the constant stream of stories positing him in the Oval Office, observers agree, he would probably have silenced Deputy Mayor Kevin

Sheekey, his campaign advisor and the man who has constantly re-sown the seeds with reporters.

 

The experience of being mayor, after all, has taught him how to handle any story, argued George Arzt, who covered three mayors as a reporter and then served as a press secretary for Mayor Ed Koch (D).

 

“If you’re in the media capital of the world, you can’t really say ‘let my press secretary handle it,’ like they do in Washington,” he said. “You have to be your own press secretary, so it’s your own instinct.”

 

Were Bloomberg to run, he would certainly have more experience with the press than most first-time presidential candidates, given his years as mayor and his business experience running Bloomberg News.

 

But as for whether he is prepared, said Daily News City Hall bureau chief Michael Saul, the answer is “Absolutely.”

 

Still, warned Maureen Connelly, also a press secretary for Koch, “it would be a different dynamic.”

 

Under the constant media exposure of a presidential campaign, his eagerness to preserve his privacy might cause problems. The local press has come to accept his tendency to disappear on some weekends, without disclosing any details. Whether the national press corps would ever be so accommodating remains a question.

 

The similarities between reporters in City Hall and those covering national politics exist, said Jim Rutenberg, who covered Bloomberg for the New York Times and now works as that paper’s White House correspondent.

 

“He’s probably in some way has to be well-equipped only in that the New York press corps is probably one of the roughest local press corps there is, and one of the biggest,”

Rutenberg said. “It’s as robust a local press corps you can imagine, and probably the closest a local press corps can come to the national.”

 

But, Rutenberg said, the relationship Bloomberg has grown used to from the personalities in Room 9 who have regular access to him is one the mayor will have to take care not to assume exists with the national press corps, if he decides to make a run.

 

To appeal to national reporters, he said, the mayor may have to shed some of the thick skin he has developed over the past six years.

 

In New York, Rutenberg said, “the back-and-forth is a little rougher.”

 

—EIRD