News Brownout

While union officials' estimates that as many as 75,000 people turned out for the March 5 City Hall rally to pressure officials to revise Mayor Bloomberg's revised budget were wildly inflated, it's likely that more than 10,000 turned out to make their voices heard.

You wouldn't have known this from the newspaper coverage the rally generated. The New York Times and the Daily News each limited their coverage to a single photo of the rally, and the Post ran a story of fewer than 100 words.

The paltry coverage stood in glaring contrast to the thousands of words that have been devoted by all three papers to the Mayor's case for major cuts in the payroll through layoffs, attrition, and reduced employee benefits. It has been a largely one-sided argument until now; the sizable turnout produced by the unions should have provided a hook for the city's dailies to give a fuller presentation of labor's side of the story.

It's disappointing and revealing that those papers — whose publishers all gave the editorial green light for Mr. Bloomberg to seek a third term minus a public referendum to overturn the Term Limits Law — chose not to do so.