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Excerpt: Politicians and the press

By Tom Plate

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Editor's Note: Tom Plate, former editorial pages editor at newspapers in New York and Los Angeles, teaches media and policy at UCLA, and writes a syndicated column on Asia. This is the final excerpt of three from his book, "Confessions of an American Media Man." Read Part 1 here; read Part 2 here.

Politicians are always trying to pimp journalists. And we journalists were always seducing and then abandoning them after we have used them up or exposed them.

It is a silly game that has little to do with making America work well. In fact, some of the most remarkable human beings you could ever want to meet in life are politicians. The interaction of politico and journalistico has got to be arguably one of the more significant human interactions in a working democracy, not to mention in aberrational psychology!

One notably colorful politician was former New York City mayor, Ed Koch. Ed was every bit as engrossing, charming and obnoxious in the flesh as he was on TV. And whenever the mayor would get angry at a Newsday editorial penned during my tenure as editorial page editor in New York (1986-89), I would suggest that that if he wanted to blow off steam, he just pick up the phone and blow it off on me.

But Koch had a great sense of humor, and often after calling me to complain, he would say: "Hey, by the way, there's a new Woody Allen movie opening tomorrow. Why don't you and I go see it, and afterwards we'll go for Chinese?" And sometimes, we did.

In other words, it was not personal. This was Koch's style and it was a style that was impossible not to enjoy.

And so one of my saddest moments, personally, was when New York Newsday decided to endorse his opponent, David Dinkins, in the Democratic Primary of 1988. To make matters worse, the decision was primarily my doing.

New York, the world's greatest city, had gotten extremely tense and nervous, especially over Jewish-African American relations, police violence against African Americans, and the epidemic of crime being committed by black youth. As is typical in politics, the number one, i.e. the mayor, unfairly bore the brunt of the blame for a problem much greater and complex than one person could instigate or fix. But precisely because Koch liked to put himself in the center of any and every storm -- or, if there was no storm, he would create one (if Koch could be likened to a sport, it probably would be roller derby or Australian football) -- he would get the heat whenever the political weather boiled over.

Newsday was the only New York paper with the balls to endorse Koch's primary opponent Dinkins, a career politician and the city's most prominent African-American establishment political figure. The problem was that the two pairs of balls in question were mine and my publisher's. In effect, it could be said that I betrayed Ed Koch. And self-interested betrayal is, alas, at the heart of the relationship between politicians and media people.

At that time, we were convinced that Koch, a three-term mayor looking for his fourth go-round, had had enough. The only way to get Koch out was to vote Dinkins in. There was no other way. Newsday decided to go for Dinkins to get Koch out of City Hall before his mouth torched New York -- and made the decision even before the formal endorsement-process interview.

Nonetheless, Koch was brilliant at the interview session at our Third Avenue Manhattan office, and after the interview asked me, almost plaintively: "Tom, do I really still have a chance with Newsday?"

I could not tell him that we had in fact decided to endorse Dinkins. So, yes, I lied. "You have a chance."

This is the problem, of course, with having developed -- or at least accepted -- a sort of personal relationship with the politician you cover. Koch lost the primary election and was finished with elective politics. I have not seen Ed Koch since. But I think I owe him an apology. I should never have gone to the movies with him as long as I had that job.

Excerpted from Tom Plate's "CONFESSIONS OF AN AMERICAN MEDIA MAN: What they Don't Tell You at Journalism School," which has just been published by Marshall Cavendish Editions.

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