Opinion

Mayors aren’t supposed to hide in ‘safe spaces’

Mayor de Blasio’s deal to do a weekly interview with NY1’s Errol Louis is yet another bid to control his press availability while seeming to be open.

Louis is a pro, and we expect he’ll ask some tough questions. But he can’t stand in for the entire, diverse City Hall press corps — which is lucky if the mayor does an open availability once a week.

With “Mondays with the Mayor,” Louis joins public radio’s Brian Lehrer as the only journalists Hizzoner opts to speak with regularly. And Lehrer’s task is definitely not asking hard-hitting follow-ups: He’s a host, mainly helping callers “Ask the Mayor.”

Nor did de Blasio even start regular call-in shows until we began slamming him on the issue back in May 2015. At the same time, we raised his failure to do town-hall-style public forums — and he still mainly only does fake ones, with tightly controlled audiences primed to ask questions he wants to hear.

We’re happy the mayor gave up on his brief refusal to take any questions from Post reporters — but that hardly makes him a model of transparency.

New York’s 109th mayor still stands as the least accessible in living memory: John Lindsay, Abe Beame, Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg all had their battles with the media, but they were available to the City Hall press corps on a daily basis, or close to it.

Yes, running a city of 8 million is a busy job (or should be) — but it’s a tough job to do well if you largely dodge the media and don’t engage broadly with citizens who aren’t drinking your Kool-Aid.

Hiding in a chief executive’s version of one of those campus “safe spaces” — where your values, actions and ideology go unquestioned — signals you’re not even trying to be the mayor of the entire city. It’s a betrayal of basic democracy.

And spinning a weekly sitdown with Louis as furthering your “efforts to reach New Yorkers directly” is absurd.

If de Blasio wants to be truly open, “Monday with the Mayor” won’t cut it. Try “every day with the entire press.”