LEONARD GREENE: Mayor Adams should lift his press conference ban on Daily News reporter

With all that’s going on in New York City these days, from elected officials being arrested by ICE agents to passengers being pepper sprayed on the subway, you would think Mayor Adams would have more important things to do than picking a fight with a reporter.

But there he was, the mayor of the nation’s largest city, banning a reporter from one of the city’s most storied and respected news organizations from City Hall news conferences for — get this — asking a question.

Adams claimed that the Daily News’ Chris Sommerfeldt was being disrespectful and disruptive at a City Hall news conference last week when he repeatedly broke protocol and blurted out questions to the mayor without being called on.

“Listen, if he does that again, he’s not to come into our conferences,” Adams said to his press staff. “You do that again, you’re going to stop at the gate.”

“You want to take a question from me, then?” Sommerfeldt asked.

“He did it again,” Adams said. “Make sure security knows he’s not allowed back into this room.”

Adams later said that Sommerfeldt was being disrespectful to other reporters, a claim no other journalist has backed. What Adams conveniently left out is that he hadn’t called on Sommerfeldt to ask a question in three months.

Why not? Well, that really doesn’t matter. It’s probably some lingering petty beef over some stories the reporter wrote.

What matters is that by singling him out and banning him from his news conferences, Adams is sending a dangerous message to other reporters who write tough stories about him.

“Banning Sommerfeldt from attending the Mayor’s press conferences is plainly unconstitutional,” News attorney Matthew Leish wrote to the city’s legal department , citing both First and 14th amendment issues.

Leish asked the Adams administration to drop the ban by noon on Monday at the latest, and did not rule out further legal action.

”The Daily News and Mr. Sommerfeldt expressly reserve all of their rights and remedies,” he wrote.

That’s way more time than Adams deserves. He should lift the ban right this second, and apologize to Sommerfeldt, the press corp that covers him and the city of New York.

Full disclosure: I’ve known and worked with Sommerfeldt at The News for nearly a decade.

Further disclosure: As a former City Hall reporter, I’ve known and worked with Adams for more than twice that time. Over those years, Adams has been accessible, fair and well reasoned. There is no favorite in this fight.

Wrong is just wrong.

There is no law that says Adams has to call on a specific reporter. There is also no law that says a reporter can’t shout out a question at a press conference. We’ve seen it a thousand times from the White House to the red carpet.

By banning this one reporter, Adams did himself no favors with the rest of the media, and the timing could not have been worse with Election Day right around the corner.

After the ban, news outlets were lining up to denounce the action.

The New York Press Club, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and PEN America have all called on Adams to drop the ban.

The irony is that Sommerfeldt wasn’t even asking the mayor a tough question. He threw Adams a softball follow-up to a question about what independent party line he was running on in his re-election bid.

Given the mayor’s recent legal troubles — corruption indictment, sexual harassment allegations — the shouted questions could have been a whole lot worse.