Wednesday’s Headlines: Homeless Media Circus Edition

The local tabs got another day out of the ongoing battle between the MTA and Mayor de Blasio over solving what one side says is an intractable homeless problem and the other side says isn’t intractable, but is a problem.

The Daily News was, of course, the happiest, because New York’s Hometown Paper’s overstated wood on Tuesday — “Next stop, purgatory” — ended up in Gov. Cuomo’s hands hours later, as Big Dog Excelsior Car Guy decided to wade into the issue (the Post also covered, minus a reference to the News’s front page!)

The Tabloid of Record was the dominant of the two hyperbole machines, adding stories on how Cuomo’s only proffered solution appears to be more cops (which is like curing obesity by buying bigger pants), how Mayor de Blasio proposed kicking homeless people off the train one stop before the terminus, and, finally, a third story that described the 2 train as a “shanty town,” which is straight up not cool, given the history of that term.

In other odd editing choices, amNY used the best line of the day in the headline, but buried the line itself — an MTA official telling Mayor de Blasio to “get out of his car and into the subways so he can see what is really going on” – until the last sentence of the story.

The Times sought some middle ground, finally giving a little ink to the human toll — homeless people are in the subway because they “have avoided dormitory-style city shelters where the virus has spread rapidly and killed dozens of people.”

In other news:

• Tuesday’s Blue Angels flyover — the subject of our editor’s ire the other day — was roundly criticized for another reason: too many people ignored social distancing rules just to watch the planes screech overhead and dump pollution on us (NY Post). Gothamist’s headline said it all, “New Yorkers Overwhelmingly Uninspired By Military Flyover.” But Todd Maisel at amNY played it straight.
• Restaurants could get a boost from Mayor de Blasio’s promise of creating 100 miles of open streets (Eater). Hell, it works in Lithuania! (The Guardian)
• And, finally, there was lots of coverage of (and tweets about) the Blue Angels “tribute” to New York heroes, which amounted to lots of sound and fury signifying nothing (OUTLETS), but our own Julianne Cuba had the best, sparse, Hemingway-esque take: