At Your Service, Mr. Bratton
Bratton resigned in 1996, after Time magazine credited him, far more than Giuliani, with "Winning The War On Crime." It has long been speculated that Giuliani, unhappy with Bratton taking credit for New York City's plummeting crime rate, forced his police commissioner out.
What I wanted to seize on in the piece was this line: "[Bratton] could potentially feed to national political reporters off-the-record disparaging quotes and assessments of Mr. Giuliani."
Think about that for a second: Political reporters know that Bratton probably doesn't like Giuliani. And yet, according to Gitell, those reporters might very well let Bratton feed them disparaging quotes about his former boss – and do so off the record.
To sum up: Gitell, a contributing editor of The New York Sun and former press secretary to Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, expects the national press corps to allow itself to be used for a little anonymous score-settling. If he's right, it's one more reason for people to be turned off by political journalism and the machinations behind it.