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Mayor Eric Adams unloaded Tuesday in an epic rant in which he threatened to stop fielding “off-topic” questions at his press conferences — and blasted the Big Apple’s news organizations over what he said was their lack of racial diversity.
The scolding, which came before an unrelated press conference on summer youth employment efforts, appeared to be sparked by coverage of his failed bid to get state lawmakers to budge on his anti-crime agenda — although the mayor failed to convey how race factored into that.
One day after meeting with Albany lawmakers in what he all but admitted was a failed attempt to roll back recent criminal-justice reforms, Adams claimed that accounts of his trip, none of which touched on race, were unfairly negative.
“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,” a clearly angered Adams said.
Adams also warned that if the coverage of him doesn’t improve, “I’m just going to come in and do my announcements and bounce.”
Adams repeatedly suggested that race played a factor in news coverage of him, telling an almost all-white group of reporters who were hand-picked by his office and invited to cover the City Hall news conference, “I’m a black man that’s the mayor but my story is being interpreted by people that don’t look like me.”
“How many blacks are on editorial boards? How many blacks determine how these stories are being written?” he said.
“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 the reporters of “writing through your prisms” before adding: “Diversify your newsrooms so I can look out and see people who look like me.”
Recounting his trip to Albany, Adams 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,’ ” 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?”
A veteran of the previous administration told The 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 the notoriously thin-skinned de Blasio, who frequently responded to negative coverage by attacking the city’s press corps.
“We’ll see how well it works for Eric.”
On Monday, Adams appeared to give up on his attempts to convince Albany Democrats to help him fight crime following a closed-door meeting in Albany.
Adams told reporters he “shared” his plan to fight crime in the Big Apple before adding, “If I am not getting the things I laid out … I still have an obligation to keep the city safe.”
That came after Assemblywoman Latrice Walker (D-Brooklyn) — who last week clashed with Adams over his desire to let judges lock up defendants they deem dangerous — said that “we are gonna hold the line” on criminal justice reforms enacted in 2019.
Meanwhile, Gov. Kathy Hochul said the bail reform law likely wouldn’t be addressed until after the March 31 budget deadline, after she last month declared that she won’t “cave to pressure” to enact tough-on-crime measures Adams and others have recently backed.
Last week, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins unequivocally rejected Adams’ push to toughen the state’s bail law.
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