Media Watch

Another day, another news story, another media outlet wielding an old saw like this one: High gas prices are a political problem for the president because Americans "love their cars." American car culture, fed by everything from our sprawled-out landscape to a daily bombardment of car ads, is also kept alive by journalists’ use of a set of hackneyed narratives. Beyond clichés, these storylines represent a collection of myths that shore up an unhealthy, unequal, and ultimately unsustainable car system.

At the beginning of this week, the newsroom at the New York Post lobbed a grenade at NYC's bike-share plans, and right on cue, the editorial staff followed up with more bike-share-bashing today.

Ever wondered what goes into the making of a Marcia Kramer hit piece, those nearly-perfected hatchet jobs on whatever DOT safety improvement is on her radar that week? We got to watch Kramer in action at Wednesday's transportation committee meeting as she gathered footage for her most recent attack on the city's plaza program.

Should a pedestrian-friendly Times Square serve as a model for other American cities? Who would ask such a thing? Certainly not the real New Yorkers who constitute the city's hard-bitten press corps.

More evidence that the Post's campaign to vilify NYC cyclists and discredit bike infrastructure is mainly just a personal vendetta...

Living in this metropolis of coastal elites, it can sometimes feel like you inhabit a different universe than the America where paranoid skepticism of the president's citizenship runs rampant, and giving people the option of getting around safely without a car is viewed as a U.N. plot to subjugate us all. But New Yorkers do have the Donald to remind us that birthers live among us, and we also have Steve "the Cuozz" Cuozzo to show us that insane Tea Party-style conspiracy theories about livability aren't just for the crazies in Albemarle County, Virginia. In fact, our local data-denier gets guaranteed column inches in the New York Post.

If you want to get the attention of the New York news media, the formula apparently goes something like so. Step one: turn a personal pet peeve into a matter of public record by filing a baseless lawsuit. Step two: watch reporters beat a path to your door.

Clarence posted these clips from yesterday's family ride on Prospect Park West, asking us to imagine the street as bike lane opponents would have it -- with only a striped, un-protected lane to separate cyclists from traffic. I can't really picture families biking on such a street. Can you?

The media loves drama, of course. As your high school English teacher explained it, if Hamlet doesn’t get pissed about his dad’s murder or if Atticus Finch doesn’t step up to defend a black man falsely accused -- that is, if somebody doesn’t say no, you’ve got no story. So the vociferous opposition of a handful of people to a handful of bike lane projects in New York City has been dramatized, through a series of news stories and op-eds, into a full-blown citizens’ backlash against the complete streets movement.