The Scoop
As the New York City mayor’s race entered its home stretch this week, a reporter for The Times of London, Bevan Hurley, sent an email to Bill de Blasio.
He wanted to know what the former mayor of New York City thought about the upcoming race.
He received an incredible response. While de Blasio has supported Democrat Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, the former mayor confessed in an email to the New Zealand-born journalist that while he admired Mamdani’s ambition, the Democratic nominee was making dangerously “optimistic assumptions” about how much money new taxes would bring in.
“In my view, the math doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and the political hurdles are substantial,” de Blasio wrote.
The Times, part of the Murdoch family’s News Corp. empire, which has been waging a broad campaign against the democratic socialist candidate, rushed to print with the explosive story that the former mayor had broken with his would-be successor. Its sister publication, the New York Post, quickly aggregated and amplified it. Melissa DeRosa — a top aide to Mamdani’s opponent, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — weighed in to amplify the story.
The only problem? The email had not come from the former mayor at all. De Blasio responded with shock, demanding The Times retract the story. “It is an absolute violation of journalistic ethics. The truth is I fully support @ZohranKMamdani and believe his vision is both necessary and achievable.”
The former mayor marveled, via text message to Semafor, that he’d never had this experience in 25 years of public life.
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So how did The Times, a pillar of quality British journalism since the 18th century, blow the story so badly?
Part of the push came from the top. As the New York mayor’s race approaches, The Times of London has accelerated its push for more, and largely hostile, coverage of Mamdani. That campaign has been driven internally by Margi Conklin, a New York Post veteran who was most recently managing editor at The Free Press, according two people with knowledge of the situation. Conklin did not edit the de Blasio article, a person familiar with the coverage said.
Three people familiar with the situation told Semafor that Hurley reached out to an email address the reporter believed belonged to the former mayor of New York. It’s unclear where he got the address, or who it actually belongs to.
In a statement shared with outlets including Semafor, a News UK spokesperson blamed the debacle on whoever that email address belongs to, saying the paper had “apologised to Bill de Blasio and removed the article immediately after discovering that our reporter had been misled by an individual falsely claiming to be the former New York mayor.”
Semafor reached out to a Gmail address our sources believed to be the one used by The Times.
“You are correct. It was me. The real Bill DeBlasio,” the person who controls the email address responded. The person didn’t respond to further questions, and phone calls to two numbers associated with the email address went unanswered.
Conklin and Hurley didn’t respond to inquiries.
Max’s view
The Times is hardly alone in its hunger for Mamdani content. Always a source of off-year political fascination, the New York mayor’s race has nonetheless attracted a huge amount of national and global attention. Mamdani, Cuomo, and Republican Curtis Sliwa have all made multiple appearances across major national and new media outlets.
Cuomo has appeared on Fox News and in right-leaning media outlets hoping to peel away supporters from Sliwa, while Mamdani has given interviews seemingly nearly once a week to The New York Times as he hopes to lock up support among the city’s Democratic voters.
The Times has already had a bad week: On Monday, it deleted a story claiming that the British treasury secretary had spent taxpayer money lavishly on office decor at a time when the country is hotly debating austerity measures.
But New York’s media-political circus is a particularly unforgiving place. The Times’ error immediately garnered write-ups in The Washington Post, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and other outlets. As British publications continue to look towards expansion in the US, and try to muscle in on turf long occupied by the aggressive New York press corps, they may find American media competitors to be more than happy to point out their errors.
Notable
- New York asks: So who was impersonating de Blasio?
- De Blasio told the New York Times he was “astounded.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated Margi Conklin’s role in the story.