New York’s ‘Fake News’ Expert
Mayor de Blasio will speak next month at a conference titled “‘You Are Fake News’: Truth, Lies, Politics in the Age of Trump.” He’s certainly an expert at denouncing news he doesn’t want to hear — and at faking news of his own.
The whole thing should be bizarre. The sponsors are Buzzfeed and The Intercept.
Buzzfeed, recall, published that infamous dossier on President Trump’s supposed ties with Russia. Intercept star Glenn Greenwald slammed it as “a totally anonymous, unverified, unvetted document filled with scurrilous and inflammatory allegations about which its own editor-in-chief says there ‘is serious reason to doubt the allegations.’ ”
The host-vs.-host fireworks might be worth the $400 fee. But what will de Blasio offer?
After all, the mayor has a long record of telling New Yorkers not to believe their own lying eyes — or news reports.
He spent months denying that homelessness was soaring, even as The Post was running photos of out-of-control encampments, before he finally admitted the truth.
Last year, he refused to take a Post reporter’s questions because he was mad over an exposé about political operatives paid by the taxpayers as “special assistants.” He said he was only “calling on real media outlets.”
Back when he was actively denying the massive mismanagement at the Administration for Children’s Services, his answer to The Post’s citing details of a report from city Comptroller Scott Stringer was to accuse us of colluding with Stringer to create fake news.
Every paper in town is reporting on Correction Commissioner Joseph Ponte’s misdoings, yet, before it emerged late Thursday night that Ponte would resign, the mayor insisted that the commissioner had done nothing wrong and that the facts “as described in the press” were purely subjective.
The mayor’s minions staged a fake exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum to bolster his anticrime cred. His City Hall creates YouTube videos that allege that racism explains public resistance to his homeless-shelter plans.
De Blasio isn’t so much an expert on fake news as an exhibit.