THE END OF AN ERROR IN NEW YORK CITY

By: Allan Wolper Our Columnist Examines Mayor Giuliani's Reign


Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani was king of New York City. He
threatened museums whose exhibits offended him. His police
officers harassed reporters trying to cover accidents, crime
scenes, or street demonstrations, and they refused to let his
political opponents hold news conferences on the City Hall steps.
His administrators were so afraid of incurring his wrath that
they refused to provide the most basic information to the press
without a Freedom of Information Act letter.

From Giuliani's first days in office, reporters were intimidated
by him. They acted like the one-time federal prosecutor would
send them to solitary confinement if they dared to investigate
him.

Giuliani abused reporters at his daily press conferences,
shouting down legitimate questions, and gave the impression that
he could fire them or have them transferred if they didn't
behave.

There was some evidence to support that. Giuliani had excellent
relationships with Mortimer B. Zuckerman, co-publisher of the New
York Daily News, and Rupert Murdoch, co-chairman of the
New York Post, and he rarely ran into problems with The
New York Times.

Giuliani got away with his boorish, anti-civil-libertarian
behavior because most of the city admired him. He had cleaned the
streets of idle humanity. Crime statistics crashed. The tourists
came back. So did the Bronx, home of the Yankees.

But he made a couple of mistakes.

He forgot New York mayors have to leave office after two four-
year terms and thought the press would give him a free ride after
he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Despite several police attacks on unarmed men the press could not
ignore, Giuliani might have been able to slip off into the
political sunset if he had not turned his personal life into a
Lifetime TV movie special. He made sure he would leave behind a
Clintonlike legacy when he announced to a glut of TV cameras that
he was divorcing his wife before telling her about it, all the
while flaunting his girlfriend, Judith Nathan, as the major
caregiver in his life. To make matters worse, he said his affair
with Nathan didn't really count because his cancer treatment had
made him impotent.

Suddenly he lost the sympathy vote. He seemed politically
vulnerable. Then when the lame duck quacked at the docile dogs of
the press, they barked back at him. He was no longer Rudy the
Terrible.

"He used to rule by fear," said Robert Polner, City Hall bureau
chief for Newsday, the Melville, N.Y.-based newspaper. "He
used to use the media against his enemies. Now he is viewed as
expendable. That's why he is getting beat up so badly."

All because he just would not shut up. The Post drove the
mayor wild by intimating he was involved in liaisons with Nathan
at a hotel. Giuliani responded by threatening to sue, but had
second thoughts about that.

Then the Daily News reported he was staying in an
apartment that belonged to a Queens businessman who had raised
hundreds of thousands of dollars for his political campaigns.

He exploded when the press pack asked him at least three separate
times if he had cleared his sleepovers with the city's Conflicts
of Interest Board. "Don't be a jerk," he railed at one reporter.
"Sometimes you guys are really insulting."

So they were. But they should have been asking questions like
that about his political life before his power was muted by term
limits, cancer, and one of the messiest divorces anyone had ever
seen. When the mayor insisted in a court hearing that his
girlfriend be allowed to visit his two children at Gracie
Mansion, the mayoral residence his wife still called home, it
seemed too sleazy to be true.

"I felt like I died and went to tabloid heaven," said Linda
Stasi, a columnist for the Post. "We had stopped writing
about Rudy and Judy and Donna. But he was begging for it. I mean,
his lawyer called Donna 'a howling pig' on Mother's Day."

Now the press, concentrating on Giuliani's successor, is
publishing every morsel about the mayor's personal life. "In my
lifetime, I have never seen anything like this," said Edward
Kosner, editor in chief of the Daily News, who has
scrutinized New York politics since the mid-1950s. "It's an
extraordinary spectacle. There is no soul-searching going on. If
it weren't all out there, and we were ferreting out details, then
perhaps we would be looking into a mirror."

Even The New York Times succumbed to the soap opera.
Elisabeth Bumiller penned a front-page story on Giuliani's
dueling political and personal lives, even though she didn't like
it very much. "So much of this is distasteful," she said.

But no more distasteful than a room of City Hall reporters
sitting on their computers for eight years because they were
afraid that the mayor might yell at them or call their editors to
complain about them.



Allan Wolper's "Ethics Corner" column appears monthly in
E&P. He can be reached at AllanWolper@msn.com.



Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.