Rotten Apple coverage

How exactly did the New York press miss the fact that the extravagantly financed Michael Bloomberg express almost got derailed?

Local news organizations didn't take the race all that seriously. Nor did many national reporters shuttle in to offer their take. Everyone knew that the mayor would cruise to a third term and that his Democratic opponent, Bill Thompson, was a mere sacrificial lamb.

After all, the zillionaire mayor spent about $90 million to win a third term, and Thompson about $6 million. A Marist poll days ago had Bloomberg ahead by 15 points. He was blanketing the airwaves. And those are the factors that journalists obsess over -- money, polls and ads.

And yet the race was tight enough that MSNBC had to pull back its projection of a Bloomberg victory Tuesday night. The mayor won by 5 points, which ain't chopped liver, but it was the hardly the blowout the media establishment had been expecting.

Turns out that many New Yorkers were torqued off about the way that Bloomberg flipped on term limits and then muscled through a law allowing him to run again. Combine that with the appearance that the Democrat-turned-Republican-turned independent was buying the race, along with a somewhat chilly style, and you've got a competitive contest.

Sure, the New York media reported that some folks were disgruntled by the self-serving trashing of term limits. But that was portrayed more as a minor irritant. There was an obligatory quality to the stories about Thompson, the city's comptroller, as if no one had to really contend with the notion that he might pull off an upset.

The general consensus in the Apple is that Bloomberg, who took office after 9/11 and really struggled for his first two years, has done a pretty good job. But for a guy who rode a wave of media hype about a possible independent bid for president, to barely clear 50 percent against an underfunded challenger is something of a comedown.

What the press generally does in cases like this is adopt a no-one-could-have-seen-this-coming tone, such as the New York Times reporting Wednesday that "the margin seemed to startle Mr. Bloomberg's aides and the city's political establishment." But not the New York Times?

Times columnist David Carr acknowledges the media's shortcoming and, in a broader sense, complicity with the mayor:

"Most of the media covering the race thought a Bloomberg victory was foregone and covered it as such. . . . All of the media outlets in town lined up early for Mr. Bloomberg. Recall that a little over a year ago, before Mr. Bloomberg decided to try to overturn term limits, he first visited with the publishers of The New York Daily News, The New York Post, and The New York Times. With Wall Street in full meltdown in a way that seemed to threaten the financial underpinnings of the city, publishers quickly signed off on a third term attempt for Bloomberg, figuring if the voters didn't like it, they could say so in the voting booth."

And many of them did.

Now it's finger-pointing time: "This was a race most Democrats now believe they could have won. Numbering among the co-conspirators in the Democrats' defeat, in the view of some party leaders and activists, are Democratic grandees, from President Obama -- who did not campaign for Mr. Thompson -- to the City Council speaker, whose support could not have been softer, to two powerful labor unions that remained studiously neutral."