Daily News: The news of the first lease-signing at the Freedom Tower, the centerpiece office tower of the redeveloped ground zero site (which first broke here on Observer.com!) should have been a coup for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, owners of the site. It’s been hard to get tenants interested. So leave it to the never-very-press-friendly bistate agency to get themselves negative tabloid wood on a technicality: During the lease-signing ceremony, the agency finally admitted that the building is not going to be called the “Freedom Tower” in any official capacity, but “One World Trade Center.” This means “NO MORE FREEDOM” for the Daily News! Helpful subhed: “Port Authority decrees it’s not Freedom Tower, it’s just gonna be plain old One World Trade Ctr.” The verb makes the Port Authority sound rather lordly! When you move inside, you get the quotes from the Port Authority officials who answered reporters’ questions about the naming yesterday afternoon, and the statement former Governor George Pataki released condemning the name change early last evening. Ho, hum. Moving to the left, “YANKS’ NEW LEADING MAN” flags Tim Smith’s report from Clearwater that the Yankees are considering making Derek Jeter bat leadoff instead of Johnny Damon. (Our own Allen Barra would differ with this characterization of the move, we think.) We guess this is news, but what’s the rule of thumb for when a sports story creeps over the lefthand side onto the front?
New York Post: “FREE DUMB TOWER.” Get it? See, “Dumb” is a derogatory word that sounds a little like the last syllable of “Freedom,” and “Free,” well, we don’t quite know what that word means in this context, since the dumb renamed tower is leasing space out for money. Stop groaning! Sometimes with puns, the groanier the better, though admittedly not this time. At least the Post knows its readership well enough to know that most New Yorkers think of the Port Authority as a place on West 42nd Street that is very ugly and full of hustlers and bus fumes and vomity smells, and not a complicated semiprivate bistate agency with broad scary administrative powers. See, the Daily News seems to believe they can cultivate outrage against this abstract bureaucracy. But the Post blames it on Fancy Marketeers: “Marketers nix patriotic name,” the paper says. On the left they’ve gone with a pop theme: “Rihanna gets a gun.” The pop star, who was recently embroiled in a domestic situation with her boyfriend, seems to have gotten a tattoo of a revolver on her arm, which she will have to learn to use to defend herself since a gun that is only a tattoo of a gun does not shoot bullets. But the Post is not immune to spring training fever! They’ve negotiated a photo tour of the inside of the new Yankee Stadium! This is an exclusive, by the way, and we think it would not be stretching the point to assume that that is partly because the newspaper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, is pretty palsy with George Steinbrenner around town. Couldn’t this have been a big splash? Or will even Rupert admit that Rihanna is prettier than the new Yankee Stadium?
General observations: That subhed on the Daily News’ Freedom Tower story makes us think they need more coffee up there. Really, it drags down the page so far it’s hard to score the rest of the pages against each other. But we give the Freedom Tower win to the Post, for finding a more plausible emotional connection with readers over the story. Rihanna vs. Jeter? It’s a draw. Does the Post score one for having a big new evil Yankee Stadium spread to sell on its wood, or no, because they didn’t get enough out of it on the front page? Either way they are one up.
Winner: We really want to make this a draw. Listen, guys, perk things up next week, OK? But we’ve decided that as a matter of policy we’re always going to declare a winner. We have to give this to the Post, even though the awful “FREE DUMB” pun is burned into our retinas. We may actually have to pick up the papers on Saturday morning to chase the image out!
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