Craig Gurian

Craig Gurian is the editor of Remapping Debate.  He received his undergraduate degree from Columbia College, his law degree from Columbia Law School, and a master's degree in United States history from the Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Craig's published work includes Let Them Rent Cake: George Pataki, Market Ideology, and the Attempt to Dismantle Rent Regulation in New York.

He is also Executive Director of the Anti-Discrimination Center and an Adjunct Professor of Law at Fordham Law School.

cg@remappingdebate.org
Open spaces, closed files
Original Reporting | By Abby Ferla, By Craig Gurian | NYC, Role of government
Wouldn't facility by facility information on operating costs, staffing, and level of use help New York City's Parks Department and outside observers assess whether there is equity in funding between and among parks as well as the related question of whether and to what extent to rely on private as opposed to public funding? Good luck getting the data. More
Neither rain nor snow nor occupy...
Commentary | By Craig Gurian | Politics
...can keep Congress and the press from shortsightedly focusing on "balanced" budget reductions despite a stalled economy and both long-term and short-term experience with the folly of austerity. It's like one of those arguments where you may think you're making headway, but where you get to the end and you might as well have saved your breath. Can anything prevent Democrats from seeking to give up hard-won gains? More
You don't get answers if you don't ask questions
Commentary | By Craig Gurian | Income inequality, Media
A perennial conceit of the mainstream press is “we don’t make the news, we only report the news.” A just-released poll, however — revealing that Americans overwhelmingly believe income and wealth should be more equally distributed — underlines how much real news got ignored this year by reporters preoccupied with centrism and compromise as all-weather solutions. More
Perils of incrementalism: the demise of the ACA's promise of affordable insurance for long-term care
Commentary | By Craig Gurian | Aging, Health care, Legislation
The abandonment of the element of the Affordable Care Act that was designed to provide insurance against the staggering costs of long-term care, announced by the Obama administration last Friday, raises important questions about the wisdom of having a strategy of always going for a legislative "half a loaf," especially when doing so obliges you both to understate the real costs of dealing with problems and to oversell the promise and potential of your solutions. More
NYT D.C. coverage: will this season be tactic-obsessed, centrist and consensus loving, or...newsy?
Press Criticism | By Craig Gurian | Politics
In the spring, Remapping Debate began a project to illustrate the scope of the centrism-is-always-the-answer problem that has marred New York Times Washington coverage. We started with an emphasis on the practice of having reporter opinions and assumptions neatly tucked into a story as though they were facts, and we've found that there are similar debate-constricting problems that recur as well. We're back on the beat, and the first find is a piece where substantive coverage is swamped by an obsession with tactics. More
NYT celebrates lower wages
Press Criticism | By Craig Gurian | Employment, Labor
Chrysler employees, we are given to understand, are thrilled to be working in the auto industry, even if they are forced to accept wages much lower than their colleagues. What do we learn about what this means for their lives? Nothing. More
NYT D.C. Bureau: still yearning for moderation and compromise
Press Criticism | By Craig Gurian | Politics
In other words, a little from column A and a little from column B. By stubbornly resisting the possibility that one faction's prescription (even a liberal Democratic or a Tea Party Republican one) can sometimes be correct to the exclusion of all other options, formula replaces reporting. Remapping Debate has an ongoing project to illustrate the scope of the centrism-is-always-the-answer problem. We started with an emphasis on the practice of having reporter opinions and assumptions neatly tucked into a story as though they were facts, and we've found that there are similar debate-constricting problems that recur as well. More
Next budget-slicing hostage drama only seven weeks away
Commentary | By Craig Gurian | Budget deficit, Economy, Politics
Get ready for spending cuts beyond the debt ceiling agreement. That deal only calls for spending caps, not spending floors. The regular appropriations process must be completed by Oct. 1, or else government operations shut down. The GOP will insist that those bills impose additional cuts. Any Democratic assertion of resistance will have no credibility in face of documented pattern of surrender. Oops. Turns out that costs and benefits of giving in to debt-ceiling hostage-taking were hopelessly miscalculated. More

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