R oger and Me: a First Amendment Story

WRESTLING WITH THE TRUTH: Roger Toussaint stopped talking to this newspaper two years ago because he was unhappy about letters we published from his critics, but his silence hasn't stopped his aides from continuing to complain about allegedly biased coverage. Late last month, I was writing an item about Mayor Bloomberg overreacting to what he considered an inappropriate question by calling a reporter "a disgrace" when I learned that I was the subject of an election complaint brought by the incumbent slate in the Transport Workers Union Local 100 officers election.

The timing led me to muse on the similarities between the Mayor and Roger Toussaint —brothers under the thin skin, if you will. Both have a tendency to act in a high-handed fashion at times, and to be particularly annoyed when journalists are rude enough to call attention to their behavior.

Mr. Bloomberg, who plowed right through the proper procedure for amending the Term Limits Law last fall to gain his shot at a third term, made the case at the time that the city's fiscal problems were so deep that extraordinary measures had to be taken and he was the only guy available who could take them.

An Over-the-Top Reaction

During an event in Queens May 28 at which the Mayor spoke enthusiastically about recent improvement in the city's finances, New York Observer reporter Azi Paybarah asked whether that didn't undercut the rationale for giving him another term. Mr. Bloomberg sputtered a bit in reply, then, upon concluding the press conference, told Mr. Paybarah that he was "a disgrace."

It was a stunning-enough loss of temper that the next day's papers used words like "testy" and "peevishness" to describe the Mayor's behavior. It reflected the slightly uncomfortable relationship Mr. Bloomberg has had with reporters going back to his first mayoral campaign eight years ago, notwithstanding his own background as the owner of a major media organization.

Early in his tenure, he declared that most of those who covered him would not meet the high standards that existed at his own company. It has sometimes seemed, however, that the Mayor and his aides prefer dealing with reporters who are pliable rather than scrupulous and skeptical, which merely makes him not terribly different from other government leaders who'd rather not be held accountable, especially by those quoting things they once said.

Mr. Toussaint is also not someone with a high tolerance for media criticism, and while he doesn't get nearly the scrutiny Mr. Bloomberg does, when he has been under the spotlight in the past, the heat has been especially intense. In his case, there is a prejudice against criticism from any source, and particularly from those within Local 100.

Members who have questioned his decisions, including those generally loyal to him, have routinely found themselves ostracized and stripped of union positions or the opportunity to run for them. He lacks the same leverage over those in the media who incur his wrath, but has made clear that given the chance he would dispense with them just as ruthlessly.

In an interview three years ago on the radio show Democracy Now just before he began a brief jail term for leading the December 2005 transit strike, when interviewer Juan Gonzalez asked what the labor movement needed to do to improve the climate for unions, one of Mr. Toussaint's suggestions was "to shut down the New York Post," a virulent and sometimes unfair critic of his tactics prior to and during the three-day walkout.

'Target Workers' Opponents'

When co-host Amy Goodman pressed him on the issue, he said, "My point is: labor and the communities need to show the strength and power of protest and solidarity, and in doing so, you need to target the opponents of working people. The New York Post, it is an extortionate media, and that would be a good way to send a message out there."

Now, the Post had basically urged that once Mr. Toussaint was arrested for the Taylor Law violation, he should get lost in the system for a few years in some dusty holding cell. Even before he led the walkout, the paper's editorial page had warned that he was ready to launch "a neo-socialistic jihad" and said he had engaged in "pigheaded battling" with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It also stated that "only a madman" would call a strike given the likely damage to the union that would result.

The harsh words reflected a one-sided viewpoint about the transit negotiations, no doubt. But the idea of a labor campaign to shut down the Post, given voice to on a radio program known for its fierce advocacy of First Amendment rights, was both startling and revealing.

During the period just before the strike when the Post (along with the Daily News and Wall Street Journal) was saying such nasty things about him, I stated in an editorial here, "Those seeking to demonize Mr. Toussaint are trying to taint the jury in the court of public opinion."

He is not someone, however, who tends to differentiate between those with no use for him and those whose sympathies do not allow them to offer a free pass when his actions warrant criticism. And Mr. Toussaint has ruled his own union's newspaper, the TWU Express, with an iron hand for so long that it seems beyond his comprehension that another newspaper might publish letters critical of him if they didn't also reflect the views of the management.

Which was how a generally amicable if not always smooth relationship between myself and Mr. Toussaint became strained past the breaking point and culminated with the bringing of the election protest against me two weeks ago.

Going Postal Over Letters

The Local 100 leader has piled up a growing collection of enemies within his ranks, and several of them would sometimes write letters to this newspaper complaining of Mr. Toussaint's actions. At one point, Local 100 Secretary Treasurer Ed Watt came to see me on behalf of his boss to make clear how unhappy he was that I was publishing them, while also questioning some of the claims made in the letters. I pointed out that the letters column was the most-democratic part of any newspaper and reminded him that he and Mr. Toussaint were free to respond to any of those letters in as much detail as they wanted.

