Was The Daily News Reporter Even At Walcott's Brooklyn Tech Speech Yesterday?

The Daily News article on the Walcott speech at Brooklyn Tech yesterday has a vastly different tone than the NY Times article covering the same speech.

The Times writer reports that the principals resented having to be Walcott's captive audience for what amounted to a political speech defending Bloomberg and his policies.

The Times writer got quotes from two principals - one a supporter of the Bloomberg reforms, one a critic - who both went on record resenting having to listen to the speech and criticizing the DOE for using what was supposed to be an "academic conference" to wage a "political battle."

The Times writer reports that the principals laughed at Walcott when he said he didn't like to get involved in politics. 

This statement by Walcott is jive, of course, given he was a political aide to Bloomberg for many years before he was shifted to the DOE to staunch the Cathie Black wound and given he was using this Saturday academic conference to attack opponents of the mayor.

But you don't get any of this reporting in the Daily News article.

Rather the Daily News reporter frames the battle as Bloomberg/Walcott vs. mayoral candidates/UFT.

There are no quotes or statements from anybody at the speech - just reaction statements from the candidates or their campaigns.

Reading the DN article and comparing it to the Times article and Norm Scott's post on the speech at Ed Notes, I have to wonder if the DN reporter was actually at the speech or if she simply reported on the Walcott text sent out in the morning, then got response quotes from the mayoral candidates' campaigns after the speech was over.

If she was not at the speech, she should say in her article that she is reporting on the text of a speech given by Walcott, not the actual speech given by Walcott.

Because how the audience received the speech is as important a part of the story as what was in the speech.

But if she was at Brooklyn Tech yesterday and failed to report on how the principals - even the supporters of the Walcott/Bloomberg reforms - were resentful at being used as a backdrop for Walcott's political defense of Bloomberg education policies, then she failed to get the whole story.

Either way, there is a major problem with the way the Daily News reporter went about covering the Walcott speech and DN readers learn little else from the DN article that they couldn't have gleamed from the text of Chancellor Walcott's speech itself.