Errors and Omissions

Duany vs. the New York Times

In this month's edition of Metropolitan Home, Andres Duany, the pioneer of the New Urbanist architectural movement, takes a couple of swipes at the Times for bias in its reporting on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Seaside, Florida (an early New Urbanist community), and Duany and team's involvement in the Gulf Coast rebuilding effort.

The article is not available online, but here are two excerpts from the interview:

Met Home: Seaside...is perhaps the most renowned [new urbanist community]. But the New York Times recently published a story suggesting that all was not well in paradise. Can you respond?

Duany: If you read past the scandalmongering headline ["Seaside at 25: Troubles in Paradise"], the problem--apart from hurricane damage--is the old saw that the place has gotten too expensive. That is indeed a problem with the confluence of excellence and scarcity....

...

Met Home: ...Your proposals for rebuilding southern Mississippi have met with resistance from locals. Why are they upset?

Duany: ...It may have been the equally negative New York Times article [that]...interviewed a confused lady who said that she was terrified that the plan would remove her house and turn the land into a golf course. In fact, the Biloxi plan proposed exactly the opposite.... We corrected this factual misrepresentation in a letter to the Times--which it did not publish. This is typical of the bias.

newspapers, media, bias, New York Times

posted by Unknown @ 5/31/2006 09:44:00 AM