Yves here. I was considering running another piece in this slot, but the evidence of the collective establishment meltdown over Mamdani continues. It’s revealing how the prospect of an supposed economic radical in a nationally prominent executive position is so threatening. Warren, Sanders, AOC and the rest of the squad, even if they had not gone pear shaped on some of their key issues, were never real threats to the power structure as legislators. They don’t exercise independent power. Importantly, they don’t control budgets and personnel, beyond a tiny number of staffers. Mamdani may prove to be a lousy administrator, but he could prove to be effective. And New York City is such a natively messy place that that would be quite the credential.
News of a fresh anti-Mamdani push just hit my inbox. From The Hill in Jewish Democrats in Congress sound the alarm on Mamdani. Erm since when do Congresscritters have any business interfering in municipal elections?
Jewish Democrats on Capitol Hill are raising concerns about Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, arguing that his refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” or recognize Israel as a Jewish state could be dangerous during the current moment of rising antisemitism in the U.S….
The latter two have sparked worries among Jewish Democrats in Congress — especially with Mamdani having a path to lead the city with the largest Jewish population in the country.
According to a source familiar with the matter, the situation has been a topic of discussion among the small group on Capitol Hill.
“To not be willing to condemn the term ‘globalize the intifada,’ it just demonstrates his callous disregard for antisemitism, terrorist activity… Anyone that I care about couldn’t possibly distance themselves from him more,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), who was the first Jewish woman elected to represent Florida in Congress. “It’s really terribly disturbing and potentially dangerous.”
Wasserman Schultz is such an utterly vile swamp creature that earning her opprobrium is a badge of honor. Other Jewish Democrats from Florida piled on. But the story continues:
The response from New York’s Jewish Democrats on Capitol Hill was more tepid, however.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the dean of New York’s Congressional delegation in the House, endorsed Mamdani the day after Election Day.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Rep. Dan Goldman, meanwhile, issued carefully worded statements that stopped short of endorsing Mamdani…
His supporters have also noted that Mamdani and New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who is Jewish, cross-endorsed one another in the mayoral race, since the Big Apple uses ranked-choice voting for the election.
In other words, some hard core pro-Zionist Jewish Congresscritters are foaming at the mouth over Mamdani, while others are supportive or at least not campaigning against him. And the latter group seems larger in number. But you wouldn’t get that from the headline or the opening paragraphs.
However, the last elected executive who got a national audience for strong pro-working class, economic interventionist, and wealth redistribution policies was Huey Long. And he was assassinated before he got all that far.
By Dan Froomkin. Originally published at his website, Press Watch, and cross posted from Common Dreams
The sad fact is that there is nothing terribly out of character about the New York Times’s decision to publish a deceptive hit piece about New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, based on hacked data supplied by a noted eugenicist to whom they granted anonymity.
The newsroom will go to extreme lengths to achieve its primary missions — and one of them, most assuredly, is to take cheap shots at the left.
You can see it almost daily – just this past week alone in a condescending article about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s brave defense of democracy, and a celebratory story about Trump’s achievements that likened dissenting views to “asterisks” on his legacy.
Under what other circumstance could a story that breaks so many of the Times’s own rules have won the approval of senior editors?
And you can trace it back to the very top: to editor Joe Kahn and his boss, publisher A.G. Sulzberger. As I’ve exhaustively chronicled in my coverage of the New York Times, the newsroom is constantly under pressure from its leaders to prove that it is not taking sides in politics — or democracy, for that matter. And because printing the truth is seen as punching right, that requires expending a lot of effort to punch left. Punching left becomes the holy grail.
I mean think about it. Under what other circumstance could a story that breaks so many of the Times’s own rules have won the approval of senior editors?
Why else would the Times, which notoriously refuses to respond to critics, have issued a ten-tweet defense of its actions? Why else would Kahn have praised the story in Monday’s morning meeting?
Consider everything that was wrong with the article. It’s a long list.
- You don’t print articles based on hacked data unless they are truly newsworthy. The fact that Mamdani, whose childhood was spent in Africa, checked several boxes including one for “African American” on a failed college application when he was 17 is not newsworthy. Its only value is to his political opponents, to employ as a scurrilous attack.
- You identify the source of the hack as fully as possible, so the readers can judge their motives. You don’t cover up the source’s identity and motives, like the Times did – you expose them. The source, as quickly became clear, was a noted eugenicist named Jordan Lasker.
- You don’t use the format of an attack story unless there’s a legitimate grievance. (First paragraph: Mamdani says X. Second paragraph starts with the word “But.”)
