Eric Adams just keeps trying to beat the press

Just after Daily News reporter Chris Sommerfeldt bumped into Eric Adams walking to a press conference Friday morning and asked why he took a car instead of biking there, a member of the mayor’s press team sent a picture of Hizzoner riding a train to the event and then posted pictures of Adams shaking hands with a fruit stand guy, smiling at a dog, and walking down the stairs to the subway.

Eric Adams likes to be seen everywhere, being regular.

He’s on the streets, talking to New Yorkers and giving them his cell number.

But Eric Adams clearly doesn’t like to be heard in those unscripted interactions with folks.

He doesn’t have a regular radio appearance, like his predecessors did over the past three decades, where people could call in and have the mayor publicly answer their questions — often quite different from the ones the press lobbed.

Adams has yet to hold an open town-halltype event where New Yorkers can not only speak directly to him, but have their questions amplified and his answers on the record.

Mostly he’s doing interviews with local outlets that are happy enough to have him for a few minutes that there’s no time for any follow-ups and national outlets that just want an entertaining main character. Those spots give the impression he’s answering questions while really he’s just repeating his talking points for the day.

Adams has already lived up to the mayoral tradition of complaining to and about the more knowledgeable and less easily satisfied City Hall press corps, saying the big outlets are fixated on bad news and haven’t given his administration a fair shake, and also that the political reporters are mostly too young and too online and don’t demographically reflect the city.

He’s entirely the wrong person to be making those points. It’s never a good look when players whine about the refs instead of playing the game. Adams, as he likes to say, is the man in the arena, not a media commentator.

It was a Republican congressman in the 1960s who advised,”never quarrel with a man who buys ink by the barrel.”

Sixty years later, ink is nearly obsolete, space online is dirt cheap and Adams — who launched his own podcast earlier this year — is hardly the only elected official trying to circumvent the press and build his own media operation to communicate directly to “his” public, though it’s not clear many people are actually tuning in.

Along with lots of other new podcasts from various departments and agencies and a newsletter from City Hall, the Eric Adams Extended Universe also includes a new weekly online briefing from his friend Phil Banks, that’s nominally about the deputy mayor for public safety speaking directly to and answering questions from New Yorkers.

Those online “episodes,” as Banks calls them, have effectively replaced with his talking points the factually grounded briefings police commissioners previously delivered monthly about the crime numbers while answering tough questions about them from reporters in the room.

They’ve been a safe space for Banks to belatedly introduce himself after more than a year of keeping a ridiculously low profile to dodge questions about his hangouts at One Police Plaza not to mention private plane flights and steakhouse dinners paid for by two guys who went to prison for bribing then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. (Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell, notably, hasn’t returned since joining Banks in his first “episode.”)

That captures the Adams’ administration’s self-defeating strategy of pretending to engage with the public, wasting energy in a futile effort to control the narrative that’s another impediment to putting in the hard work it takes to get stuff done and putting out numbers people can use to judge that stuff for themselves.

(One example: It’s no good to proclaim that your administration is going to get mentally ill street people evaluated at hospitals, by force if necessary, if it then won’t disclose how many people the police have brought in for those evaluations.)

The thing about Adams’ press strategy is that, like almost every new mayor, he’s brand new to wielding real power let alone running the city, but has decades of experience behind the bully pulpit.

While no mayor ever fully accepts this after talking their way into City Hall, the fact remains that there’s no way to talk past the underlying facts.

And that means there’s no reason for a talented communicator like Adams to shy away from talking, at town halls and with the mics on, to the public.

New Yorkers aren’t easily fooled. The media doesn’t control what they think, and neither do politicians.

The only way to beat the press and convince New Yorkers over time is to deliver.

The rest is commentary.