Neil deMause: The Website

In the course of responding to the New Yorker’s problematic profile of Rudy Giuliani a couple of weeks ago (by Elizabeth Kolbert, who’s usually one of my favorite of their writers, but who usually sticks to environmental issues), I tackle the common belief that the sinking presidential candidate was a mastermind at tackling crime and welfare:

How will history judge Rudy Giuliani? With his presidential campaign (and political career) at a turning point in tomorrow’s Florida primary, it’s a question worth asking.

If there’s anything close to a journalistic consensus about Rudy’s reign as New York mayor, it’s something like what Elizabeth Kolbert expressed in a long New Yorker magazine profile of Giuliani earlier this month… [read more]

With Metro NY taking the last two Mondays off for the holidays, I get a special Wednesday op-ed slot today. The subject is appropriately holiday-themed: How attention to the poor disappears after Christmas, and what that means for those trying to provide food year-round:

With the holidays finally wrapping up, it’s time to mark the end of another season as well: the caring-about-poor-people season. Once the Christmas decorations come down, it’s once again safe to watch the news without fear of hearing about the plight of the homeless or of being asked to help out the hungry with a once-a-year turkey dinner… [read more]

And Metro seems to have figured out this Interweb thing now, so you can read it in sparkling HTML format! Woohoo!

The study that Steve Rendall and I conducted of nightly news coverage of the poor - which I mentioned last week would soon be out - is now online. (You can also grab a snazzy PDF version of it here.) Our key findings:

Despite being an issue that directly or indirectly affects a huge chunk of the U.S. population, poverty and inequality receive astonishingly little coverage on nightly network newscasts. An exhaustive search of weeknight news broadcasts on CBS, NBC and ABC found that with rare exceptions, such as the aftermath of Katrina, poverty and the poor seldom even appear on the evening news—and when they do, they are relegated mostly to merely speaking in platitudes about their hardships… [read more]

And the CounterSpin interview is up: Click here to listen.

I recorded a short interview today for CounterSpin, the radio show of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, on my upcoming report for FAIR, “The Poor Will Always Be With Us… Except on TV News,” which examines poverty coverage (and the lack thereof) on the nightly network newscasts. (The article isn’t online yet, but should be hitting newsstands momentarily.) In New York, this airs 10 am tomorrow on WBAI (99.5 FM); elsewhere, check your local listings. Or just grab the podcast here when it becomes available.

Okay, looks like that New Year’s resolution didn’t go all that well. I may switch to a more continuous-blog format for this page shortly; in the meantime, here’s a two-month recap of my doings and whereabouts:

I usually start things off with the articles I’ve written, but then, it’s not every month that I testify before Congress. On March 29, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Domestic Policy (chaired by Rep. Dennis Kucinich) had me in to testify on a panel discussing public funding of sports stadiums. The hearing lasted three and a half hours, and also included community activists, sports economists, and an IRS official who looked creepily like Bud Selig - you can see it all via C-SPAN’s website, or read our written testimony on the subcommittee’s site.

Back in the written world, I’ve been focusing on stadiums a fair bit as well, it being both legislative season and the start of baseball season. For Baseball Prospectus I took a look at the status of the four new stadiums (and one renovated one) approved last year, as well as the new deals the Oakland A’s and Florida Marlins hope to cut this year. (Both subscribers-only, sorry.) I also made my long-awaited return to the pages of the Village Voice with a look at the details of the new Yankees and Mets stadiums to see just what New Yorkers are getting for their $720 million in state and city tax money. (Hint: It’s not better views from the cheap seats.)

I also tried my hand of late at the ever-popular pastime of concocting new baseball statistics, introducing MP/MWW to evaluate which teams got the most bang for their payroll spending buck, ROPE to gauge their return on player investment (not very good, as it turns out), and BAD and BADr to find the most wasteful player contracts of all time. Murray Chass, forgive me.

Other of my writings in the last two months include: a look at the cost overruns that are threatening New York City’s #7 subway line extension (for the newspaper City Hall); a report on the city’s individualized medical/psychological care system for welfare recipients that costs $200 million and doesn’t provide individualized care; coverage of the anticlimactic groundbreaking for Brooklyn’s controversial new Atlantic Yards project; and a report on how the city proposed to switch a pair of two-way streets to one-way in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, and ended up faced with an angry mob that charged it was all part of a plan to making it easier for fans to speed to the controversial new Atlantic Yards project (last three all for the Voice’s Runnin’ Scared news blog). Also, for the transit news site Streetsblog, reports on Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to create a “sustainable” New York for 2030, and a UCLA professor who thinks “market-rate” parking meters are the solution to midtown traffic and parking woes.

Finally, to top off a busy bimonth (quadrifortnight?), I dropped in on a fascinating lunch talk by several ’60s activists featured in the great oral historian Jeff Kisseloff’s equally great new book, Generation on Fire, and wrote about it for In These Times magazine. If you like the article, read the website; if you like the website, buy the book. Actually, just buy the book anyway - it’s worth it alone for Gloria Richardson and Bob Kellner’s recounting of their time at the front lines of the civil rights movement, which is a sorely needed antidote to revisionist crap like “Mississippi Burning.”

Coming up next: I’ll have a long piece in the April 11 issue of the Village Voice, so check their website starting on the afternoon of the 10th. After that, I have a bunch of irons in the fire, so stay tuned to this site for more news of the world around you and its trip to hell in a handbasket.

Oh, and donate to WFMU! It’s not too late, and it’ll get you into heaven. I promise. I know a guy.

In a perfect world, I’d have spent the whole of January wrapping up the manuscript of the new edition of Field of Schemes. (Note to Rob at U of Nebraska Press, if by some chance you’re reading this: Any day now, really.) Instead, the world stubbornly refused to stay still, which meant I had to take time out from revisiting Boston in the summer of 2000 to focus on current events:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as you may recall, keeps promising he’s about to release details of how he plans to fight poverty. In his State of the City address, he revealed that the city will start aggressively helping eligible residents apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor - though he’s not doing the same for food stamps, which should make even more sense from a fiscal perspective, but perhaps not if he’s concerned about only aiding the “deserving” poor. And speaking of helping people to money, the mayor also snuck into his capital budget, with no public notice, plans to funnel as much as $226 million in added city money to new homes for the Yankees, Mets, and Nets - all “deserving” recipients, no doubt. (Both of these stories appeared on the Village Voice’s Power Plays blog, which has just been redesigned and renamed Runnin’ Scared - bylines are still missing from the stories, you’ll note, but that should be fixed soon. I hope.)

I also have two articles in the January edition of City Hall, a newish newspaper focusing on New York City politics with a seriously unfortunate name for anyone trying to report for it. (”Hello, is this the mayor’s office? I’m calling from City Hall. No, I’m at City Hall. Yes, I know you’re at City Hall, but I’m with - never mind, I’ll call back.”) My topics for this month: How New York’s new governor, Eliot Spitzer, plans on dealing with the numerous megaprojects planned for the metro area, and concerns that he’ll start with the ones where funding is easily available, regardless of what’s best for the state; and another look at Bloomberg’s poverty-fighting plans, such as we know they are.

No baseball writing for this month, aside from a couple of posts on Baseball Prospectus’ Unfiltered blog. I have a bunch of stuff in the hopper for next month, though, which should make for a nice run-up to my debut in the BP annual, and the upcoming revised paperback edition of Baseball Between the Numbers. I’ll also be making a couple of public appearances at BP book events in the NY/NJ area on March 22 and March 24, so mark your calendar if that’s the sort of thing that floats your boat.

That’s about all for this month, and I see a Vin Scelsa archive with my name on it. (The Yo La Tengo appearance is especially recommended.) Until next month, try not to do anything to drive walruses into extinction and turn Nebraska into a desert.

If I’m making a New Year’s resolution, it’s to keep this page updated every month with links to my latest writings and other projects. Not only will that be a better service to you, whoever you might be who’s stumbled upon this Internet backwater, but it will also mean I’ll never again have to do what I’m now about to attempt: a complete recap of everything I’ve done since the end of August. Buckle in, and let’s go:

The final one-third of 2006 saw New York cross the t’s and dot the i’s on three sports construction projects, and I was there to chart the course of the bulldozers. With the Yankees already having broken ground in August on their new $1.3 billion stadium (about $400 million of which came courtesy of taxpayers), construction kicked swiftly into gear, creating a giant dust bowl where a 22-acre Bronx park used to be. Out in Queens, meanwhile, the Mets didn’t break ground on their new stadium until November, by which time they’d announced that Citigroup had agreed to spend $20 million a year to have the new structure dubbed CitiField - money that will go entirely into the team’s pockets, with not a dime to repay the city’s $200 million or so in expenses.