- You don’t hide behind a headline that says the disclosure you just made “raises scrutiny“. It’s either legitimate news or it’s not. (And it isn’t.)
- You don’t bury key information. Here, that Mamdani wrote in “Ugandan” as a way of explicating his checked box. (He was born there.)
- You don’t engage in racial policing. That is socially harmful and highly unseemly, especially coming from such a white-dominated institution.
- You don’t publish political stories whose lead byline is a free-lance writer who is a culture warrior. Benjamin Ryan is well known online as a critic of trans healthcare and trans reporters.
- You don’t rush to print in order to “scoop” a right-wing culture warrior. Semafor reported that Times editors hurried to greenlight the article because they had heard Rufo was also pursuing the story. That should actually have made them hesitate to print, rather than hurry.
There’s more about the Mamdani piece in this excellent article by Liam Scott in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Parker Molloy, in her newsletter, points out:
When Times columnist Jamelle Bouie had the temerity to post “i think you should tell readers if your source is a nazi,” he was apparently forced to delete it for violating the paper’s social media guidelines. Think about that for a moment. The Times will protect the anonymity of a white supremacist, but will silence their own Black columnist for accurately identifying him.
And Guardian media columnist Margaret Sullivan , who previously worked as the Times’ public editor, concludes that “this made-up scandal” — combined with a nasty pre-election editorial – makes the Times look “like it’s on a crusade against Mamdani.”
The Times did its own self-serving follow-up article here, reporting that its disclosure had “provoked sharply different reactions.”
It also published — in what the New Republic’s Jason Linkins called an attempt to “reverse-engineer a pretext for their Mamdani piece” — a query asking readers what they think of racial categories.
The Need for a Public Editor
When a Times article sets off an understandable explosion of media criticism, like this article did, the response would ideally come from a public editor, or ombud, whose job is to explain what happened and independently assess whether the Times was at fault or not. There would ideally be some learning.
Parts of the Times operation remain brilliant, most notably its investigative journalism and Cooking. But its coverage of anything remotely political is poisoned by its obsession to prove its neutrality by taking cheap shots at the left.
Sadly, The Times eliminated the position of public editor eight years ago. The publisher at the time said “our followers on social media and our readers across the Internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be.”
So on Saturday, the response came from the Times’s hackish “assistant managing editor for standards and trust” Patrick Healy. To say that he does not inspire trust is an understatement.
Healy, who until May was the deputy opinions editor, drove the Times’s excellent columnist Paul Krugman to quit his job. Prior to that, he led a series of right-leaning citizens panels.
He was the newsroom’s politics editor during the 2020 presidential election, and the unapologetic leader of the paper’s “but her emails” coverage.
In short, he seems to revel in trolling the libs.
In his tweets, Healy focused on the article’s “factual accuracy” and he recognized concerns about how the source was identified. But he refused to engage with the concerns that the article was not newsworthy or that its sourcing was repugnant.
“The ultimate source was Columbia admissions data and Mr. Mamdani, who confirmed our reporting,” Healy wrote defensively.
That he is a rising star at the Times – indeed, said to be among the possible successors to Kahn – tells you everything you need to know about what’s wrong there.
Parts of the Times operation remain brilliant, most notably its investigative journalism and Cooking.
But its coverage of anything remotely political is poisoned by its obsession to prove its neutrality by taking cheap shots at the left, no matter the cost to its obligation to accuracy and fairness.
Meanwhile, ordinary New Yorkers seem excited an$ energized by his rise:
https://bsky.app/profile/zohrankmamdani.bsky.social/post/3ltg7ymzrn22a
Uplifting video of the day
Would anybody subscribe to the NYT if not for the games?
I recently learned, by asking at customer service, that day-old newspapers are free at Kroger’s. Saturday is market day for me, and Kroger’s is usually one of my stops. They never seem to put out a Saturday edition of the NYT, but often still have leftover copies from Friday. So I will grab one and say “Yesterday’s newspaper” to the customer service desk on the way out.
And yes, I get it almost exclusively for the puzzles. I will look at the editorial headlines, but rarely bother to read them.
OP: Parts of the Times operation remain brilliant, most notably its investigative journalism and Cooking.
When are USians going to get over their reflexive cultural deference and see the NYT for what it is: the most worthless, overrated major rag in the last two centuries of media journalism — which is saying something.
In some cases it goes beyond deference and borders on worship. Some erstwhile friends of mine were such staunch defenders/promoters of the paper (I believe one of them had worked there in some capacity decades ago) that I began referring to it as the “Temple of Journalism”. Their view seemed to be that if wasn’t reported by the Gray Lady, it hadn’t happened.
