Mayor Pissed That Disabled Reporter Can't Fix Electronics Glitch Faster
They say corporate dysfunction starts at the top, and we're starting to think the nasty culture at Bloomberg LLC is no exception. Look at how the company's founder humiliated a wheelchair-bound reporter today.
As Gotham's mayor, Michael Bloomberg feels he's gone above and beyond for the reporter, the Examiner's Michael Harris. Harris gets transportation in a special van and wheelchair access around City Hall, Bloomberg's flack tells the New York Times.
But the mayor turned nasty against Harris today. The reporter was waiting for a mayoral press conference on gay marriage to begin when a photographer knocked over his coat a few seats over. This caused his tape recorder to begin playing. At first Harris couldn't figure out what was going on, and the Times says most people in the room couldn't even hear the recorder's output.
Still, Bloomberg singled Harris out from the podium, even after the City Council speaker whispered in the mayor's ear, "he's disabled." (See video above.) Bloomberg waited about a minute and a half for Harris to reach the tape recorder.
Since the reporter was disabled, in a wheelchair, and penned in by other photographers (per the Daily News), this took a little while.
The mayor scolded him in the interim — instead of, say, asking an aide to help Harris. Then he went on to say something Historic and Very Important about how crucial equal rights are, and how we need to adjust our institutions for people who are different from us and who have been historically pushed to the margins of society.
