EXCLUSIVE: A senior figure at The Times of London has bemoaned the damage done to the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper’s reputation after a reporter was duped by a man pretending to be Bill de Blasio.
Ian Brunskill, an associate editor at The Times, emailed the newsroom lamenting the “humiliating” botched interview with the former New York City mayor. The email was subject-lined: “Fake (Times) news/must read.”
Brunskill said the de Blasio interview — and a separate hoax story involving an “AI-generated case study” about a fake royal household employee — had done “serious damage to our reputation” and “could have been avoided by good practice and due diligence.”
“We should have been on our guard. We should have tried much harder to speak to the people concerned,” he wrote in the email, seen by Deadline. “There are no excuses.”
Published earlier this week, The Times’ story carried quotes purporting to be from de Blasio, in which he raised concerns about Democrat Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for office.
Semafor reported that The Times did track down a man named Bill De Blasio, but he was actually a Long Island wine importer. This person told Semafor he played along, responding to The Times journalist over email and using ChatGPT to compose a response criticizing Mamdani’s tax plans.
“While the ambition is admirable, the cost estimates – reportedly exceeding $7bn annually – rest on optimistic assumptions about eliminating waste and raising revenue through new taxes,” the impostor said. “In my view, the math doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and the political hurdles are substantial.”
De Blasio said the quotes were “entirely false and fabricated” and criticized Murdoch’s newspaper for its “absolute violation of journalistic ethics.”
The Times retracted the story and said: “The Times has 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.”
The hoax interview has generated a flurry of press reports on both sides of the Atlantic, including in The New York Post, which is also owned by Murdoch. De Blasio said he supports Mamdani and believes “his vision is both necessary and achievable.”
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