De Blasio’s anti-media narrative is wearing thin

Loyalty to the executive is the latest mandate at City Hall – where Mayor Bill de Blasio has issued gag orders to staff members in the wake of the federal investigations probing his administration – an effort to tamp down any leaks to the media, which the mayor apparently believes “will never be on our side,” according to Gothamist. The question that City Hall staffers should be asking is whether they can say the same about their boss.

De Blasio’s bunker mentality media strategy is nothing new. Since taking office in 2014, the mayor and his closest aides have leaned on the familiar refrain that the work his administration is doing is what really matters, and what the New York City political news media is reporting isn’t.

But de Blasio’s “me against the media” narrative has transcended the typically frosty politician-reporter relationship and now borders on a compulsive tic – a crutch for the mayor to lean on when he and his staff lose control of a story. The mayor’s latest salvo was directed at a reporter who doesn’t even regularly cover him – Daily News Albany Bureau Chief Ken Lovett – with de Blasio pointedly implying that Lovett is a PR conduit for the governor’s office because he scooped a leak of a criminal referral by the state Board of Elections involving de Blasio and his fund-raising operation. (Lovett’s recent rebuttal to the mayor’s allegations is a must-read.)

The Gothamist report on the gag order perfectly illustrated just how thin-skinned the mayor has become regarding the media coverage – a Kremlin-esque tactic that will most certainly backfire, if only because the mayor’s modus operandi of throwing his staff under the bus at the first sign of trouble would hardly seem to engender loyalty.

Consider three separate media skirmishes that embroiled the de Blasio administration – the disconnect between Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the mayor’s handling of the Legionnaire’s outbreak in the Bronx; the bizarre removal of funding to finish the city’s third water tunnel; and the recent scandal over the lifting of a deed restriction on a former HIV/AIDS care facility in Manhattan that was subsequently flipped for an obscene profit.

In each instance, de Blasio’s first reaction was to point a finger at anyone but himself. The first to be thrown under the bus was Karen Hinton for questioning the state’s efforts to prevent a Legionnaire’s outbreak while they were actively trying to muscle out the city’s health apparatus. Hinton was publicly scolded by the man she replaced as press secretary, Phil Walzak, now a senior adviser to the mayor, who said her remarks “did not reflect the views of the de Blasio administration.”

When the mayor’s office mysteriously removed budgeting for the final phase of construction to complete the much-needed third water tunnel, de Blasio’s first line of defense was to deflect blame to his communications staff: “There are times when my team does not do a good job of explaining something. And I think it’s as simple as that."

And of course, the Rivington Street nursing home scandal, which has become the source of city, state and federal investigations, was met with substantial shock and awe when first addressed by de Blasio – only to then suggest that the first he had heard of a major real estate transaction brokered by his administration was in the newspaper that morning – a dubious claim that puts the blame squarely on multiple levels of City Hall staffers rather than his (and Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen’s) own managerial incompetence.

When I was covering City Hall in 2014, I spoke with Leland Jones, the press secretary for former Mayor David Dinkins, about de Blasio’s early media stumbles. Jones offered the sage advice that de Blasio’s communications staff would have to “let the Kool-Aid wear off a little bit,” in order to manage the unwieldy city news cycle – referring to the frequent criticism that the mayor had too many “true believers” in his press office.

But after two-plus years of antagonizing the media and letting his press staff take the beating, one has to wonder if there is any de Blasio Kool-Aid left to drink at City Hall.