New York City’s new Mayor has only been in office since January 1.
Improving upon the widely disliked former Mayor, Bill de Blasio, should have been a low bar to clear, but Eric Adams is off to a rocky start.
Now, the new Mayor is offering a crazy explanation for bad stories about him from media outlets in the city.
Before an unrelated press conference on Tuesday about summer youth employment efforts, Adams threatened to stop fielding “off-topic” questions at his press conferences – and blasted the city’s news organizations over what he said was their lack of racial diversity.
NYC Mayor says the media distorts news about NYC and his leadership because he’s a black man. pic.twitter.com/dX0nqXXaVR
— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) February 15, 2022
The epic rant was precipitated by Adams’ failure to convince Albany Democrats to enact his anti-crime agenda.
After a meeting with state legislators in what the Mayor conceded was a failed attempt to change recent far-left criminal justice and bail “reforms,” Adams claimed that media accounts of his trip, none of which mentioned race, were unfairly negative.
In an exchange with reporters, a clearly indignant Adams blamed race for how he was covered, saying, “If you want to acknowledge or not, I have been doing a darn good job and we just can’t live in this alternate reality. How many blacks are on editorial boards? How many blacks determine how these stories are being written? How many Asians? How many East Asians? How many South Asians? Everyone talks about my government being diversified, what’s the diversification in the newsrooms?”
The Mayor also threatened that in the absence of more favorable coverage, “I’m just going to come in and do my announcements and bounce.”
That threat also came with the demand, “Diversify your newsrooms so I can look out and see people who look like me.”
If the unfavorable press accounts were motivated by racial animus then it can’t be the case that his failure to move state legislators had the same culprit.
In summarizing the events of his Albany trip, the Mayor said, “I went to the Assembly conference. People raised the issues that they had and we talked. Black mayor, black Speaker, black majority leader, coming together and talking to each other. And if you would have turned on the news this morning, you would have said, ‘It was all hell up there.’”
Hopefully Adams has future success in changing the laws in Albany because since they’ve been enacted they have been an unmitigated disaster.
The Mayor’s stance on fighting crime is actually an upgrade over the favored policies of the previous de Blasio administration, but unfortunately Adams still has leftist instincts.
And unfortunately, when the going gets tough for a leftist, the explanation for any failure can only be racism.
Stay tuned to Blue State Blues for any updates to this ongoing story.
