Botched Bill De Blasio Interview Was "Humiliating," Times Of London Editor Says

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