David Dinkins and New York City Politics: Race, Images, and the Media

PREFACE

PREFACE Journalist Robert Turner once asserted, “Mayors are chronicled by novelists but ignored by political scientists.”1 I am a political scientist who has spent most of his career watching and writing about mayors. Yet I do agree that mayors are “character actors of politics.”2 They are certainly not the lead actors or stars of the American political theater. Occasionally, a city mayor appears on the political stage, attracts a large following, and is able to speak to the American people at large. Richard J. Daley of Chicago , Coleman Young of Detroit, Sam Yorty of Los Angeles, and Rudolph Giuliani of New York are examples of mayors who achieved national visibility. This book is about the political image of David Dinkins, the first African American mayor of New York City. It does not attempt to explore all aspects of New York City politics. Politics is just part of what is happening between a political leader and constituencies. Obviously the most attentive constituency is the media. This project began as an attempt to understand the media’s interpretation of what can now be called the “Dinkins interregnum” between white mayors of the city. This research project began as an attempt to deconstruct journalists’ understandings of the politics of New York City. As I delved further into the writing process, I realized that I needed to include more contextual information about the political career of David Dinkins and the media’s reaction to him. For this I gained much insight from psychology, sociology, advertising, and social construction theory scholars. So the story that is developed in this book is one of media meanings and perceptions. I have always wondered how media stories are constructed and why x DAVID DINKINS AND NEW YORK CITY POLITICS certain events are highlighted and others are ignored. I confess to being envious of journalists’ access to mayors. They enjoy a proximity advantage over political scientists that allows them to see mayors at their best and their worst. Reporters behave similar to emergency medical services (EMS) personnel during political events. They rush to the scene, interview people, and sometimes make suggestions to actors as the event unfolds. Because they are close to the action, they collect telling quotes from politicians. Accordingly, their written reports, notes, and broadcast selections matter because they are the basis for public discourse about city life. It has been said that journalists write the first draft of history. This is true, and there is much to be learned from this draft. In my interviews with reporters, I found most of them knowledgeable and modest. Many were particularly conscious of their influence on the discourse on race. Although race is an attractive subject for editors and reporters, it does not rank with sex and financial scandals as a crowd puller for newspaper readers, television watchers, and radio listeners. Nevertheless, race stories do sell newspapers and attract viewers and listeners. When a black person is elected mayor of a major city, editors and reporters are given a cornucopia of possible story lines. There are a variety of angles to explore and new frontiers to examine. Having studied several black mayors, I began to appreciate the role that print media plays in the construction of images of these mayors. I wondered if it played the same role with white mayors. It does but not with same lead lines or angles. During my research former mayor David Dinkins offered two admonishments for my study. First, he said, “You historians. You have to rely on news clips and interviews and what not, and it gets to be a function of whom did you talk to [and] what did you read. . . . If you are not part of it, you were not here. How would you know? You take what you are told.”3 I agree with the mayor. I was not there. However, history can only approximate political events and suggest possible interpretations . Retelling rarely provides unchallengeable explanations for an event. Historians cannot talk to all the participants, and even if they could there is always the possibility they would get different interpretations of the same event. We who write history try to collect as much data and as many impressions as possible Preface xi and then place the work in the academic marketplace. Accordingly , this book is just one interpretation of the Dinkins years, and as an outsider I may never know what I have...