The Barclays Center’s Media Enabler – From the start, the New York Times was reluctant to challenge Brooklyn’s new arena.
“The sanitized story was no shock, given the Times’s erratic, inadequate coverage of the $4.9 billion Atlantic Yards development, the largest, most contentious real-estate project in Brooklyn’s history, encompassing 16 towers and covering 22 acres. It again signaled the paper’s inability to get tough on Forest City Ratner, the Times’s partner in the New York Times Building in midtown, which opened in November 2007. Atlantic Yards has involved nearly $300 million in direct subsidies from the state and city, substantial tax breaks, and an inside track (and discount) on public property for the developer, along with the state’s use of eminent domain to deliver purportedly blighted land for Ratner to warehouse. All of this presented ample opportunity for scrutiny.”
Oder, Norman. City Journal 6 November 2012.