When are USians going to get over their reflexive cultural deference, lol, when we get over our friggin “pride” and accept that we can be wrong about things. We still can’t let go of our perception that the Democrats and Big Labor represent the people’s interest.
In a word, never.
It is not a newspaper, it is a cultural signifier. Getting the NYT delivered is a social status marker for wannabe intelligentsia everywhere except maybe Manhattan. Then there’s the inevitable puzzle flex…
I know someone who felt he needed to subscribe to the NYTimes because Trump bested Clinton in 2016.
And he did.
From nytco.com/investors/faqs
“What’s NYTCO’s Mission?
We seek the truth and help people understand the world. This mission is rooted in our belief that great journalism has the power to make each reader’s life richer and more fulfilling, and all of society stronger and more just.”
Wow. The Times is full of itself.
On the other hand, this Healy guy supposedly got the “excellent columnist” Krugman to quit so he can’t be all bad.
I began my disassociation from the NYT after Krugthulhu arose from his slumbers at 8’Leth Ave and stated that he “Did Not Want To Be Your Friend.” Even if true, such a petty public statement exposed a murky, seamy side to the Establishment that the best efforts of the Miskatonic School of Journalism could not obscure.
I have found that I get more accurate and honest reporting from the lowly pages of the Arkham Advertiser.
Stay safe when the stars become aligned.
“An open letter from prominent economists who say that Mamdani’s mayoral platform is a practical blueprint to tackle New York’s most pressing problems: We write, as economists from across the world, to support Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral platform as a bold yet practical blueprint to tackle some of New York City’s most urgent challenges—above all, the cost of living. His platform proposes targeted, responsible interventions that would immediately improve millions of lives while building a fairer and prosperous New York.” –Isabella Weber, James K. Galbraith, Ha-Joon Chang, and others–
https://thenationmagazine.substack.com/p/economists-support-zohran-mamdanis
Of course, these are exactly the kinds of challenges that the NY Times and most establishment economists would prefer to ignore, focusing instead on GDP growth for the top 10%.
The Meritocrats like to think that the gains are targeted at the top 10%, but the gains are really accruing to the top 1% of the population.
When the concrete material benefits are removed, all that is left is Status.
Surprisingly, Krugman, once described as Conservatives favorite Liberal, is not hostile to Mamdani! https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/mamdani-and-the-moguls-of-madness
I wonder what his stance would have been if he was still with the NY Times…
There is something deeply sinister at work here. I’ve had the opportunity to mentor college students and I find nothing about Zohran Mamdani’s views that is out of step with most people of his generation — about Palestine or anything else.
In many ways he could not be more “establishment,” as after being born in Uganda his family moved to Morningside Heights when he was 7 — where is was raised in “privileged” (his word) circumstances by his parents Mahmood Mamdani (the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University) and Mira Nair (the noted film director of Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake). The racist Islamophobic dog-whistling about Zohran is disgusting, as while his father’s background is Gujarati Muslim, his mother was raised as a Punjabi Hindu in cosmopolitan Delhi before emigrating to the U.S.
The separation of church and state enshrined in the First Amendment is fundamental to our form of government. All Americans should condemn the notion of all theocracies, be they Caliphates or Papist or Zoroastrian. Most of the original Zionists did not share the Jabotinskyite revisionist/fascist view of the State of Israel as a “Jewish State” — at least as of today 20 percent of Israelis are not Jewish.
It’s unsurprising that the ghoul Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has raised her gorgon-head about Zohran Mamdani. One only has to read the transcripts from Wilding v DNC (the dismissed 2016 lawsuit accusing DW-S and the DNC of fraud against the supporters of Bernie Sanders) to understand that the Democrats are no longer a “party” in any sense and are instead a private business run by a tiny cabal of GOP-lite neoliberals sucking at the billionaire teat.
As for the FailingNYT, I only read it for the Cooking section — and Wirecutter.
After the disastrous 2019 election in the UK for Labour, we had a major series of attacks on left non-Zionists; those critical of the Israeli regime; and those advocating the pro Palestinian 2 state solution, all of whom were accused of anti-semitism with that then being weaponised to purge the left, including the former leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Centrist and centre right factions, including Jewish MPs like Margaret Hodge (who despised the Left and especially loathed Corbyn), vigorously claimed anti-semitism and prejudice against themselves, by those on the Left / centre left, with the sole aim of removing such party members and non Zionist MPs who were either pro Palestine or critical of the Israeli government, but which also included some Jewish members.
The UK mainstream media really went to town with this anti-Left, pro-Palestinian human rights campaign, as it served the purpose of their plutocratic and often Zionist owners.
