Mayor Eric Adams might not know a 1957 Brooklyn Dodgers cap when he sees one, but he damn sure knows where the low-income Ebbets Field Apartments is located, which is a lot more than can probably be said for City & State Reporter Jeff Coltin.
Coltin got a real scoop last week. He was wearing an old Brooklyn Dodgers cap at work when hizzoner passed him on the city hall steps going in the opposite direction and remarked, “This is New York, we don’t wear Boston hats.”
Sensing an exclusive, Coltin took a selfie of himself wearing the cap and tweeted the mayor’s comment with the gotcha comment: “It’s a Brooklyn Dodger hat!”
And of course, Twitter, being the bible for journalists and filled with mob justice warriors, went off the charts. As of this writing it has 25.8k likes, 1,647 retweets and 793 quote tweets – including from a number of the City Hall Press corps reporters. It even garnered a story dissing Adams by smarmy New York Magazine Reporter Joe DeLessio.
Coltin’s Tweet certainly lends credence to Adams recently going off on the almost all-white City Hall press corps. When he made his remarks, Adams notably said they should not be taken as a negative but as a conversation starter about how nobody covering him looked like him. This brought on a lot of grumbling on how Adams was playing the race card, but he made a good point.
I interpreted what Adams was saying as that a lot of the city hall press corps lack context in covering Black officials. They never went drinking at Black bars, hung out in Black neighborhoods, went to Black churches or in the words of Jay-Z, “shot at the same baskets.”
Full disclosure. I’m a white Jewish journalist blessed for living a part of my adult life on the streets – including in Black neighborhoods – before going into this noble profession. I am married to a working-class, politically unconnected Black woman and we have four now-grown biracial kids and three grandchildren.
This disclosure doesn’t make me a better journalist or person. It does give me more context into the Black American experience than most whites. This also isn’t the first time that I’ve written about Coltin and City & State’s white privilege way of covering city politics without ever venturing into the community.
Now I’m sure there are those in the media thinking, what Jeff did is not a horrible thing. I mean you have to have a sense of humor, right? Right?
But to me it feels like a lot of local media is covering the still young Adams administration with a death by a thousand cuts mentality. And Jeff – a normally solid city hall reporter – took a box cutter to his role as a government watchdog and received a pat on his back for it from some of his colleagues. And we all know how publishers love clicks and likes!
For the record, the low-income Ebbetts Field Apartments, 1720 Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, is built on the site where the Brooklyn Dodgers played. It is an H-shaped 24-story housing complex, with 1,300 units and thousands of residents.
Their issues are much more important than a baseball cap.
