“[Ross] Barkan’s catalog of media humiliations is among the most maddening content in the book and illustrates one of his principal virtues as an author. He commands a deep expertise refined through a career in the New York press corps but avoids falling victim to the worst habits that afflict so many of his colleagues. Their open contempt for the Left, their reflexive deference to power, their fetish for the aesthetic of managerial competence — this was all fertile ground for Cuomo to cultivate the myth of himself as New York’s savior. That Barkan manages to operate in this hothouse of professional-class neuroses relatively unfazed is an achievement in itself, and it’s how he’s already written an entire book about a truth that many in the press are only now admitting.”
