Cambridge's mayor emerged this week an embattled man, angrily accusing a city newspaper of inaccurate and unfair reporting while himself troubled by new media reports on his personal finances.

City officials and civic leaders alike have portrayed Mayor Kenneth E. Reeves '72 as a diligent and involved official who often has problems dealing with the press.

The issues raised have touched a raw nerve among Cantabrigians. More than 140 of them, mostly African-Americans, rallied outside City Hall on Monday, demanding fairer coverage from the Cambridge Chronicle.

The weekly newspaper published a story last Thursday that charged Reeves, who is Black, with failing to account for more than 275 expenses he billed on his city-issued Master-Card.

In addition, Reeves admitted Monday night that he had been visited by two agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding a $30,000 overpayment by the school committee. And a new revelation on Tuesday--that the state will look into whether he paid his state income taxes in 1992--has only served to complicate the issue.

'A Necessary Evil'?

Some of the most visible actors in this Cambridge play are the media, which have been accused of sensationalism and biased coverage.

Reeves "doesn't get recognition for what he deserves," said Bernard P. Hicks, one of three organizers of Monday's rally. "But for things that are unimportant, he gets recognition," he added.

"It's unconscionable," Reeves declared at the city council meeting, "that anybody would attempt to manipulate fact in a way that is so sick."

"You have a responsibility to ensure that everything you print is true, and comes from reliable, objective and knowledgeable sources," Reeves wrote in a five-page letter to Chronicle editor John H. Breneman Tuesday night, that appears in today's issue of the Chronicle. "In this responsibility, you have sadly failed."

He said the weekly is motivated by "personal enmity."

The Chronicle stands by its story. It insists that its purpose is to report the truth, not to sell papers.

"I know he is half saint and half role model to countless people," Breneman says in an editorial in today's Chronicle, which was obtained by The Crimson. "But it does not relieve the newspaper of its responsibility to ask hard questions, nor does it absolve the mayor of his responsibility to be accountable for city tax dollars."

Moreover, the Chronicle editorial states that Reeves usually refuses to speak with its writers and faults the mayor's attitude toward the press.

"He has never regarded the press as anything more than a necessary evil," Breneman writes in the editorial.

But beyond the charges of sensationalism and lack of accountability are statements--from Reeves' supporters--that the mayor needs to improve his P.R.