Word: schanberg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Perhaps the Times's most blatant admission of its support for the city's large real-estate moguls was its recent canning of columnist Sydney Schanberg. Schanberg's column, called "New York," was a beat he clearly decided to cover thoroughly. Realizing that the New York of Broadway theatres, Times Square redevelopment (read gentrification) and egocentric mayors was being prominently displayed on the front page, Schanberg set out to cover a different New York...
...York portrayed a city in which thousands of citizens were sleeping on the streets and the lines at the soup kitchens were growing. Schanberg also wrote of people who were unable to afford housing, New Yorkers who were being displaced by the exhorbitant rents...
...What about the people who are already in Manhattan? Do you just force them out and tell them it's nothing personal, just free-market forces at work?" While the Times editorial page spoke about the nuisance of ghetto kids trying to earn a few dimes by washing windshields, Schanberg put David Rockefeller and Alfonse D'Amato in the spotlight, questioning their role in trying to bulldoze Westway through a city of concerned citizens...
...while, the publisher and executives at the Times allowed Schanberg's column to run, even though his New York had little in common with theirs. But things began to change. Schanberg began to bring the two New Yorks together. He began to wonder why large real-estate developers (many of whom advertise heavily in the Times) were getting tax abatements for building luxury housing. He began to question the tactics that landlords were using to convert their rental stock into condominiums. He wondered about the mayor's policy towards the growing homeless population...
...balance (or excesses in outspokenness). The unintended effect of such after-the-fact scolding is to convey the impression that nobody in responsible authority reads the paper before it goes to press. The Times recently took away a twice-a-week column by its Pulitzer-prizewinning reporter Sydney Schanberg, who wrote passionately against real estate speculators and presumably displeased the publisher. Schanberg subsequently resigned. The editorials in most papers these days discuss the issues with the evenhandedness of a sociologist and the fervor of an accountant. They aim to inform and perhaps to persuade but not to dictate. The only...