The city doesn’t need its own television station, but it seems the mayor does.
As Susan Edelman and Amber Jamieson reported in The Post, the mayor is turning a “public” TV station into a vanity channel for his political and personal interests. Officially, it’s called NYC TV, but given the mayor’s role in dictating content, it would be better to call it WBdB-TV — for Bill de Blasio.
The programming includes a feature the mayor ordered up on dancer and “healer” Alessandra Belloni — an old NYU pal who performed at Bill’s wedding. Her “spider dance” is supposed to help domestic-violence victims overcome trauma. It was filmed in September.
To give you a flavor, consider this: In the past two months alone, 18 of the 24 stories carried on its weekly “City Scoop” program featured Mayor Bill as the star.
“Since we’re owned by the city,” a source told The Post, “we’re essentially de Blasio’s media arm. We follow him around because we are his.”
Well, not all “his.” The station gets its funding from cable-licensing fees, a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — and, of course, city taxpayers.
When the station was founded in 2003, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg hailed it as an effort to provide the public with up-to-the-minute info on their government. And he used it, too.
But not as a propaganda-style news service with features designed to promote spider-dancing friends.
Time to pull the plug on a TV station that operates on the public dime and is in danger of becoming all-Bill, all-the-time.



