Breslin this final time rides his “tabloid horse,” as Politico dubbed it, into another battle of great importance. He rides it to Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street was being born. And once more, his words would be the ones that stood out. They appeared in the Daily News four times. On Sunday, October 9, 2011, the headline spanned the full page:
SPIRIT OF SELMA IS REBORN ON BROADWAY
In the morning, I climb the steps out of the subway and onto lower Broadway, whose new history is starting. The outcry today is from the 99% who start this day of work against the 1% whose rich comforts include acceptable theft.
The future of today’s Broadway inherits the past that suddenly is living so fully in memory. I am on Broadway, abuzz with buses and cabs and chauffeurs driving people to work.
For the unemployed, the jobs are nonexistent.
The contrast comes at a time of rising national opposition to Wall Street. The politicians have not recognized that the gathering against the government of the rich and uncaring is only the start of a national outcry.
They all cannot see the start of a future that will make history.
The crowds today at a small park on Broadway and Liberty are perhaps the most pleasant, uplifting scene that we’ve had around this city for so long.
They set up life in a park on Broadway and then had a march of great democratic health. . . .
The small place where all this started is Selma, Ala., the place historians call the basis for all the rallies and marches that those in New York have now recognized as the same outcry for change. . . .
I now go to a notebook stored in a closet and take out this half a century later. I get pained thinking of how long I have been out on the streets in this business. But I was there in 1965, and this is something I found . . . Patricia Anne Dossiage, 10, stood in the red dirt and twitched her toes . . . and looked at the people walking on the road.
“I know why you marchin’,” she said. “I know it good.”
Fifty years later on Broadway the issues are different, but the cause remains the same. One percent of the country gets the best of everything. The rest gets the shaft. Funny how some things never change.
On Sunday, November 6, he began again at the subway station, this time descending.
I am starting the day reading the paper while I’m walking to the subway to go downtown to cheer a new gathering of the Wall Street protesters. The entire city is just starting to be convinced that these crowds are going to change things and forever. Just follow the numbers and energy of the people.
Still, the people you thought would be first to tell the country all about this are news people. But they have stayed seated in the office. These desks in a warm office save some newsmen from going out to the site where they would have to get cold and push through the crowds of protesters. That is work—and they are not so busy at that.
Instead, they’re telling another kind of story.
The New York Post had a front-page headline on Thursday for the city:
“Enough! Post Editorial. Mr. Mayor, it is time to reclaim Zuccotti Park—and New York City’s dignity.”
The paper’s ownership comes out of Australia and London. The owner is Rupert Murdoch, who is friendly with New York politicians who fall down when they get a glimpse of his money.
On Friday, the New York Post runs a front page that screams:
“Occupy Wall Street animals go wild . . .”
I am standing in the middle of Eighth Ave. reading the start of this paper. I became busy reading other parts while standing there. A bus had to stop dead or leave me in the same condition.
Breslin then captures how the paper tells its readers what is happening: pages of fights and people being called morons. This is not, he assures his readers, what is actually happening.
. . . actually walking around Zuccotti Park you find the scene pleasant and moderate. The large crowds coming here now are filled with children walking in front of their parents.
It is in this context of the whole that he includes some of the uglier elements of the protest. And then he closes the column with a woman from the East Village, knitting, as she does each day until it is too dark to knit.
This is molestation? Lawlessness? These are animals? Morons?
That’s another kind of story. All right.
The mood in the news media and in official New York was as unsympathetic as Breslin was understanding. In 1991, on his way to Crown Heights, he starts his column looking for the taxi that will take him to the riot. This time he took the subway to the protests, which had been marked at times by some bottle and rock throwing, some knocking down of mailboxes and trashcans and some running through the streets, but on the whole, it is a peaceful protest crowded into a park, hemmed in by steel and glass towers, the media, and the police in blue uniforms, their bosses in white shirts with gold bars or stars on them.
As the nonprofit news organization Gothamist noted on October 16, “Famed New York City journalist Jimmy Breslin, who has spent his long, storied career highlighting the plight of the common man, has visited Zuccotti Park and mingled with the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Not surprisingly, he approves. Calling the protests a ‘human rights movement’ that’s ‘threatening to become historic,’ Breslin writes in the Daily News, ‘Each day, the crowd grew larger and there came a moment in a city newsroom when somebody picked up his head and wondered if they couldn’t begin to cover the News.’ ”
On Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and his views on the park, the news outlet notes, “Breslin uses his plain, matter-of-fact style to cut the politician to the quick,” and quotes his column:
He has an arrogance that, as always with the rich, comes with the poorest knowledge of people. I don’t know how the city made him mayor. It also turns out that his lady friend is on the board of the real estate company that handles Zuccotti Park, and that wants to push and con the protesters out of the park. Great surprise! The mayor wants the protesters to beat it out of the park. Bloomberg seems to stand with the people in New York who don’t stand for all of the city.
