Friday’s Headlines: Budget Blues Edition

The big story yesterday was Mayor de Blasio’s preliminary Fiscal Year 2022 budget, which will be smaller that New Yorkers have come to expect. The budget calls for another $1.3 billion in agency cuts, on top of the $2-plus billion in cuts that we’re still living with in the current year’s budget.

• The Post highlighted the “long-term fiscal nightmare” of COVID-19.
• The News and the Times played up the immediate revenue shortfall due to the pandemic.
• Gothamist called the decrease “staggering.”

We’ll have full coverage of the street safety implications later today.

In other news:

• Gov. Cuomo has been teasing all sorts of goodies in his ongoing State-of-the-State addresses. On Thursday, he once again hyped two long-standing dreams — expanded capacity at Penn Station and a new Port Authority bus terminal (WSJ). The NY Post was a bit dismissive. And amNY had it, too.
• A food delivery worker was victimized twice — first by the driver who struck him with his or her car and then by a mob that pounced on him when he tried to take a picture of the car that hit him. The Daily News covered the mob beat-down, but barely devoted any coverage to the first crime: the likely recklessness of the driver. But that was better than the Post, which didn’t even mention that the worker had been struck by the driver.
• Multiple outlets covered Andrew Yang’s all-transit mayoral launch on Thursday. Streetsblog played up a weird answer Yang gave on pedestrian safety. Mark Hallum at amNY played up Yang’s support for city control of the subway and his promise to make “extreme poverty a thing of the past.” The Times did it as an interactive photo and video feature. The Post also played up the anti-poverty pledge (but probably just to mock it).
• And everyone covered the fact that the state Attorney General sued the city in federal court over the NYPD’s misconduct and brutality. (NY Times, Post, NYDN, amNY, Gothamist and even little Streetsblog).
• The Post is so busy looking for conflict in the “battle” between suffering street vendors and suffering mom-and-pop restaurant owners that it didn’t even realize that the subtext of its “food war” story was that the city should help both suffering entrepreneurs … by taxing the rich more (not that the Tabloid of Record would ever advocate for that).