It's not that the rich think we're suckers 'n' saps. It's more that they just don't give a damn

Mayor Mike the Movie Star: Say, whatever happened to those old-fashioned reclusive billionaires who shunned publicity?

by Ken

The Village Voice's Tom Robbins is back this week with a follow-up, "The City's TV Station Is All Bloomberg, All the Time," to a story he broke in March, "Bloomberg: The Movie (At Your Expense)," after being given a persistent runaround by, and something very close to stonewalling on a Freedom of Information Act request from, the Bloomberg administration in New York.

The story involves something called NYC Media Group, the city agency (formerly known as the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, before it was engulfed in scandal and embarrassment) that oversees the city's TV stations. (Did anyone know the city has TV stations?)

Mike Bloomberg's trip to Copenhagen last December for the U.N. talks on climate change put him on a global stage, which he didn't seem to mind a bit.

After his speech on environmental reform, reporters and photographers literally chased him through the conference center halls. His words and picture ran in more than 100 publications. New York's dailies sent reporters who relayed hourly dispatches back home.

Despite this wall-to-wall coverage, the mayor's office insisted that the city have its own camera crew on hand to record him. On December 12, a couple of days before the mayor flew out on his private jet, a pair of technicians from the city's TV station, NYC Media, grabbed their camera equipment and took a taxi to Newark Airport. They paid an extra baggage charge to stow their gear, flew overnight to Copenhagen, put up at decent hotels, rented a car, and followed the mayor around, grabbing a bite when they could.

All told, the five-day trip cost $11,220. You can add another $1,500 for a week's worth of wages for the hard-working cameramen who had to hustle through airports and foreign streets. Net benefit to the city? Their video footage ran for awhile on Channel 25's "City Scoop" program. Then it went on a shelf in the archives, where it remains today.

Just why it is that taxpayers pay the tab for these out-of-town mayoral movies is a mystery. The Voice reported in March that Bloomberg is the first mayor to insist on a traveling video crew wherever he goes. (See "Bloomberg: The Movie (At Your Expense)" from March 16, 2010.) More than $142,000 was spent to film him on his world tours from January 2006 to May 2009. It took nine months to pry that information loose from the city's Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications, so an added request was made to find out what was spent in the interim. The answer, as of April, was that another $16,000 went to film seven more outings, including the Copenhagen spree, and $2,200 to film the mayor shaking hands with federal health officials in Atlanta.

NYC Media's mere existence is not the only mystery surrounding it. Tom Robbins again:

For a tiny agency that should be right in the mayor's sweet spot of expertise—he is, after all, a media mogul—NYC Media has had an awful lot of headaches since Bloomberg took over.

This week, the former chief of operations began serving a 15-month prison sentence for embezzlement. After he was nabbed, the executive said he'd gotten away with his scheme because the station's general manager was never around to check up on him. Five other officials were forced to resign. The ex-manager, a former Bloomberg campaign aide named Arick Wierson, was cited for using city workers to run personal errands and work on a private movie.

None of this has ever been acknowledged by Bloomberg's City Hall. But when tough questions started coming their way at the April 15 Council hearing, the current NYC Media executives were quick to say how bad things were at the agency they inherited.

"When I was asked to take responsibility, it was immediately following a publicly reported arrest of a senior member of staff," testified [former Bloomberg LP employeed and current NYC Media Group president and NYC TV general manager Katherine] Oliver, who also heads the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting. "It was a very troubled agency that had not been managed effectively." She ticked off a laundry list of unhappy management indicators, including a workforce in shell shock from a lengthy investigation. "You can only imagine what it was like," said Oliver.

So what does NYC Media do besides hire friends and cronies and spend sums of money that are less than astronomical but are surely significant for a city in desperate financial straits, planning draconian cuts in frivolous areas like schoolteachers? Nobody seems to know. None of this enormous stock of footage of Hizzoner seems to be shown anywhere. His media profile is high enough that all those other outlets tracking him seem to have more than enough pictures and footage for their needs.

As Robbins wrote in his March 16 report:

Shortly after his re-election in November 2005, Mike Bloomberg decided to raise his national profile several notches. He began traveling widely, making speeches and accepting awards. We later learned this was mostly about setting the stage for a potential run for president. He ultimately passed on that race, without giving up hope that he might get lucky next time. But one of the interesting features of this publicity push was that—despite his own fabulous wealth—the mayor wasn't shy about using city resources to promote his image.

Starting in February 2006, the Bloomberg administration began assigning a team of video camera operators from the city's television station—NYC-TV—to follow the mayor on his far-flung voyages. The mayor flew on his private jet; the city crews followed behind on commercial airlines.

At taxpayer expense, city workers traveled to Shanghai, Beijing, Bali, Paris, London, Mexico City, Belfast, Berlin, and Jerusalem. They also covered his cross-country jaunts to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, Atlanta, Boca Raton, and Fort Lauderdale. The crews shot the mayor as well as he made his less glamorous, workaday trips to Washington and Albany.
This fascinating footage was then routed back home for use by local commercial television stations seeking to show viewers their mayor in action. The tapes also aired on one of the city's TV stations, where they ran in endless loops, similar to the way leaders are promoted in places like North Korea. Much of it was also posted for posterity on the mayor's website.

Hmm. Way back in 2005, of course, Mayor Mike may well have been thinking about the presidential run he officially never thought about, though it's still a stretch to imagine how this nonsense could have contributed to such an endeavor. And that presidential election has already been held. For that matter, so has another mayoral election, which the mayor, despite being term-limited out of, nevertheless managed to run in and win.

(The reelection race was a most curious affair, when all the conventional wisdom was that the mayor was unbeatable. Apparently only the campaign's own polls showed otherwise, at least until the actual surprisingly close election itself, which may explain why the campaign's principal strategy was to make sure everyone knew about the candidate's invincibility. Those election results made a lot of people wonder whether the outcome might have been different if everybody hadn't been so sure it was preordained.)

Now I don't want to beat up on Mayor Mike too much. As the rich and superrich go, he's practically a mensch. After all, some of the rich and superrich are Rupert Murdoch, and the Hunt Brothers (Bunky and, you know, the other one), and all those Mellons and Scaifes who eventually combined to give us Richard Mellon Scaife -- just to pick some random examples. But the mayor gets a free pass on a whole lot of stuff that puzzles me, like this NYC Media business.

And I offer this as a reminder that the old shibboleth about the advantage to rich people holding public office, that they won't be likely to rob you blind, is after all a shibboleth. Not that Mayor Mike stole anything here. But isn't there something eerily casual about the way he has set up the squandering of precious city resources on this nonsense? While lecturing us city dwellers about the need for fiscal prudence and austerity? Sure, the amounts involved are pocket change to a billionaire. But note whose pockets that change is coming out of.

Maybe it's just a case of the vaunted "CEO mentality." Mayor Mike is accustomed to thinking like a CEO, and what corporation would have the temerity to deprive its chief of a friendly little propaganda machine to make the world, or maybe just himself, think more highly of him? Come to think of it, we once had a president who, it was said, was going to show us how the government could be run on the CEO model. That turned out pretty well, didn't it?

KNOW YOUR BILLIONAIRE, USING THIS
"BILLIONAIRES' MULTIPHASIC PERSONALITY TEST" [draft]

[Editor's note: This test is still in the developmental stage, pending several rounds of corporate and foundation grants to refine it.]

Instructions to test-takers: Answer each test question by filling in the blank with the first word or phrase that comes to mind.

1. "I didn't get where I am today without _____[-ing] ________________."

2. "I didn't get where I am today by _____[-ing] _______________."

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