New York Daily News

The Mayor’s Filthy Salt Habit

Mayor Bloomberg launched a health initiative last year aimed at reducing the city’s salt consumption leading to such memorable headlines as the New York Post‘s:

BLOOMY TO NYC: HOLD THE SALT

The other New York rag, the Daily News, quoted Bloomberg on the new salt initiative:

People are eating too much salt, me included. After this, we can keep going. People don’t like to have somebody come in and tell them what to do, but afterward, if it turns out to be something that’s in their interest, they sure as heck say thank you.

Michael Barbaro of the New York Times though gets the real skinny a year after this initiative is launched: the Mayor himself “dumps salt on almost everything, even saltine crackers.” Barbaro apparently has been watching the mayor in dining situations closely – even counting the number of dashes of salt applied to his pizza: 6. (Salt on pizza?! Really?). This paragraph is representative of the piece:

But Mr. Bloomberg, 67, likes his popcorn so salty that it burns others’ lips. (At Gracie Mansion, the cooks deliver it to him with a salt shaker.) He sprinkles so much salt on his morning bagel “that it’s like a pretzel,” said the manager at Viand, a Greek diner near Mr. Bloomberg’s Upper East Side town house.

There’s nothing wrong with a man – who admits his own faults – attempting to curb unhealthy behavior. But the many micro-initiatives to make New Yorkers healthier do end up getting on my nerves in a manner that makes me more sympathetic to Jacob Weisberg’s Slate piece.

[Image by the Center for American Progress licensed under Creative Commons.]

Sexual harassment attorney accused of sexual harassment!! With kinky details enclosed – it’s a perfect tabloid story. Both New York papers took a similar angle for the lede…

Jose Martinez’s lede from the New York Daily News:

The founder of a Manhattan law firm dedicated to empowering women is a chauvinist pig with pierced genitals who wore a bondage collar at work…an explosive new suit charges. [Ellipses added for dramatic effect.]

Under the headline “ANTI-BIAS CRUSADER HAS ‘KINK’ IN ARMOR“, Dan Mangan’s New York Post lede is virtually identical:

A leading lower Manhattan women’s-rights lawyer watched porn at his desk, discussed his “pierced genitalia” and wears a “slave” collar at work as part of a sadomasochistic relationship with his girlfriend…a shocking sex- harassment suit alleges. [Ellipses added for dramatic effect.]

I personally have seen how the Daily News and Post have made up bogus facts to bolster their stories, so I don’t know what to make of this. Most important, their ledes are dishonest – while factually accurate. From a distance – where I am, it’s kind of funny to see the detailed allegations laid out with the disclaimer briefly hanging onto the sentence at the end – but for those involved it must be infuriating.