The mayor appears increasingly preoccupied with his legacy, and recently hired two public relations advisers — a former Times editor, Arthur Pincus, and a former television reporter, Andrew Kirtzman — to shape the public perception of the Bloomberg era.Asked on Monday if he was concerned that a drawn-out legal battle over the soda limits could spill into the administration of a successor who does not favor them, Mr. Bloomberg, sounding a bit irked, muttered, “All of our time is running out,” before saying, “I don’t know who is going to be my successor.”
Make no mistake, Bloomberg knows that he who writes the news (or he who owns the men and women who write the news) writes the first drafts of history.
He owns a lot of these people already over at Bloomberg Views, Bloomberg Businessweek and his other news and editorial outlets.
Now he's got a couple of more working directly for him at City Hall.
There will be a full court press on the press to get the Bloomberg View of everything out there as the right view.
This bears watching in these final months of the Bloomberg Reign of Error.
They are going to try and rewrite all the bad stuff - from the CityTime mess to the 911 mess to the Bloomberg/Boxer Day Blizzard mess.
But they are especially going to try and rewrite the history of Bloomberg's school stewardship.
They want to put down markers now that make people forget just how bad the test scores dropped under Bloomberg/Klein when the state stopped inflating the scores, how phonied up the graduation rates are with credit recovery and other "innovative" ways to move kids along.
They are especially going to look to dismiss the ELA and math scores this year after they drop the expected 30%.
That's what Kirtzman has been hired to do.
The Times calls it "shaping public perception" of the Bloomberg legacy.
That's a nice way of saying bullshitting people into believing their lies and propaganda.
Yes, perception management in service of manufacturing consent.
ReplyDeleteBut it's a hopeless cause: this little man's legacy is going to turn to dust the moment he leaves office, if not before.
There's a quote attributed to Churchill, which supposedly refers to the Germans and/or Arabic people, but which best describes the press and media: they're either at your feet or at your throat.
Some of the pent-up/repressed investigative energies that should have been at work over the past twelve years will be released after Bloomberg leaves, and he will be discredited once and for all.
Yeah, the nice thing is that a lot of people hate him. Every time he steps in front of a camera he manages to reveal his true self.
ReplyDelete