Stern, who drafted the definition of antisemitism, has stating the IHRA designation has been weaponised in order to stifle free speech relating to criticism of Israeli actions and policies.
It very much looks as if the US Dem clique are now doing exactly the same with a ‘rinse and repeat’ copy cat on Mamdani, with the aim of both stifling any condemnation of Netanyahu’s government and excusing the Gaza genocide, whilst reinforcing the supremacy of the corporate Dem elite, supporting their plutocratic sponsors, and marginalising any naughty leftism within the party.
Don’t the Dems just hate any prospect of a populist left leader emerging ?
But let’s hope they are less successful in their character assassination of Mamdani, than their British equivalents, who did.
Learned to read and see the world through the NY Times; would sit in our suburban New Jersey dining room and peruse the Sunday paper even before I could read. Finally gave it up last week. Am actually substituting a quick scan of the links here mornings before I get to work–a far better orientation to the issues from my lifelong left POV anyway–going back to read what looks most important to me evenings.
Speaks volumes that even a whiff of socialism, hell–the word–mobilizes tens and tens of millions against someone like Mamdani. Who may sell us out many times before this is over. Certainly, we’ve had progressives take the helm recently–in Chi, LA, and San Francisco–get sunk like stones, pretty much out of the gates.
Look for police riots like they mobilized for the mild tennis-playing Dinkens when he considered a civilian review board, friends. Which brought us Giuliani. That was during my longest tenure in NYC, Brooklyn, to be more exact.
I see that my old Prospect Park nabe went for Mamdani, and studying the returns note that the rich and very poor all went for Cuomo. I have no beef against Mamdani’s platform, but that speaks to issues Dems face nationwide. The upsides in re: Mamdani (for me) OTOH, are the fact that people are willing to listen about Gaza and that the world ‘socialism’ doesn’t necessarily send anyone running.
Meanwhile today, Trump is–by my reckoning–really now struggling. On the war front, with hugely suspect gift legislation to the very rich, and about Epstein. We’ve believed that his sad balloon was going to pop many times before, but I do think it’s possible. Watch for Vance to be very cagy, maybe start pissing Trump off, too.
From Politico today:
Looks like it’s time for another Obama-style Night of Long Knives orchestrated by the Dems to consolidate the other candidates and make sure the leftist doesn’t win.
I would say “mark my words”, but I’m tired of being right!
The elite are cr@ping their pants right now. I totally agree with your “Night of Long Knives” conclusion and it appears that something similar could be in play as we speak, but the likely winner of that will be Cuomo and he has so much baggage to carry he’d win only on a Anyone But Mamdani slogan. Which means you’d have to have a much bigger get out the vote capability than Mamdani because he’s the one with real policy proposals.
It will take a heroic getting-the-young-out-to-vote effort to get Mamdani over the line. Looking back, this doesn’t happen, but these are interesting times.
On October 7, 2023, the New York Times lost its mind. It has yet to regain its sanity.
It seems as if the establishment cannot recognize that they are making the same kind of unforced errors that contributed to Mamdani winning the primary. As it stands, they are banging heavily on the drum that sunk Corbyn but the conditions have changed, mainly that the antisemitism accusations have lost a large portion of their efficacy in the wake of the Gaza genocide that Israel is still carrying out to this day. Personally, I hope they keep wasting their efforts here for that it keeps laying bare the depravity of these people.
The other factor that comes to my mind though is that Mamdani actually appears to have learned and applied the lessons from the failures of Sanders circa 2016 onwards and demonstrates a solid sense political instincts that have been in short supply on the left. You roll in the fact that his presentation is undeniably good (another ongoing focus for his opponents who refuse to analyze the substance of what he says), he is demonstrating a model for left wing politics that constitutes a real threat to the centrists and right wingers
Hedges
Sydney Schanberg was a friend of mine from the killing fields and won the Pulitzer in Cambodia, came back, ran the Metro Desk, went after the big developers that were friends of the publisher, and he was finished. Abe Rosenthal, the editor, during that period, of the New York Times, used to call him my little commie.
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/journalists-and-their-shadows-w-patrick
So business as usual at the NYT? Rosenthahl was brought in by the then elder Sulzberger after Watergate and took the paper to the right as well as out of the “good gray” format era. Alex Cockburn, wearing his press critic hat, used to regularly take shots at him.
But then was the paper ever “of the left”? Meanwhile “middle of the road” has moved considerably to the right.
” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), who was the first Jewish woman elected to represent Florida in Congress. “
With enough adjectives, anybody can be a first.