Two years ago, at the time when Local 100 had its automatic dues collection rights suspended as part of the penalty for the transit strike, I wrote an editorial urging union members to pay their dues even if they were upset with Mr. Toussaint's leadership. On the day it appeared, I got a call from his outside public-relations adviser, not to thank me for the editorial, but to rant about a letter I had published on the opposite page from one critic of the Local 100 leader that he insisted was filled with lies and distortions.

It was at that point that I realized that Mr. Toussaint was the ultimate glass-is-half-empty guy, who was so obsessed with any suggestion of his imperfections that he lost all perspective about those not ready to put aside any ideals that clashed with his own interests.

By the end of the conversation, a new dynamic had asserted itself: from that point on, Mr. Toussaint determined that in order to show me the error of my ways, he would stop cooperating with this paper's transit reporter, Ari Paul. This went beyond simply making himself unavailable for comment on pertinent stories: his public-relations people, a description that in their case seems a misnomer, would also not offer any responses.

Hissing in the Wind

This new policy quickly took a perverse turn when the outside spokesman, Jesse Derris, began calling Mr. Paul after stories were published noting the non-response from the union to complain that they were inaccurate or biased. Mr. Paul would make the point that had the union offered its version of the facts, the imbalance Mr. Derris alleged existed might have been addressed. The old line about those who would rather curse the darkness than light a candle comes to mind.

Over the past year, John Samuelsen, who is leading the dissident slate seeking to take control of Local 100, increasingly made issues of problems, both internally and regarding Local 100's dealings with the MTA, that he said were the result of Mr. Toussaint's actions and inactions. In trying to present Mr. Toussaint's viewpoint, Mr. Paul was sometimes able to gather information from the union newspaper or its Web site, but the kind of canned quotes that appeared in those forums rarely read as spiritedly as the case Mr. Samuelsen was laying out in detail.

At the same time, Mr. Toussaint's actions against those who criticized him became increasingly punitive and bizarre. He seemed infuriated at the fact that a majority of his members didn't stay current on their dues once the union couldn't collect them directly from paychecks. Nonetheless, he chose a court battle that wound up prolonging the penalty to nearly 18 months, rather than displaying the requisite humility (as he eventually would do) that could have gotten full dues rights restored a year earlier than they actually were.

Dues Confusion

His knack for alienating or exiling many of his most-capable aides left Local 100 with an unwieldy system for making sure dues were paid and properly logged, and there were repeated instances in which critics of Mr. Toussaint's regime were told they were not current with their payments but they subsequently produced documentation showing they had been up to date.

Amid all the chaos, the most-inexplicable maneuver involved the decision to move up this year's officers election by six months, to June, but keep the ballot-counting on its regular schedule in December. It's the kind of delay that makes sense in television series—you end the season with a cliff-hanger so that six months later people will tune in to see who survived the explosion in the emergency room—but in the context of union elections it brings to mind Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the other members of the Looney Tunes family.

Just before the ballots went out, New York 1 "Transit Talk" host Bobby Cuza asked Daily News transit reporter Pete Donohue what the explanation from the union had been for the long gap between vote and count. Mr. Donohue said Local 100 claimed that it would save money on postage by sending the ballots out now at the same time that it was conducting a vote for representatives to the convention of its international union. He then added, "I don't see how those numbers work."

Penny-Wise, Pound-Foolish

Nor did the potential savings of a few thousand dollars in postage seem to make much difference when weighed against Mr. Toussaint's precipitous decision four years ago to sell the union's building but then fail to purchase a new headquarters in time to avoid millions of dollars in capital gains taxes.

The most-obvious result of the move-up in voting was that it ensured that some of those among Mr. Samuelsen's potential running-mates would be rendered ineligible for union office because they had not been fully paid up on dues for a year prior to the ballots going out. The bylaw amendment permitting the change in dates had been approved by only 8 percent of the union's membership, a product of both the majority of members at the time being behind on dues payments and apathy among those who remained eligible to vote.

Even as Mr. Toussaint continued to manipulate the election, he was plotting his own exit strategy from Local 100, one that would guarantee that he maintained a position of power regardless of the outcome of the vote. Last November, he took a job as a vice president of the TWU of America, whose primary duty was to oversee Local 100. Though he tapped Mr. Tate as his replacement, he limited his opportunities to step forward to establish himself as a capable leader.

Icebreaker Never Materialized

A couple of months ago, Mr. Tate indicated in an e-mail to Mr. Paul that he would like to sit down and talk at some point about his candidacy in what seemed like an attempt to break through the wall of silence Mr. Toussaint had imposed on communication with this newspaper. He never followed up, however, suggesting that either he hadn't meant it or his mind had been changed for him.

Mr. Paul tried to convey the sentiments of Mr. Tate's slate using the writings in its blog, but they weren't particularly helpful to his candidacy. There was little of substance regarding positions, except for Mr. Tate's declaration at a slate meeting in late March, "If you try to stop us from moving Local 100 forward, we will run you over." The fact that this comment remained on the slate's blog, along with a series of taunts aimed at those who had dropped off Mr. Samuelsen's slate that sounded more appropriate for a schoolyard, suggested Mr. Tate was running more on belligerence than brains. It also hinted at why he might have ultimately decided that submitting to an interview would not have served him well.

