In Matters Big and Small, Crossing Giuliani Had Price (Rudy Hits Low and Hard)

Rudolph W. Giuliani likens himself to a boxer who never takes a punch without swinging back. As mayor, he made the vengeful roundhouse an instrument of government, clipping anyone who crossed him.

In August 1997, James Schillaci, a rough-hewn chauffeur from the Bronx, dialed Mayor Giuliani’s radio program on WABC-AM to complain about a red-light sting run by the police near the Bronx Zoo. ...That morning, police officers appeared on Mr. Schillaci’s doorstep. What are you going to do, Mr. Schillaci asked, arrest me? He was joking, but the officers were not.

They slapped on handcuffs and took him to court on a 13-year-old traffic warrant....A police spokeswoman later read Mr. Schillaci’s decades-old criminal rap sheet to a reporter for The Daily News, a move of questionable legality because the state restricts how such information is released. She said, falsely, that he had been convicted of sodomy.

“Mr. Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistle-blower,” the mayor told reporters at the time. “Maybe he’s dishonest enough to lie about police officers.”

Mr. Schillaci suffered an emotional breakdown, was briefly hospitalized and later received a $290,000 legal settlement from the city. “It really damaged me,” said Mr. Schillaci, now 60, massaging his face with thick hands. “I thought I was doing something good for once, my civic duty and all. Then he steps on me.”

Mr. Giuliani was a pugilist in a city of political brawlers. But far more than his predecessors, historians and politicians say, his toughness edged toward ruthlessnessand became a defining aspect of his mayoralty. One result: New York City spent at least $7 million in settling civil rights lawsuits and paying retaliatory damages during the Giuliani years.

it appears your positive feelings towards Giuliani want to give him the benefit of that doubt

Actually, my comments here are based on observations of what the NYT has printed and is printing. Their motives may not be that hard to figure out. Being riddled with communist ideology, the paper hates fiscal conservatism with a passion.

I do have my reservations about Giuliani and always have had, but I tend to believe he's the most fiscally conservative of the 3. I believe the NYT tendency to soft-pedal McCain and Romney while blasting Rudy in this and many other columns support my belief.

But I'm willing to be persuaded. Whom would you suggest?

One of the rules of good journalism is "if your mother says she loves, you, check it out." If the New York Times were a good newspaper, and some guy says "I had a nervous breakdown because of what Giuliani did to me" I would call the heads of the agency that made the decision against the guy. Why did they say they did it?

After printing both sides' explanations, the next step is to find any relevant facts that may influence the argument. Let's say person A says "I was fired because I stood up to the administration" and person B says "Not true. We had to let everyone go with less than two years of experience because of budget cuts." The reporter should then see if everyone with less than two years of experience really was fired. The resolution of that question will make one side's argument look better than the other side's, but that's not bias--only reporting the facts.

The next step would be to provide some context. One of the shoddiest articles I ever read was trying to make the case that nearby military testing in the town where I grew up was causing increased rates of cancer. The article claimed "this town had a higher rate of cancer than what would be expected." Any decent journalist would have asked a few experts and noted that the town in question was a farming community at high altitude, and thus had a high rate of skin cancer. They didn't consider the larger picture that cancer rates vary from place to place.

Anyway, the New York Times in this case neither provided the opposing arguments nor gave many supporting facts nor provided context. It's not the way a real newspaper would behave.

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