WPIX Long Island Reporter Rob Hoell Eats Marcia Kramer’s Lunch

Here’s the piece about the Prospect Park West bike lane that ran on the Channel 11 News last night.

While it would have been great to see more of the data showing the success of the redesign, WPIX Long Island reporter Rob Hoell gets a lot of the good political details into the segment: The role of former DOT commissioner Iris Weinshall and involvement of Weinshall’s husband, Senator Chuck Schumer; the fact that Weinshall and Schumer live on the street that has been redesigned; the connections between Schumer and Jim Walden, the attorney at the white-shoe law firm Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher who is working “pro bono” on behalf of bike lane opponents.

It would have been a cinch to connect all these dots a week ago, before CBS2’s chief political correspondent, Marcia Kramer, filed her latest hatchet job on the PPW redesign. But not one shred of information about the political machinations behind this high-profile bike lane fight has ever made it into a Marcia Kramer segment. Why is that?

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

Do You Walk in NYC? Then You Don’t Matter to CBS2’s Marcia Kramer

By Ben Fried |
Kramer explains the horror of giving pedestrians more space. No one warps a two-minute segment about New York City pedestrian improvements quite like CBS2 reporter Marcia Kramer. The venerable TV newser, who’s perfected the art of windshield perspective journalism, fired a salvo against the city’s public plaza program on the 6 o’clock broadcast yesterday. This […]

The 2011 NYC Streetsies, Part 3

By Ben Fried |
The third installment of the Streetsies concludes 2011 for Streetsblog NYC, but we still have a few days left in our year-end pledge drive. Please drop a donation in our bucket to help support Streetsblog and Streetfilms in 2012. Have a great New Year everyone. We’ll see you back here on January 3. Elected Official […]

The ‘Burbs: Extremely Safe or Especially Dangerous?

By Charles Komanoff |
Long Island is safe. So safe that police recruits are flocking to the island’s two counties, according to an article in last Tuesday’s New York Times: High pay coupled with low crime rates make a coveted Long Island job “like winning the lottery in law enforcement,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of law and police […]

Behind the Scenes of a Marcia Kramer Hit Piece

By Noah Kazis |
Ever wondered what goes into the making of a Marcia Kramer hit piece, those nearly-perfected hatchet jobs on whatever DOT safety improvement is on her radar that week? We got to watch Kramer in action at Wednesday’s transportation committee meeting as she gathered footage for her most recent attack on the city’s plaza program. We’ve […]