Given that tone, it wasn't a complete shock to learn about the election protest alleging that I had been guilty of what was described as "an illegal employer contribution to the Samuelson campaign."

Riddled With Mistakes

Its misspelling of Mr. Samuelsen's name was consistent with its screwing up my own, but the fact that the evidence it was citing consisted primarily of columns in which my name appears in reasonably large type made me wonder whether the attorney who drafted the complaint, Jeanne Mirer, had written it or merely taken dictation from someone whose credibility did not depend on getting facts right. As editors are inclined to tell young reporters, if you can't spell people's names correctly, it's going to raise questions about what else you got wrong.

And Ms. Mirer wasn't through. Leave aside the errors in grammar and sentence structure that populate the rest of her complaint. She alleged that while the newspaper was frequently critical of Mr. Toussaint and his allies, "These articles and editorial 'opinions' are never critical of John Samuelsen or the TBOU slate."

The fact is that on more than one occasion I've questioned Mr. Samuelsen's complaints about Mr. Toussaint's dealings with the MTA as being unrealistic given the union's reliance on management good-will in both its fight to regain dues check-off and the bargaining on a new contract. And the issue of this newspaper that was published two days before her election protest was filed featured a front-page story stating that Daniel Silverman—the neutral monitor to whom she made the complaint—had found that Israel Rivera, running for the No. 2 position on Mr. Samuelsen's slate, used deception to get union members seeking on-line information about Mr. Toussaint to view a Web site promoting the slate.

An Ambiguous Grievance

Her complaint also charged, "The most recent issue of the Chief has negative articles regarding Mr. Toussaint claiming that he is still running the union although he is no longer on payroll."

She didn't indicate what was negative about that particular story—the implication that he was still running the union or the claim that he wasn't on the payroll at that time.

The basis for our reporting that, in an article by Mr. Paul and an editorial I wrote, was Mr. Toussaint's own testimony in a mid-April deposition for a court case brought by Ainsley Stewart—a candidate for Local 100 president three years ago—against the union. After that issue of the paper went to press May 22, Mr. Paul received a phone message from Local 100 lawyer Arthur Schwartz stating that Mr. Toussaint still was president of Local 100.

But given Mr. Toussaint's statement under oath for the deposition that, "I'm not salaried by Local 100 anymore," our characterization seems a reasonable one based on the facts available until Mr. Schwartz informed us it was permissible to continue as president while not on the local's payroll.

In showing Mr. Paul a copy of the deposition, Mr. Stewart had contended that if Mr. Toussaint was on the international union payroll, it violated Local 100's constitution for him to be running his old union.

Debate Red Herring

Not content with the number of errors riddling her four-paragraph complaint, Ms. Mirer decided to doubledown in a supplemental statement she submitted. Here it is, in full, with no corrections for grammar and spelling: "It has come to the attention of the UI slate that this weeks issue of the "CHIEF" contains a demonstrably false statement that Curtis Tate refused to debate John Samuelson and that both the New York Times and the Daily News offered to sponsor a debate. These statements are false and if there had been reasonable inquiry they would have determined that it is against the policy of the New York Times to sponsor debates, and that the Daily News never offered to hold a debate."

Which would be well and good if that's what the article, which appeared in our For the Record column, had stated. All it said, however, was that ". . . challenger John Samuelsen called reporters at this newspaper as well as the Times and Daily News asking whether they would help facilitate a debate by acting as questioners . . . "

Something as devoid of facts as Ms. Mirer's submission seemed designed, if that's not too strong a word, to be milked for propaganda value by the Toussaint/Tate camp in the ongoing election by citing it as an "official" accusation against myself and this newspaper.

Running Away From His Record

Ultimately, while Mr. Toussaint may share with Mayor Bloomberg a certain disdain for some journalists, there is one notable difference between them. Mr. Bloomberg, while capable of being a pickle and abusing the democratic process, has compiled a generally strong record in office over the past four years. Mr. Toussaint during that same period has amassed a series of blunders and bad acts that have undermined the hopes of more than a few in the labor movement that he would become a major leader.

Because he never gave Mr. Tate a real chance to emerge as the new voice of Local 100, his hand-picked successor is saddled with the legacy of those bad choices, even as his reputedly warmer personality may convince union members weary of Mr. Toussaint's truculence that he is a kinder, gentler stand-in.

Once the transit strike ended and Mr. Toussaint served his brief bit behind bars, much of the media lost track of Local 100. This newspaper has been the conspicuous exception, and its reporting, along with the letters it has published from dissident union members, has had the effect of laying bare Mr. Toussaint's forsaking of the ideals he previously championed.

That is what he finds objectionable. It is not the purported Big Lie that threatens him, but the accumulation of small, hard truths of how he has gone off course over the past few years.