No more questions for you!
Mayor Bloomberg threatened to stop holding news conferences on Thursday after reporters kept asking him questions that he didn’t want to answer.
“Every press conference all you want to do is ask about things I’m not going to say. I’m not going to bother with the press conferences.There’s just no reason to do it,” he huffed, before telling the press what he considered acceptable lines of inquiry.
“I think it’s very important we talk to the public and answer the press’ questions. But you just have to restrict the questions to things that are germane to what our administration is doing.”
After calling reporters to Chelsea Piers to boast that the city’s air quality was better than ever, Bloomberg opened the floor to questions.
But he quickly became agitated when the press started asking about the mayoral race and voters’ apparent “Bloomberg fatigue.”
When a reporter from Metro News asked if New Yorkers had “a propensity to focus on the negative” in his administration, the mayor had enough.
“When they vote with their feet which direction do they go?” Bloomberg asked, referring to the fact more people are moving into the city than out.
He went on to explain that he was only there to answer what he called “legitimate questions.”
He dismissed as “dumb” another reporter’s complicated query asking him to ascribe percentages to how much New Yorkers’ lives have improved by the administration’s programs.
When it came to the race to succeed him, Bloomberg said he has not listened to one campaign speech, seen a single campaign ad or listened to any of the debates because he didn’t find them interesting.