I Bashed Media Before Trump Made It Cool: De Blasio

NEW YORK — News flash: Bill de Blasio has disliked the local press for decades. The Democratic mayor's vehement criticism of right-wing outlets such as the New York Post started well before President Donald Trump made media-bashing a daily habit, he said in a new interview.

De Blasio's often testy relationship with reporters and indignant responses to critical coverage have drawn comparisons to Trump, who has called the news media an "enemy of the people."

But in a sit-down with the "FAQ NYC" news podcast, the mayor said he started calling out the Post and its parent company, News Corp., for race-baiting and stoking division well before he held his first elected office.

"I'd been saying this stuff since the 1980s — not that anyone knew me or cared, but I’d been saying it," de Blasio said in the interview released Friday. "This concept of the meaning of News Corp., for example, and concerns of a certain type, of corporatization of the media, is not because of Donald Trump."

The Post is not the only publication to draw de Blasio's ire. He wondered in private correspondence whether the New York Daily News ending its print edition would be good for him. He once called a New York Times story "disgusting" and contemplated "starv(ing)" the paper. And he's said people shouldn't believe everything they read in certain publications.

But the Post and other News Corp. outlets such as Fox News have sown division through propaganda like no one else, the mayor argued. He blamed the company for Trump's rise to power and accused the Post of using race "incessantly as a tool to divide."

He cited the paper's treatment the Central Park Five and David Dinkins, the city's first African-American mayor under whom de Blasio worked.

"Borrowing from Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the others," de Blasio said. "And News Corp, Fox, New York Post, they are not like the rest of the American media, period."

De Blasio once refused to call on a New York Post reporter at a news conference, reportedly saying he had "no use for a right-wing rag." Just this week he reportedly stood by while his bodyguards escorted away a Post reporter who tried to question him at a parade.

Trump and his administration have similarly singled out CNN — the president refused to take a question from one of the network's reporters last month, and another was barred from a press event after she tried to question Trump.

But the mayor called comparisons between him and the president "facile and simplistic." He conceded News Corp.'s journalists "should have every right to ask every question," but still accused the company of pushing an agenda that's harmed American society.

"The notion that some corporations have a political agenda and are trying to alter our society in their favor, that’s not a new idea to me," de Blasio said. "That has no resemblance to what Trump is talking about."

Listen to de Blasio's full "FAQ NYC" interview below.

(Lead image: Mayor Bill de Blasio speaks at a news conference in June 2018. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)