Covering Politics and Power in New York City, A Conversation
A New York City journalist and former candidate for office discusses how he sees politics in the city, and the implications of the power people hold.
Cities are the most local and personal expression of political power, yet they can be among the most complex. New York City is a telling example: its government structure is exceptionally elaborate with citywide positions that include the mayor and City Council, as well as borough-wide and offices at the local level. In fact, it may be more accurate to think of New York as its own country instead. The city’s almost eight and a half million residents, over $88 billion budget, and general role as an international hub for financial, media, real estate, and trade — along with a number of other economic sectors — only serves to underscore that fact.
In that sense, the mayor, the city’s chief executive, is similar to the president — often described as the “second most powerful job in the country,” for good reason. It is thus no surprise that every 12 years, when the mayor of the safely Democratic city is forced to step down due to term limits, the election of New York’s next leader is a hotly-contested affair. This year, the ongoing, interlocking health and economic crises and increased demands for racial and social justice will be formidable challenges for any of the over two dozen people who have thrown their hats in the ring — including people who could be the city’s first woman, Latinx, or openly gay mayor; the next mayor will need overwhelming sheer political might from their first day in office.
Power in the city is centralized in City Hall, and understanding and explaining that power and how it flows through the city — where it intersects, and its impact — can be a tricky task to accomplish. Still, it is a task that many advocates, watchdogs, and journalists seek to realize.
Ross Barkan is just one of those people. As a journalist and a former candidate for office, he centers power in his work. As he explains, his job is to explain power as he sees it, and he often asks one question repeatedly: how does this impact everyday people? “Writing about New York can be like writing about a country,” he says. I sat down to talk with him about power in America’s biggest city, and the current race to capture it. . This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you decide to make covering New York City your beat?
I grew up in New York City, so there’s a natural interest in what was going on around me, but I really became interested in New York City and how power works in my first journalism job, which was at a no-longer-existing newspaper called The Queens Tribune. I worked there for about a year, and I covered just about everything. I wrote about transit issues, crime, community boards, parks, just about everything imaginable they throw at you when you are a first-time reporter. I also wrote about politics, and I always had an interest in it, but it is something I didn’t know I wanted to write about seriously until I was covering local politicians and government.
I got to see how power worked and thinking about why things are the way they are. You see a bill become a law, you see policy change, but these things don’t just happen out of nothing, they don’t come from a void. There is a whole world, and these different forces that make policy possible and impact people’s lives. That’s always interested me. As a reporter and writer, I wanted to understand that better and better explain it for other people because I think journalism sometimes doesn’t do a good job of explaining issues to people.
You said that you want to explain these issues to people better. What are you doing now to try and achieve that goal?
Now, I have some freedom to write what I want. I can do straight journalism, investigative journalism, and opinion. Sometimes it can be fun to marry them, too. So what I do in my own writing — my journalism and my commentary — is tell people what I think based on my reporting. It’s like, I’ve done the reporting, I’ve spoken to people, and I’ve done the research; here’s my conclusion. I think that can be very liberating for journalists and can be very important because it’s hard to spend a lot of time around a beat and report on issues and not to come to some sort of conclusion about them.
I’m in a privileged position where I can tell people this is both what I think, and this is how it is. I see myself as someone who is trying to explain power as I see it through my reporting and trying to make it understandable for people, so it’s not obscure, it’s not confusing. I never want to intentionally confuse people, obscure issues, or limit my audience. I really try to write in a way where people who maybe are not experts can still be drawn in and still understand what I’m doing.
The New York City government is an extremely complex system with a number of political players, special interest groups, and tiers of institutional bodies, boards, and councils, and offices that control everything from schools to zoning to the city’s water supply . Do you think that provides more opportunities for you to do your work?
Yeah, for sure. I mean, New York is incredibly large and incredibly diverse, so of course. New York State has the second-largest state budget in the United States, and New York City’s budget alone is almost $90 billion. That’s a lot of money. You have a lot of money, you have a lot of people, you have a lot of elected officials, and you have a lot of interest groups. There are so many ways that power intersects, and power works. Writing about New York can be like writing about a country, and certainly, New York itself has a population larger than a small European country. I see it as my task to explore it, expose it, and explain it to regular people because the government does impact people’s lives every day, whether they know it or not.
How much power do you think mayors actually have to implement change?
Power is not diffuse; it is not decentralized in New York City. It is centralized in the mayor’s office. So even though there are a lot of laws controlled by the state, the mayor, in conjunction with the City Council, determines the direction of almost $90 billion. That’s always important to remember. The budget is enormous, and the mayor has a lot of say over how that money gets spent. For example, if Bill de Blasio had not been elected, parents of young children couldn’t send their children to universal pre-kindergarten. That program was created by the mayor. It was his priority; it was his greatest accomplishment, among some significant failures. It’s one prime example of why elections matter.
As we’re looking at this mayor’s race, pay attention to what they’re promising and what they want to do because it does matter. They have different experiences and different ambitions. It is very important for voters to understand that.
You once ran for a State Senate seat in Brooklyn. Although you didn’t win, how does that experience impact your understanding and coverage of politics?
It was incredibly fun but also incredibly hard. I don’t think people really understand just how hard it is. As a journalist and as a writer, it helped me understand how campaign finance works in a much more central way. The pressures of raising money are so severe for people who are in politics, and I saw firsthand just how much pressure there is to raise money. I saw how much money influences politics very directly because people with more money do tend to get more attention. That is the unfortunate reality of the political system as it is set up.
