Chris Sommerfeldt, who covers City Hall for The New York Daily News, spent the early part of Tuesday reporting on ICE agents’ arrest of Brad Lander, the city comptroller, at a Manhattan courthouse.
Later in the day, Mr. Sommerfeldt was a subject of news coverage himself, after Mayor Eric Adams took the extraordinary step of barring him in the future from the weekly City Hall news conferences that are reporters’ only regular chance to ask Mr. Adams whatever they want.
The mayor, whose interactions with reporters have often been contentious, imposed the ban after calling Mr. Sommerfeldt “disruptive” and “disrespectful” for shouting questions without being called on first, as is the custom at the so-called off-topic events.
Mr. Sommerfeldt, one of two Daily News reporters who cover City Hall, has not been called on at one of the weekly events in more than three months, the newspaper reported.
The exchange that preceded the mayor’s unusual move came as he discussed his plans for the general election campaign.
Elected as a Democrat in 2021, Mr. Adams is skipping the party primary this year and has said he intends to run for re-election on two ballot lines of his own creation: EndAntiSemitism and Safe&Affordable.
State election law requires that he pick one, a restriction that he suggested at the news conference he was considering challenging in court.
After Mr. Adams emphasized that he would be running on the two lines, Mr. Sommerfeldt interjected: “If you can only pick one —”
“You’re calling out a lot, Chris,” Mr. Adams responded in a taunting, singsong voice. “Stop calling out. You must have done that in school.”
Mr. Sommerfeldt sought to ask his question again. Mr. Adams cut him off.
“Listen, if he does that again, he’s not to come into our conferences,” the mayor told members of his staff, adding: “You’re not going to come into this conference, my off-topics, and be disrespectful, and call out, and think you’re going to do what you want. You won’t come through that gate if you do that again.”
Mr. Sommerfeldt tried once more to get in his question.
“He did it again,” Mr. Adams said. “Make sure security knows he’s not allowed back into this room.”
Kayla Mamelak Altus, the mayor’s press secretary, said after the news conference that the ban did not affect The Daily News broadly, that Mr. Sommerfeldt had been talking over other reporters and that her focus was on ensuring all media outlets had equal access to the mayor. She also said she did not know Mr. Sommerfeldt had not been called on in over three months.
Reached by phone, Mr. Sommerfeldt, 33, declined to comment.
Andrew Julien, The Daily News’s executive editor, objected to the mayor’s move in a statement.
“Our reporters have the right to ask questions, and taxpayers aren’t funding the police to keep reporters out of City Hall press conferences,” Mr. Julien said.
In a letter to the mayor, the Daily News Union, a unit of the NewsGuild of New York, demanded that the mayor reverse the ban, saying that he had shown “a flagrant disregard for the role of the press and for our colleague’s professionalism.”
“Chris was doing his job,” the union said to Mr. Adams. “The only person being disrespectful was you.”
Ed Shanahan is a rewrite reporter and editor covering breaking news and general assignments on the Metro desk.
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