New York Mayor Launches Newsletter To Circumvent Press
Adams says the media has overlooked his accomplishments, and he wants to speak directly to citizens.
Fed up with press coverage of his administration, New York’s mayor is launching a new initiative to publicize his administration’s achievements.
Mayor Adams is asking New Yorkers to sign up for a newsletter that promises to update them on policy changes and new resources being made available. Mr. Adams says the press has overlooked his accomplishments, and he wants to speak directly to citizens.
“We’ve accomplished so much in our first year,” the mayor said in a statement, “but none of those accomplishments mean anything if New Yorkers don’t know about them and aren’t using them. That changes now.”
“I can’t continue to run a city where all the great stuff we are doing is being distorted or not being recorded at all,” the mayor said at a press conference Monday, the subject of which was supposed to be new, low-interest loans for local businesses.
Noting the irony of addressing the topic at a press conference, the mayor said he would be “surprised if you guys,” referring to the reporters present, “even cover that we did this $75 million allocation.”
“Imagine me, dependent on you to tell a story,” the mayor told reporters, with an almost incredulous tone.
The mayor’s popularity is tanking, and even press outlets that showed initial excitement about his administration have soured. A December Siena poll found Mr. Adams floundering, with an approval rating at 50 percent among city residents, down eight points from February. Chatter about 2025 challenges has already begun.
“If Colgate was at the mercy of the tabloids, they would go out of business. I am the Colgate. I can’t go out of business,” the mayor told reporters, apparently referring to the dental health company.
He would not be the first New York mayor to go out of business — Mayors Dinkins and Beame only served one term each before their electoral defeats.
Mayor Adams’s complaints have an echo of President Trump’s critiques of the mainstream media, which the former president once declared “the enemy of the American people.” After being banned from several social media platforms following the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Mr. Trump took it upon himself to found his own social media company.
