Anne Torres, the mayor's communications director, sent the AJC the following email Wednesday afternoon in response to Bill Torpy's column on the mayor's office blocking an interview with firefighters.
Bill Torpy concludes his latest column about Atlanta's firefighters with the phrase, "I'm sure it was all very dramatic." But the real drama in Bill Torpy's reporting is his propensity for stretching the truth and deliberately misleading his readers. He employs a worn and dishonest rhetorical formula throughout his work in which he attempts to obscure his ultimate motive of furthering a one-sided, unprovoked feud against City Hall.
There are many examples of these tactics in Torpy's archive, but the two most recent columns illustrate the point perfectly. His September 30 column, Mayor Reed pours water on hero firefighters, sees Torpy positioning himself as a neutral observer attempting to write a "feel-good yarn" about three Atlanta firefighters who valiantly risked their own lives to rescue three children from a home engulfed in flames. His attempts, he says, were rebuffed by the Reed Administration. But it's just three sentences into his piece that Torpy unveils his true reasons for writing, twisting the story into a fight about pension reform and pay raises. He continued by absurdly speculating about the reasons his interview requests were denied, attributing false motives to the Mayor and his staff while failing to acknowledge that the news side of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) had already written a story about the firefighters' heroic rescue. In fact, his story takes sound bites from a press conference held by the City of Atlanta on September 17, when all broadcast television stations and the AJC again had the opportunity to speak with the firefighters, and in fact, did speak to the firefighters. Torpy fails to mention that on September 18, the AJC ran a front page story on the heroic rescues written by his colleague, Steve Visser. Clearly, the issue was not with our firefighters. Our issue is and remains with the misleading journalism that comes with Bill Torpy.
He also fails to mention basic facts: that firefighters have received 5 percent pay raises to offset the pension expense, that the fire department has gone from having three firefighters on every truck to four (the national standard for best practices), that the fire department is the largest and most well-funded that it has ever been. Somehow, none of these facts made it into Torpy's column.
The simple fact is that had our administration not implemented pension reform in 2011, with the support of the firefighters union, Atlanta would be headed down the same financial path as Detroit which declared bankruptcy and Chicago which just last week proposed the single largest property tax increase in its history to pay unfunded pension costs. Instead, we have had no property tax increases, five balanced budgets, multiple credit ratings upgrades and cash reserves in excess of $150 million.
This is a disingenuous attempt to mislead readers and distract them from the real problem, which is that Bill Torpy already knows the story he wants to write before he does any actual investigating or fact gathering. The facts are that Mayor Reed has never held a grudge against the heroic men and women in the Atlanta Fire and Rescue Department, and his actions on pension reform not only maintained public safety in the City of Atlanta, but preserved jobs and financial security for firefighters. Torpy could have written about those things, but has never chosen to do so. Instead, he tried to use our City's real heroes as pawns in a lazy game to create content for another opinion piece parading as a news article.
The same could be said for the lack of understanding Torpy shows for the basic responsibilities of City government in another recent column, When City Hall comes in like a flood, you're sunk, where he inappropriately implies that the Reed Administration is accelerating gentrification in Peoplestown, rather than acting to protect its residents from a severe public health and safety risk. Peoplestown has endured severe flooding since the early 1900's. In many cases, the flooding permanently damaged homes; in several cases, homes have been entirely destroyed.
But even though these floods are entirely predictable and the problem has plagued the neighborhood for decades, it wasn't until the Reed Administration that a permanent resolution was offered. The City of Atlanta is investing $65 million in a plan that will benefit the Peoplestown community and surrounding neighborhoods for years to come, yet critics who've never dedicated a single column to chronicling the energy, vibrancy or challenges of Peoplestown are now weighing in with their typical cynicism. That is unacceptable.
This is Torpy's approach: he feigns a deep care for and understanding of people in a community he's never bothered to write much about. Such was the case with his recent, negative articles about downtown Atlanta. Area residents and community leaders responded aggressively, and Torpy was forced to write a response explaining what "he meant to say," but still treating deeply complex, personal issues as though he were writing a ninth-grade civics essay.
With these two columns, Torpy set a new standard for dishonest commentary masquerading as factual reporting. He ignores the fact that the Reed administration is making vital investments in the future development of Peoplestown, and has stood up for both the safety of the City's residents and its public servants. The city's decision to act on two long-neglected problems was driven by our desire to put forward best-in-class solutions for a community that deserves them.
Most egregiously, Torpy repeats claims that moving Mrs. Jackson's house "will kill her." This sensationalist claim ignores the real vulnerabilities Mrs. Jackson has in her current home. Atlanta will have a serious rain event and in that case, her home will flood. It's only a matter of when.
The reality is that most of the homeowners in Peoplestown are pleased with the city's solution to prevent flooding, and longtime residents like Mrs. Jackson will be safer as a result.
Bill Torpy has consistently used his column to attack the Reed administration and Mayor Reed personally. At this point, regular readers of the AJC are accustomed to his biased writing, but that doesn't mean we should expect so little from the city's paper of record.
