If you’re not closely following the New York City mayoral race, you may have missed this strange little wrinkle: Earlier this week, former mayor Bill de Blasio disavowed a report in The Times Of London which purported to quote him condemning candidate Zohran Mamdani. “I want to be 100% clear: The story in the Times of London is entirely false and fabricated. It was just brought to my attention and I’m appalled,” de Blasio (who has endorsed Mamdani) wrote on Twitter/X. “I never spoke to that reporter and never said those things. Those quotes aren’t mine, don’t reflect my views.” The Times had to issue an apology and a retraction. But the quote printed did reflect the views of Bill DeBlasio. Just not the politician.
Instead, a Times Of London journalist apparently emailed a Long Island wine importer who has the same name (spelled ever so slightly differently, “DeBlasio” vs. “de Blasio”). “I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor. So I just gave him my opinion,” DeBlasio told Semafor (which conducted this interview “through his Ring doorbell in Huntington Station, Long Island, from his current location in Florida,” as if this story couldn’t get any more boggling). Instead of correcting the Times reporter, DeBlasio used ChatGPT to come up with a quote that reflected his own view that “the math” of Mamdani’s policies “doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and the political hurdles are substantial.”
Instead, the story made it to print. Sources for Semafor say this is because of pressure for more critical Mamdani pieces, supposedly driven by Margi Conklin, the U.S. Director of Content at The Times and a veteran of The New York Post and The Free Press. Unfortunately, Mamdani mania led The Times down a wrong but very funny path. (Though one with real consequences: Mamdani’s political rival Andrew Cuomo boosted the false piece on social media to highlight opposition to Mamdani’s campaign.) The outlet stated it had removed the post “after discovering that our reporter had been misled by an individual falsely claiming to be the former New York mayor.” But the other DeBlasio justifiably assumed that the reporter cold emailing him would “check out” his lack of credentials. “It was all in good fun. I never thought it would make it to print,” he told Semafor.