With the baseball stadium out of the way, attention turned to Brooklyn, where the Atlantic Yards megaproject (which is to include a basketball arena for the Nets, which would relocate from New Jersey) entered the home stretch for its own approval process. Following the final uninformative public hearing, the state agency running the project first stonewalled on releasing its economic impact study, then released a memo giving incomplete details of the projected effects of the project. Project opponents hoped this would be enough to convince the state’s top assemblymember to delay approval of the project; it didn’t happen, though.

The New York plans all relied heavily on “hidden” subsidies - everything from tax and rent breaks to low-interest city bonds - something that looks to be an increasing trend across baseball as team owners try to make their projects look more palatable to a skeptical public. That’s certainly what Oakland A’s owner Lew Wolff did in presenting his own stadium plans in November, as he talked lots about all the new gizmos the park would be wired for, and as little as possible about how it would all be paid for.

But enough about giving public money to rich people. I also wrote plenty this fall about giving public money (or not) to poor people, starting with New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s poverty commission recommendations and what actual poor people thought of them (choice quote: “The mayor, the president, the governor, they all messed up”), continuing with the latest on how new federal welfare laws could cost New York City big in penalties, moving on to an analysis of news coverage of the welfare law’s 10th anniversary (wherein a study that revealed welfare recipients were no better off financially under the new law was described by the press as showing that “for many the blessings of work have been mixed”), and finally reporting on Bloomberg’s first announcement of how he actually plans to help the poor (or as he calls them, “people who are starting their way up the economic ladder”). With the mayor promising 30 new initiatives but not revealing what any of them exactly are, I’ll be continuing to follow this one closely, believe you me.

And those were the main themes. The leftover articles in last four months’ portfolio include: a look at how New York City’s housing tax-subsidy reform is likely too little, too late; a tribute to the second New York Yankee to die in the prime of his career in a small plane crash; a look at the new baseball labor pact and how it’s likely to affect team payrolls (a prediction that’s panning out pretty well so far, the Gil Meche contract notwithstanding), and a report on how a New York Sun editor used a description of the Lower East Side in the 19th century to argue for its redevelopment now. But hey, what’s 120 years between friends?

And that’s it for now, at least in terms of the printed word. If you really need to hear more from me, or would just like to rest your eyes, you can hear me talk about poverty coverage on WNUR’s “This Is Hell” show from December 16, or blab about the new baseball labor pact on Baseball Prospectus Radio from November 4.

Until next month - really - I’m still Neil deMause. Farewell, sweet Purvs, wherever you are.

Whoops - it’s another month now, isn’t it? And I picked a bad month to miss the calendar turning over, given that July was jam-packed with action on the byline front.

Let’s start off with my Exclusive with a capital E (as it appeared on the cover of the Village Voice, anyway): The news that the New York Yankees, under a lease clause allowing them to deduct “stadium planning” costs from their city rent, had billed the city treasury for the lobbyists they hired to push for public stadium funding, as well as the salaries of their own top executives. The documents proving this had been sitting around in city Parks Department files for years, but no one bothered to look at them - apparently, checking to make sure that your high-powered tenants aren’t ripping you off isn’t in the job description of anyone in city government these days.

It was also the month that the Yankees reaped the rewards of all that lobbying, as the National Park Service and Internal Revenue Service signed off on the use of federally funded parkland and federally subsidized tax-exempt bonds, respectively, clearing the last two bureaucratic hurdles facing the stadium project. Unless lawyers for Bronx residents manage to get a last-second court injunction, the trees are expected to begin falling in Macombs Dam Park later this month, with the House That Ruth Built to follow in the spring of 2008. The monuments to Lou Gehrig et al. will be relocated to the ersatz Stadium; no word on the fate of the plaque honoring the soon-to-be-landfilled seat of Ali Ramirez.

With the Mets also about to break ground on their new stadium, attention is set to turn to the New Jersey Nets, whose owner developer Bruce Ratner wants to build a new arena for them in Brooklyn, accompanied, incidentally, by a huge passel of butt-ugly condo skyscrapers. Will he succeed? Not if noted Brooklyn poet Steve Buscemi has anything to say about it.

And enough about all that. On a different topic, the new July/August issue of Extra! is out, with my analysis, as the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, of how the news media lived up to promises that it would pay more attention to pervasive poverty now that the hurricane and its aftermath had brought it to light. In a nutshell:

On CNN’s Reliable Sources (9/18/05), Newsweek contributing editor Ellis Cose was asked how much longer “the underclass” would remain in the news after Katrina. He replied: “I think it’s going to be a story for a long time, and a long time meaning at least six months or more. And I think these issues are going to be finally examined.”

