By Jeffrey Blehar
Thursday, October 30, 2025
Readers, let us pause for a moment to celebrate what may
turn out to be — with just two months to go — the single most delightful media
disaster of the year. (The competition is fierce, as always.) I have written my
fair share about the upcoming New York City mayoral race,
but the imminence of a multinational immigrant and avowed communist seizing the
reins as mayor of a truly international city has drawn the attention of other
countries as well, particularly that of the U.K.
Thus it was a huge deal when the Times of London (est.
1785), an institution more staid and only slightly less venerable than Big Ben
(est. 1843), seemed to have scored an utterly scandalous last-second
interview with none other than former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who
announced that impending mayor (and former acolyte) Zohran Mamdani’s policies
just “don’t add up.”
You remember Billy the Blazer, right? The improbably tall
two-term mayor — a man who left the city so desperately and sclerotically
broken that it turned in its desperation to Eric Adams — may not have burned
New York to the ground, as people once warned that electing a gangly, surly
socialist sympathizer would do. But the city’s marked decline in safety and
opportunity, and increased cost of living, began under his reign, and so it was
a huge news coup for the Times to score a strangely negative series of
comments from the man Mamdani once described as the greatest New York mayor of
his lifetime.
“In my view, the math doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and
the political hurdles are substantial,” de Blasio wrote when reached via email
by the Times. It was a surprisingly hard-headed analysis. Many on the
right have, of course, long emphasized that Mamdani’s pie-in-the-sky campaign
promises are either unfulfillable or prescriptions for civic collapse. But it
was a shocker to see de Blasio knifing the man who is the closest he will ever
get to an ideological successor a week before the election.
I would love to give you a link to this story, but alas I
cannot. You see, the Times has removed it from its website, because as it turns out the paper never actually spoke to Bill
de Blasio. The real Bill de Blasio took to Twitter almost immediately after
the article was published to state that he had no idea what the heck was going
on and that he’d never spoken to anyone with the Times of London. And he
hadn’t!
Yet there was no fraud at play, only reputation-torching
irresponsibility. Get this: the Times in its infinite wisdom apparently
interviewed the wrong Bill de Blasio. The reporter emailed an
address he believed to be the former mayor’s but that belonged instead to a
random Long Islander of the same name. And the paper never bothered to confirm
that its reporter was actually communicating with the real de Blasio — because
after all, he was. (“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill
DeBlasio.”)
The New York Times — which, to its credit, would
never have been caught making this mistake, no matter how much it might wish to
forget de Blasio — has framed this story with an uncharitably accusatory headline: “De Blasio Impersonator Tricks British
Newspaper With Fake Criticism of Mamdani.” Nonsense! That isn’t just wrong, the
framing of it is perverse, an embarrassing expression of guild-class sympathy
over professional pride.
The Times of New York should be clowning on its
London counterpart properly, not reflexively taking the side of journalists too
stupid to perform their basic due diligence. Bill DeBlasio — who is now a minor
legend — did not hang his shingle out to the world advertising himself as the
former mayor. He was sitting at home minding his own business, for crying out
loud! Even though he knew he was taking advantage of the Times’
ignorance — “I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the
mayor. . . . So I just gave him my opinion” — I cheer him for forcing these
people to pay the price for their lazy assumptions.
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