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It took only 46 days for New York Mayor Eric Adams to pull out the race card.
During a Tuesday press conference, Adams slammed the New York media for what he perceives as a lack of diversity when they dared to report that his recent trip to the capital of Albany failed to get lawmakers to budge on his supposed anti-crime agenda.
“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,” the aggrieved Adams said to the press corps.
The mayor repeatedly called race to the forefront of his remarks which were unironically directed to a nearly all-white team of reporters hand-picked by his own office.
“I’m a black man that’s the mayor but my story is being interpreted by people that don’t look like me,” he said.
(Video: Fox 5 New York/YouTube)
“How many blacks are on editorial boards? How many blacks determine how these stories are being written?” he continued. “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?”
Adams also accused reporters of “writing through your prisms” before admonishing them to “Diversify your newsrooms so I can look out and see people who look like me.”
He related his experience in Albany in the hopes that the press would look at the bright side of his young mayoralty.
“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,” Adams noted.
“And if you would have turned on the news this morning, you would have said, ‘It was all hell up there,’ ” the mayor said. “I’m trying to figure out – do you guys already write the stories before I do something and just print out what you’ve already written?”
He added, “I’m going to stop doing off-topics because if you already have your perception of me – and you are already going to stick to what you think I am — then why am I doing this?”
One veteran of the previous administration told the New York Post that Adams appeared to be “taking a page out of Bill de Blasio’s playbook.”
“It didn’t work for him,” the source said of de Blasio, who routinely would attack the city’s press corps whenever he felt scorned. “We’ll see how well it works for Eric.”
Long-time Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf also said that playing the race card was unwise at this juncture in Adams’ career.
“Eric Adams’ mayoralty will rest entirely on crime control. He’s not getting the help he needs in Albany, he’s frustrated, he’s angry and he’s taking it out on the press,” Sheinkopf said. “And talk of race will not help him.”
Former de Blasio press secretary Bill Neidhardt also said, “If this is what gets him upset, wait until it’s six times larger and smacked on the front of both tabs and he’ll start to understand.”
“Not every story can be about your smoothies,” he added.
Adams told reporters he “shared” his plan to fight crime in the Big Apple but faced a lot of resistance from the state. “If I am not getting the things I laid out … I still have an obligation to keep the city safe.”
Assemblywoman Latrice Walker (D-Brooklyn) said that “we are gonna hold the line” on the notoriously failed criminal justice reforms enacted in 2019, while Gov. Kathy Hochul said the bail reform law likely wouldn’t be addressed until after the March 31 budget deadline. State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins also rejected Adams’s alleged efforts to convince lawmakers to get tougher on crime.
Adams closed with a warning that if the coverage of him doesn’t improve, “I’m just going to come in and do my announcements and bounce.”
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Frank (Chip) Webster is a musician and composer, former teacher of percussion and U.S. Army Infantry veteran. He holds a degree in English from Arizona State University.
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