Contrary to Cose’s predictions, “a long time” turned out to be a matter of weeks. An Extra! analysis of media coverage since Katrina - of the hurricane’s aftermath along the Gulf Coast and of poverty issues in general - found that with few exceptions, the media’s rediscovery of impoverished Americans lasted barely a month. While occasional individual journalists did follow up on how New Orleans’ poorest residents were faring in the months after the hurricane, these seldom went beyond tales of individual tragedy, examining neither the systemic causes of their destitution, nor what could be done to alleviate their woes.

The article isn’t up on FAIR’s website yet [okay, now it is] - in fact, I haven’t even gotten my copy of the magazine yet, though others have. In the meantime, you can hear me discuss post-Katrina coverage, as well as how the media mishandled the recent welfare law changes, on the July 7 edition of FAIR’s radio show, CounterSpin.

Thanks to everyone who showed up at my Philadelphia talk with Dave Zirin, and for my Baseball Prospectus chat (transcript here). If you’re looking to meet me live and in person, your best bet is either to pester BP to hold a New York pizza feed, or attend the sure-to-be-a-blast Yo La Tengo show at the Landmark Loews Jersey Theatre on September 29, part of the tour for their rumored-to-be-their-best-in-a-decade long-player (and even longer-namer) “I Am Not Afraid Of
You And I Will Beat Your Ass.” Look for me in Row P.

We were all set to head west for the four-day celebration of freedom for slaveholders, but nature has decided to remind us why they’re called floodplains, so we may go north instead. In the meantime, a recap of my writings and other noteworthy events from the month of June:

The Village Voice may be down
one editor-in-chief, but the printing presses - and the, er, website presses - continue to churn, with a good chunk of this month’s output bearing the byline of yours truly. The big item: My investigation of Housing Stability Plus, the New York City homelessness-prevention program that is increasingly leaving families stuck in substandard housing with no way to pay their rent. And if you thought that was the whole reason behind the homelessness crisis in the first place, well, read the article. (It has a picture of a cute kid, even!)

On the web front, I covered two of New York’s ongoing sports-subsidy controversies: first, the Bronx borough president’s move to punish
those who voted against his Yankees stadium plan by booting them from the community board (followup story here); and second, the growing opposition to New Jersey Nets owner Bruce Ratner’s plan for a basketball-arena-and-skyscraper development in Brooklyn for being too damn freaking ginormous. And I haven’t even gotten a chance to weigh in on the Mets’ demands for a new commuter rail station or the plans to shoehorn a new Madison Square Garden into a landmarked Manhattan post office building - watch for them in July, perhaps.

Finally, just this week I covered the release of the new federal welfare rules by the Department of Health and Human Services, a hugely important development for anyone who relies on public assistance - or any state taxpayers who pay the bills for the programs - but which, aside from the AP and the Washington Post, the daily media mostly greeted with complete disinterest. In a nutshell: The Bush Administration has drastically reduced the number of allowable “work activities” under the welfare law, which could lead to a renewed wave of families being kicked off the rolls. Outside of a nutshell, read the full article.

Finally, my analysis of media coverage of poverty since Hurricane Katrina will appear in the July/August issue of Extra!, the magazine of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, which should be hitting shelves and mailboxes in
mid-July. Not sure yet if it’ll be on the web as well, but if it is, I’ll add a link to it here.

Also upcoming in July: For those in the Philadelphia area, I’ll be speaking (along with my comrade Dave Zirin) at the Rotunda, 4014 Walnut Street, on Thursday, July 6, at 7 pm, on “The Dirty Business of Sports and the Rebellious Athletes Who Play Them” (so I’m told). For those
not in the the Philadelphia area, or just too lazy to get off their butts and walk away from the computer, I’ll be doing a live chat about stadium
shenanigans, baseball’s upcoming labor talks, and other stuff like that, at baseballprospectus.com, Friday, July 14, 1 pm Eastern time. As always, questions can be submitted ahead of time; for that matter, questions can be submitted after the
fact, but not if you want them answered.

Let’s see, war on the poor, stadium ripoffs, natural disasters … yep, that about covers it for this month. I think I need to cheer myself up by listening to the Art Brut record a couple of times in a row. I recommend that you do the same.