PressEthic

A foreign tourist couple approached me today on E 12th St. and asked how to take the bus to Harlem. The bus to Harlem? Why in the...

I said I didn't know, and that it was faster to take the train anyway.

"Yes, but you have heard the announcement?" the woman asked. The announcement? Oh, the announcement.

"You don't want to take the train, do you?" I asked.

Her eyes widened. "Nooooooo. No!" she barked.

Ok, that's one for Bloomberg's announcement keeping people off the trains.

Ultimately, I don't know if these terror announcements should be made. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

Kirsten Vala addresses here the PR stunt possibility of the Mayor's press conference. I think it's a dark but realistic possibility.

More specifically, the question is whether the announcement, based as it was on uncorroborated, unconfirmed, "specific yet noncredible" intelligence (emphasized as coming from Iraq mind you and if here you are reading 'give me a break' you are reading correctly) would have been made if there were not an upcoming mayoral election and if the President were not fending off myriad criticism from all sides.

Possibly not. Very, very possibly not.

Clearly Bush is trying to refocus the public's attention. (How about bias in that lead?)

Which means he's trying to divert attention away from his obvious current problems by rolling out the terror threats. (And the question is timing, not necessarily the veracity of the threats.)

I'm not slamming him here either. All Presidents do things like this. It's a very presidential thing to do. You don't get to the White House if your public manipulation skills are poorly. (Which is why I'll never make it - I'm always on the bum end of manipulation, I can't figure it out....)

Anyway, could the public actually believe that the Mayor would trump up terrorist threats to help his political campaign?

They could and maybe they should.

But we could put it differently. We could say that Mayor Bloomberg is trying to "refocus New Yorkers' attention on terrorism", rather than "trump up terrorist threats."

We could be more like the New York Times.