And that detail about the mayor’s girlfriend is all you need to know about Jimmy Breslin, reporter, hovering on the northern edge of 80 years old, a newsman from the age of 18. Not counting The Flash, of course.
“Yes. I remember how excited he was by what they were doing when I talked with him after he filed the column,” recalls Kevin Convey, who was the Editor-in-Chief of the Daily News that year and who, with senior Managing Editor Stuart Marques, were Breslin’s editors.
“And that was distinctly different from the prevailing tut-tut tone of the media at the time. I was happy to have that viewpoint, and Jimmy, in our paper, especially as the Post was ripping the protestors.”
Just as there were friends who worried when Jimmy was writing for suburban Newsday—opining that writing for the suburbs was a mistake—there were several good friends who were concerned that Breslin was continuing to write at all at this point. They were concerned, perhaps understandably, that age and injury had taken away more than his fast ball.
“Pretty sure I edited that column. Truthfully, I didn’t know Jimmy prior to 2010-2011, so maybe he had degenerated by that time in a way I could not measure. I attributed whatever he had lost off the fast ball to age,” Convey said. But it was what he had that mattered, not what he might have lost, he added.
If they are very good, major league pitchers can regularly put fastballs across the plate at 90-plus miles an hour as measured by the radar gun. Hurling it from the mound to the plate at more than 100 miles an hour is much rarer. And the analogy is probably as good as any for journalism—where there are plenty of very good pitchers, but only a few who can regularly put it across the plate with a speed well north of 100. That was Breslin at his absolute no-hitter best.
But here we are in 2011, and Convey was still seeing a lot of speed on the ball. And that speed came with the kind of knowledge that a Willie Mays could bring to the game—a player who, as Murray Kempton pointed out, had played the game before some of the pitchers he faced were born.
So Breslin, who had been playing for decades before these protestors were born, dug out his notebooks from his coverage of the marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965.
Fifty years later on Broadway, the issues are different, but the cause remains the same. One percent of the country gets the best of everything. The rest gets the shaft. Funny how some things never change.
Joe Pompeo raised a question in his article in Politico on October 10: “We wondered who Breslin thought he was writing for in the tabloids today, and whether he thought his readers shared his sympathy with the protesters, so we called.
“‘You got me there,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. I hope they read what I write.’ ”
Pompeo puts you there much as Breslin might. And he quotes enough of Breslin to follow J.B.’s thoughts on how he covers a story and what the other coverage was like.
“‘A lot of these places,’ [Breslin] said, referring to newspapers, ‘even when they’re finally gonna come around, they say, “You gotta get the other side.” Well, there is no fuckin’ other side to this.’ ”
Whether the protest, even as it spread across the nation, was a full-blown success, a failure, or something in the middle, was a matter for continued debate.
How to cover news, and how to cover the crime of not covering it properly, is, for Jimmy Breslin, not such a matter. Tell the truth. And make it present. Breslin explained that to his readers one day shortly after Nelson Rockefeller died in 1979.
Chen Ping—who was also called Bo Ghee Lo, which was said by Breslin to mean “newspaperman” in Cantonese—pushed a shopping cart with eight different Chinese language newspapers to the Gold Coin Restaurant as he flapped one copy like a pigeon in the night air of the always busy midtown canyons. It was in the best, time-honored tradition of the New York newsie and he was one of the last, he and Firpo, the newsie down in the canyons of Wall Street whose name came from the fighter who almost beat Dempsey and who, it was reported, flew through the ropes and on his way down to defeat landed on a journalist’s typewriter. Bo Ghee shouted in the present tense and flapped the thin pages as he wheeled bundles of them in a shopping cart to Bill Chan’s restaurant at 994 Second Avenue, just ten blocks up from the Daily News Building, a gilded shrine to alcohol and New York–style Chinese food where Breslin and the editors of the paper would drink in deep thoughts.
“People don’t want to fool around, they want big news. They don’t want nothing to happen, make them read.”
“Like what?”
“War.”
“And?”
“Big Guy Die.”
“Make people read.”