Our Petulant Mayor
In a week when Mayor de Blasio, having escaped indictment in his various corruption scandals, should have been soaring high, he instead came off as a petulant kid, testily ducking reporters’ questions as his minions scrubbed the record in sad efforts to hide the embarrassments.
The mayor walked out of his own press conference Thursday because no one wanted to ask about the issue he hoped to promote, his dream of a new “mansion tax.”
Instead, reporters sought his comments on news of public interest — a racially motivated murder; an arrest over the threats to Jewish Community Centers; the court ruling against his bid to shield his communications with his “agents of the city.”
De Blasio’s response: “This is how we set things up, guys. You don’t want to be a part of it, you don’t have to come.”
Wow: Most 7-year-olds don’t whine that sadly to other kids who won’t play their game.
Then the mayor’s staff followed up by scrubbing the offending questions from the official transcript — instead labelling them “inaudible,” with rich echoes of all those “expletives deleted” in the Nixon tapes.
On Friday, the mayor continued to pout in public, insisting the reporters didn’t know their jobs, because the mansion tax and the senior housing it’s supposed to fund are “what their readers really care about.”
More egg-on-the-face: City Hall also got caught censoring an embarrassing de Blasio answer from the online video of a presser earlier in the week.
As he notes on the opposite page, Seth Barron of City Council Watch asked about the mayor’s high-profile ban on federal immigration agents in city schools: Has anyone from ICE ever tried to enter a school?
No, de Blasio admitted — thereby admitting his “solution” was just grandstanding.
The exchange was edited out of City Hall’s YouTube video of the press conference — until Barron pointed out the mysterious gap, and aides posted a clean version.
The tone for such stupidity is plainly set at the top: De Blasio’s hunger to control the public debate is as palpable as it is futile.
Grow up, Mr. Mayor: City Hall reporters aren’t your stenographers or your cheerleaders. And nobody gets to dictate news coverage in this town.