Covering (and Working for) Bloomberg

 

Mr. Goldman is Bloomberg’s man on Mr. Bloomberg. For 10 years, his assignment has included chronicling Mr. Bloomberg’s ups and downs for the global news service the mayor founded. Now, as Mr. Bloomberg’s third term wobbles through a rough start, with his approval ratings the lowest they have been in eight years and news coverage increasingly critical, Mr. Goldman’s task has gotten trickier: maintaining his down-the-middle style during one of the toughest periods of the mayor’s administration.

Mr. Goldman’s job is inherently problematic: cover the mayor too positively and risk looking like a shill; cover the mayor too negatively and risk the ire of the man who pays his salary.

“I can’t think of a more uncomfortable position to be in,” said Joyce Purnick, the author of “Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics” and a former City Hall bureau chief for The New York Times. “I’m not suggesting any direct pressure to write a certain way or cover something or not cover something or ask something or not ask something. I don’t think Henry would put up with that. But the pressure to just stand up straight and keep things objective — it’s just got to be very, very difficult. I don’t know how he does it.”

While much of Mr. Goldman’s work is praised by his colleagues, Bloomberg News’s coverage of the mayor has come in for some criticism. Last month, an article in Editor & Publisher magazine criticized the New York news media for the way it covered Mr. Bloomberg’s handling of the December blizzard that left the city paralyzed. Bloomberg News, the article reported, “totally ignored the intense debate over the mayor’s whereabouts as 20 inches of snow closed in on New York.”

“The news service,” said the article, written by Allan Wolper, “behaved as if City Hall had sent over a city editor to make sure the majority owner of its company wouldn’t get into trouble during any of his snow days.”

Mr. Goldman, 61, has covered some of the central controversies of the mayor’s tenure: his successful push to win an extension of term limits, and his unsuccessful appointment of Cathleen P. Black as schools chancellor. But Mr. Goldman’s coverage of Mr. Bloomberg is generally in connection with news events, rather than investigatory work.

Mr. Goldman’s portfolio includes topics other than the mayor. Bloomberg News describes him as a state and local municipal finance reporter, and says that differentiates him from other reporters based at City Hall. Mr. Goldman declined to be interviewed for this article, but in 2002, he told American Journalism Review, “It’s a difficult assignment.”

“I’ll stick to documents, what he says, what he does and what others say — and will do it faithfully,” he said in the interview. “In this job, I’m going to be a lot more conservative writing about Bloomberg, because we’d be idiots not to think about what our readers think.”

A spokesman for Bloomberg News declined to comment, but all of Mr. Goldman’s articles that mention Mr. Bloomberg include a matter-of-fact disclosure: “The mayor is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg L.P.”

The mayor has also acknowledged a potentially awkward dynamic: at a holiday party in his first term, Mr. Bloomberg, who has been known to tease Mr. Goldman at news conferences about their relationship, presented him with an autographed rock, described as the “Rock and a Hard Place Award.”

“We view Henry like any other reporter,” said Stu Loeser, Mr. Bloomberg’s chief spokesman. A former deputy of Mr. Loeser’s, John Gallagher, said Mr. Goldman could “definitely be tough, and being in the position he’s in, I never felt we benefited from it.”

“I would occasionally just think,” he added, “?‘This makes no difference.’?”

Mr. Goldman has arguably even lost out on occasion because he works for Bloomberg News. The mayor’s office tends to dole out exclusives to other outlets, and Mr. Goldman has never landed an exclusive interview with Mr. Bloomberg.

“I don’t think his employer gave him any breaks,” said Frankie Edozien, a former City Hall reporter for The New York Post. “Certainly it wasn’t evident, because I was getting things that he wasn’t getting.”