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It’s “Orwellian” when those in power say that things are the way they want the public to perceive them with no respect for history or the way things really are. We’ve seen “Orwellian” in eras past and likely we will see it again to disguise the non-completion of Atlantic Yards. It was “Orwellian” back in 1986 when it was proudly announced to the NYC public that the Jacob Javits Conference Center had been completed relatively on budget ($487 million vs. $375 million) and on schedule (only two years late) ignoring the fact that the completed center was only half as large as what was planned when construction was begun. But now it seems as if we are living with “Orwellian” as we have never before.
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Noticing New York readers may recall that we once considered Ms. Purnick’s Bloomberg biography “Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics” in the context of how it expunged from his portrait depiction of “significantly errant Bloombergian megadevelopment” and particularly Atlantic Yards, notwithstanding Ms. Purnick’s having been thoroughly briefed on that megadevelopment’s outrages. See: Saturday, October 3, 2009, What Purnick Has Purged: The Bloomberg Bio Mysteriously Missing Atlantic Yards.
The National Notice article is a follow-up to an earlier National Notice article about how, in much the same way, the New York Times started running stories proclaiming that Bloomberg was a champion of the First Amendment and free speech in connection with its coverage of his eviction of the OWS protesters even though the Times history of coverage on Bloomberg in this regard is very much to the contrary. (See: Sunday, November 20, 2011, Question of Truth For The Times: The Meme of Bloomberg as Champion of the First Amendment & Free Speech, Firmly Planted Before OWS Eviction.) It definitely seems as if Ms. Purnick was trying to fall in line with this flattering revisionism offered by the Times rather than stand by her own reporting in the previously published biography.
There is always a concern that biographies written by biographers getting special access to their subjects will be too adulatory. The prior Noticing New York article included observations that Ms. Purnick’s book was mostly admiring of Bloomberg. Usually however the problem envisioned with respect to such bias is that the biographer will be too deferential to its subject when the biography comes out, not that the biographer, due to an ongoing deference to the subject of their book, will subsequently act as if the book they wrote no longer says what it said when they wrote it.
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Ms. Purnick, alas, is no Robert Caro.
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