‘The Whole Story’

Mayor de Blasio was at it again Friday, telling WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, “I don’t think New Yorkers believe that every tabloid’s cover tells them the whole story.” Yes, Mr. Mayor: Page One is mostly headlines — grabbing the essence of the news. The full stories are inside. More important, New Yorkers plainly can’t count on you to tell the full story.

The mayor was griping about coverage of his team’s much-belated truth-telling about the number of public-housing kids with elevated blood lead levels — which followed years of systemic lies by the city Housing Authority about its lead-paint inspections and much, much more.

Back in November, Team de Blasio claimed that only 19 NYCHA children under 6 had registered high blood lead levels between 2010 and 2016. It took until July to report that it was actually 758 kids over a shorter timespan, 2012-2016. And only Thursday did the city note that 1,160 public-housing children under 18 had tested positive.

It’s all par for the de Blasio course. It took weeks of Post coverage, complete with photos of major encampments, for him to admit the soaring street-homeless problem. He insisted his Administration for Children’s Services was working fine even as more battered and mistreated kids died.

And of course he defended the team he’d installed at NYCHA until the tabloids exposed too many of their lies.

His other fallback, also deployed Friday, is to blame the Bloomberg administration. And it’s certainly true that NYCHA’s deceptions go back at least that far.

But de Blasio took office vowing to stand up for the “other New York” that he said Bloomberg had neglected. Instead, the new mayor left NYCHA running on autopilot — even as his appointees made things worse at agencies like ACS and Homeless Services.

For the record, Bloomberg complained plenty about his press coverage, too — because a big part of our job is to tell you the story the politicians don’t want you to hear.