I Guess Four Billion Dollars Isn't a Detail....

Repost in full from No Land Grab:

April 3, 2007

"...every last detail and development has been fought over bitterly."

In today's Times, Metropolitan Editor Joe Sexton asserts that "every last detail and development has been fought over bitterly" in regards to the Atlantic Yards project (link).

If that is true, then:

• Why did NY approve the project without reviewing a real financial plan?
• Why does no one know the real cost to the taxpayers?
• Why has the Times never reported that Atlantic Yards would be the densest residential community in the nation?
• Why hasn't the Times shown a scale image of the project in relation to the existing neighborhood?
• And why does the Times repeatedly make mistakes like reporting on the "city and state approved" "rezoning" and "reconstruction of Atlantic Yards," which includes a "rooftop park." [These errors are only from the last 4 1/2 months, including March, 2007 when there was only one significant Times story covering Atlantic Yards.]

Just because the Times lacks the courage to cover the largest single-source private project in the history of NYC, doesn't mean that the pubic is done.

Anyway, who's feeling bitter? We're laughing our asses off, watching revenues drop at "The Paper of Record," while the graying institution is wringing its hands over the effect of the blogosphere and side-stepping a story that is shaping up to be the poster-child for reform in Albany.

We're just mouthing off here, credit should go to Norman Oder at Atlantic Yards Report for staying on top of the issue.

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...and none of this, at all has to do with the fact that Ratner is a developing partner with the Times, which looks like its trying to shift its assets out of its ailing newspaper, in fact speeding up its own demise by using it as a tool to advance agendas.

Curiously like the flash of life that comes over someone just before they die -the hallmark of a doomed institution is construction of a grand, opulent "headquarters". Some examples:

• The Sears Tower. Built when Sears, once the retail/catalog king of America was in serious decline.
• Delhi as the capital of the Raj - finally completed in the 1920s ....two decades later Briton's rule over India would be at an end.
• Versailles...well you get the picture.

Like nolandgrab, I look forward to the day when the New York Times gets its comeuppance. In my eyes it has never had any credibility - it intentionally masked the crimes of the Bolsheviks - but I am glad more and more people feel as i do the new york times is increasingly irrelevant.

Oh and one other thing...John Sexton is either remarkably incompetent - to miss a story that the biggest project in New York City history - that could potentially cost taxpayers billions - was approved without even seeing a business plan...or being deceitful.

We know that many New York Time's staff is remarkably incompetent and/or unethical - I speculate that the Daily News and New York Times hire reporters because of, not in spite of those facts, but which one is John?

Is he incompetent? As Metro Editor, to miss this story seems extraordinary.
Or is he unethical? Where he knew about it, but the 'powers that be' want little fat Bruce's project to go through.

The extraordinary claims he makes - that every last detail has been fought over, sounds like a PR release from Forest City - a comment that has no basis in reality, that they know is a lie, but that lie can drown out the truth since the big media outlets repeat it, indicates to me that this was a calculate response and a conscious effort to ignore the story.