At the beginning of the day, Chiara de Blasio released a video announcing her struggles with substance abuse and depression. At the end of the day, former Gov. Eliot Spitzer and his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, publicly called it quits after 26 years of marriage.
Only Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg could say the timing of his announcement was not deliberate: His daughter Georgina gave birth to a boy on Tuesday after sundown.
Whether looking for sympathy or for silence, it is not a coincidence that publicists choose Dec. 24 to speak.
“The day that has most good will toward men and women is Christmas,” said Mortimer Matz, 89, a ceaselessly working publicist, who said he helped start the Nathan’s hot dog eating contest.
On Wednesday, Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, again deflected questions about the timing and production of the video in which their daughter discusses her personal troubles. In a brief interview outside their home, Mr. de Blasio said that the couple had received “a lot” of phone calls of support and that the responses have been “moving.”
“We had some people telling us their kids had had similar challenges and it was really important for someone in the public eye to acknowledge that these challenges exist,” he said.
Whether Mr. de Blasio’s tightly controlled release of the news of a family issue will portend how he makes uncomfortable announcements during his tenure is yet to be seen. The Bloomberg administration, said Mr. Bloomberg’s former press secretary, Stu Loeser, has a policy of not announcing news after noon on Friday, so as not “to appear to be ducking it.”
Some politicians, meanwhile, choose days just to claim the spotlight. Senator Charles E. Schumer has perfected the fine art of holding Sunday news conferences.
Of all days, though, Friday is the one of avoidance, if not the best to clean out a desk. Two appointees of Gov. Chris Christie, both officials with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey who were involved in the scandal to close local lanes from Fort Lee to the George Washington Bridge, resigned on subsequent Fridays this month.
San Diego’s mayor, Bob Filner, besieged by reports of sexual misconduct with several women, resigned at 5 p.m. on a Friday in August. The principal of Stuyvesant High School, under the cloud of a cheating scandal, and the president of St. John’s University, dealing with a financial scandal and the suicide of an assistant dean on trial for corruption, each resigned on a Friday.
After the financial markets close on Fridays has been a time for companies to release potentially damaging financial news, such as of a merger or poor quarterly results. “That is a practice at least as old as the wise men following the star to Bethlehem,” Michael Tobman, a political consultant in Brooklyn, said.
Before the Internet explosion, it was easier for politicians to release controversial news on a day when the next morning’s newspaper might go unread or be used in fireplaces. On Christmas Eve 1992, President George Bush pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and five other people involved in the Iran-contra scandal in the Reagan administration.
It doesn’t always work. “No matter when you dump something, there is still cable news and there is still the Internet,” Mr. Loeser said. News can be released before “a long holiday weekend, hoping it dies, but there is a small chance that it is one of two or three stories that is debated ad nauseam.”
Among publicists, one cautionary tale reigns supreme. Jo Moore, an adviser at the British Department of Transport, wrote an email to her department on 2:55 p.m. local time on Sept. 11, 2001, an hour after the attack on the World Trade Center. “It is now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury,” she wrote.
Ms. Moore was only talking about announcing a change in pension policy. She resigned under pressure months later. On a Friday.
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