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  Mayor’s Office of Communications
55 Trinity Avenue, Suite 2500 • Atlanta, Georgia 30303

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 1, 2017

News Release

The Reed Administration's Response to Bill Torpy's Sunday Column Endorsing Mary Norwood

Statement from Tom Sabulis

ATLANTA - “The Atlanta Journal-Constitution loves to advertise the work of columnist Bill Torpy with the line ‘What’s really going on? I’m all over it.’

Well, not quite. If Torpy does know ‘what’s really going on,’ he’s not passing on these insights to his readers.

Case in point: his latest column, published online today (‘Et tu, Kasim? Then rise, Ceasar!’), isn’t really about Mayor Reed or Atlanta City Council President Ceasar Mitchell. It’s about taking shots at the candidates who could give Mary Norwood real competition.

Torpy’s bias against Mayor Reed is well known; by our count, this is his 39th hit piece targeting the Mayor. But here he takes jabs at Council President Ceasar Mitchell (he ‘spells his name funny’); businessman Peter Aman (‘newcomer,’ ‘former top aide’) and Councilwoman Keisha Lance Bottoms, because she earns two salaries (‘Oh, by the way, the Mayor has a candidate for you…’).

This column is yet another example of how the AJC has one set of standards for Mary Norwood, and another, higher set for everyone else. It’s clearly seen in how Torpy mentions Mitchell’s $8,375 in civil penalties for ethics violations and Aman self-funding his campaign with ‘gobs of his own money.’ Despite mentioning Ms. Norwood multiple times, Torpy, a boxing fan, never lays a glove on the Councilwoman from Buckhead. Not once; not a word. Strange.

The ‘independent’ City Councilwoman was recently photographed smiling with GOP Congresswoman Karen Handel, but despite the AJC’s non-stop coverage of the recent Sixth Congressional District run-off, the paper only covered after the city’s LGBT press broke the story.

Voters likely do not know that Councilwoman Norwood charged the City of Atlanta thousands of dollars for robo-calls about community meetings from a company she owns. It’s interesting that neither Mr. Torpy nor the AJC has deigned to cover this clearly questionable activity – especially in the middle of a competitive campaign.

But because Norwood gets 54 percent of her support from Republicans, she’s apparently not a candidate for scrutiny.

Instead, Torpy spins negatives at the leading Democratic candidate, Keisha Lance Bottoms, who is polling first among Democrats and black women.

None of this is surprising, because any frequent reader of Torpy’s column knows that he is a wolf in progressive’s clothing. He attacks cyclists who dare slow down his mini-van. He attacks bike lanes going up in communities where he does not reside. He routinely diminishes or seeks to attack the success of a progressive and accomplished city government because it does not fit his agenda.

For a former journalist and now columnist, Bill Torpy does not seem interested in understanding the city he’s paid to write about. He refuses to accept the fact that Mayor Reed is popular with Atlanta voters. Mayor Reed’s job approval rating remains near 70 percent. Notably, Torpy fails to mention that the Mayor was re-elected with 84 percent of the vote, which is consistent with his habit of conveniently skipping over the many verifiable successes of this administration. Even after the bribery investigation broke, and despite obvious hit pieces and sensationalized news stories from the media about ‘blue lights’ and the cost of police vehicles, Mayor Reed’s standing with voters remains largely unchanged in Atlanta.

But let’s get back to Mary Norwood. Whether Ms. Norwood can be elected as mayor remains very much in doubt, and as long as Mayor Reed remains a popular figure and continues his track record of success, the harder it will be for her to win.

That’s because Atlanta’s success comes in spite of Ms. Norwood, not because of it.

Over the past seven and a half years, the City of Atlanta has boosted its credit rating eight consecutive times; built its cash reserves from $7.4 million to nearly $200 million; expanded its police force to 2,000 officers, the largest in its history; and reduced the crime rate by 38 percent since Mayor Reed took office, while the murder rate is approaching record lows.

At the same time, Mayor Reed has expanded parks and greenspace, the Atlanta BeltLine, and secured funding streams for the largest expansion in MARTA history.

Norwood voted for two pension expansions that put the City on a path to insolvency. She voted to eliminate APD officer positions while endorsing budget-busting raises in order to curry favor with the police union. And, of course, there’s still the question of whether it was ethical or appropriate for her to hire her own robo-call company with taxpayer funds from her Council office. 

We’ve seen what can happen when the press fails to vet candidates for office. We can only hope that the AJC – both its news desk and its columnists – take their important role in our democracy more seriously in November 2017 than in 2016. Otherwise, it’s a real possibility that Bill Torpy continues to write hit piece after hit piece on Mayor Reed and multiple viable candidates for Mayor, while giving an ‘independent’ candidate a free pass.”

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For more information about the City of Atlanta, please visit http://www.atlantaga.gov or watch City Channel 26. Follow the City of Atlanta on Facebook and Twitter @CityofAtlanta. Follow Mayor Reed on Facebook and Twitter @Kasim Reed