Hardball in New York

When New York Times reporter Alan Finder wanted to check on a city survey that had found an unprecedented 83 percent of New York streets "acceptably clean," city officials refused to discuss the methodology of the rating system or even to name the employees who had conducted the survey. The reporter was not surprised. In New York these days, he says, "It's clearly more difficult to get information from city agencies. Sometimes it discourages reporters -- myself included. At other times you go out and you get your story anyway." In this case, the Times editors sent Finder to Washington, D.C. for training on how to apply a widely used rating system. His own survey of 800 city streets, published in April, gave New York a much lower grade than it had given itself.

In three and a half years under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, New York's metro reporters have found agencies and departments uncooperative if not downright hostile. Even getting basic information, interviews, or public records has become a strenuous exercise. "I have never experienced anything like this," says Village Voice veteran Wayne Barrett. "City agencies don't return phone calls. They cannot answer questions without clearing it with city hall."

And as Giuliani takes credit for slumping crime rates across the city, reporters and photographers say they are less than welcome where crime does occur. Daily News reporters alone, according to a March 6 article in the paper, recounted eleven confrontations with the police "in the last six months." Keeping crime out of the news may help sustain the image of a safer New York. But "That's not the way democracy is supposed to run," says Gabe Pressman, a local TV newscaster and president of the New York Press Club.

In the face of obstacles, news organizations have scrambled, even sued for information about the doings of the city government. Baseball metaphors abound. "This administration plays hardball," says Leonard Levitt, Newsday's outspoken police columnist. "The only way to deal with it is to play hardball back." So what's the score?

Last September, the Daily News sued the administration over non-compliance with New York State's Freedom of Information Law.

The case dates to January 1995, when reporter David Lewis asked the Department of Investigation (DOI) the city's internal watchdog - for its 1994 final reports. Although similar reports had been released before, the DOI now refused to do so and, after the Daily News appealed the denial in June 1995, sent heavily redacted material. "They withheld names of agencies, officials, details of investigations. Some conclusions were entirely missing," says Lewis, who notes that he did not ask for confidential information about ongoing investigations, only for details in the case of convictions.

On April 23, more than two years after the initial request, a state judge ruled that the administration withheld more information than permissible. The law "provides for maximum access, not maximum withholding," the judge wrote. The New York Times also settled a suit, filed in March, and got the names of employees in an allegedly mismanaged city-run shelter for battered women. In July, the Daily News sued again - this time for the street addresses of pistol license holders, which are "public records," according to the police department's own application forms.

But are victories in the courtroom going to help reporters on the streets? Eve Burton, vice-president and assistant general counsel for the Daily News, points to the long-term effect. "This is about the Constitution," she says. "If you don't protect your rights day to day, you're going to lose them." Burton believes that the recent victory over the administration has "greased the wheel" and will help reporters with other city agencies as well.

Yet, three months after the court decision, Lewis is still waiting for about half of the 1994 reports. Nor has the DOI complied with his requests for 1995 and 1996 reports. Lewis says that, after the suit, "we still get the same kind of resistance at other city agencies as before."

Moreover, news organizations cannot or will not litigate whenever there is an incident. Suits cost money. And George Freeman, the assistant general counsel at The New York Times, says that going through the courts "takes so long that by the time you get access, no one cares about the story anymore. Often we tell our reporters to use their skills in order to get the information."

Given such limitations, news organizations pick their battles. At rapper Biggie Smalls's tumultuous funeral on March 18, Julia Campbell, a New York Times freelancer, was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct. A police report charged she had incited the crowd and pushed a police officer. Campbell insists that, throughout the incident, "I acted as a professional." And Freeman, the Times attorney who worked on the case, says a local TV news tape of the incident "showed her being arrested without a provocation on her part. A tear-gas canister went off and she asked what was going on."