Eric Adams dropped out of the race over the weekend, citing the media’s coverage of his campaign as one reason he couldn’t hang on.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at how the media has helped Zohran Mamdani in his bid to become New York City mayor, and cover more media misses.
Mamdani Inches Closer to the Finish Line — with the Media’s Help
New York City Mayor Eric Adams dropped his reelection bid over the weekend, just five weeks before Election Day.
“Despite all that we have achieved, I cannot continue my reelection campaign,” he said in a nine-minute video posted on social media. The incumbent mayor, who had been plagued by a corruption scandal, said he ultimately was unable to raise the funds for a “serious campaign.”
Opponents of progressive front-runner Zohran Mamdani had hoped for weeks that Adams — and trailing Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, for that matter — would exit the race to give former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo a better shot at defeating Mamdani, a radical who self-identifies as a Democratic socialist.
But as Election Day nears, it seems victory is all but certain for Mamdani, who has been a media favorite since the outset of the race. Polling shows Adams’s support sat only in the single digits.
A RealClearPolitics polling average finds Mamdani leading second-place Cuomo by 19 percentage points. Mamdani currently enjoys 44.4 percent of the vote, followed by Cuomo at 25.4, Sliwa at 13.8 percent, and Adams at 8.4 percent.
But even back before polling suggested Mamdani was the clear favorite among voters, he emerged early on as the media’s clear favorite.
As NR’s Jeffrey Blehar wrote back in July, one month after Mamdani won the Democratic primary:
The Wall Street Journal was out this weekend with a peppy, upbeat personal profile of Mamdani’s rise to power, which could not help but remind me of Simpsons anchorman Kent Brockman turning on a dime midway through the Springfield Evening News to welcome his new insect overlords. In upscale liberal quarters, the New Yorker is attempting to sell us on “The Case for Zohranomics.” (For those curious, it amounts to little better than “imagine a world where money isn’t real.”)
Meanwhile, New York Times reporter Jeffery C. Mays previously defended Mamdani against the (accurate and appropriate) commentary that the mayoral hopeful is a socialist, arguing that his “belief in treating people more equitably” is the closest he gets to socialism.
Mays, and many others writing within the Times’ pages, have argued that Mamdani’s opponents have “derogatively” called the political novice a “socialist” and a “democratic socialist” — nevermind the fact that Mamdani is a member of the national Democratic Socialists of America and its local New York City chapter.
After Cuomo argued that “New York City people are not socialists,” Mays said, “Neither, actually, is Mr. Mamdani. He is a democratic socialist, which means his beliefs are similar to those of socialists but not exactly the same.”
But Mays himself noted that the NYC DSA describes itself as a branch of the national group, which calls itself the “largest socialist organization” in the country.
And as Fox News reported at the time, Mamdani’s own past remarks (which somehow failed to surface until after the Democratic primary) offer evidence that Mamdani is, in fact, a bonafide socialist. While attending a Young Democratic Socialists of America conference in 2021, he told attendees not to compromise on goals like “seizing the means of production.”
“Right now, if we’re talking about the cancellation of student debt, if we’re talking about Medicare for all, you know, these are issues which have the groundswell of popular support across this country,” he said. “But then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s BDS or whether it is the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment.”
New York Times readers need not look long and hard to find examples of the paper fawning over Mamdani. One article lauds his “video savvy,” which is “easy to envy, hard to duplicate,” per the paper. In another report, the Times tells readers “what to know about Zohran Mamdani and Democratic socialism,” including that “Opponents of the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City have derogatively called him both a socialist and a democratic socialist to make a dent in his lead in the polls.”
Rolling Stone, meanwhile, focused on Mamdani “confront[ing] Trump’s misinformation and threats,” accusing Republicans of “engaging in mongering tactics against the candidate.”
But here at NR, the writers and editors have always been clear-eyed about the threat Mamdani poses to the Big Apple.
As the editors wrote back in June:
He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, with a list of campaign promises that revisits nearly every discredited left-wing fantasy of the past decade: universal health care, rent freezes, the use of “social workers” as opposed to policing to control urban violence, etc. His most prominent campaign initiative is a promise to eliminate city bus fares, a fantasy which would, if implemented, blow a hole in the MTA’s budget and inevitably lead to service reductions. He has also advocated the eventual implementation of a $30 minimum wage. . . .
He is worse than a democratic socialist; he is — as evidenced by an adult life’s worth of political actions — a deeply committed pro-Hamas activist and advocate for the abolition of Israel. Mamdani has stated repeatedly — including during a recent mayoral debate, when pressed directly on the issue by both Cuomo and the moderator — that he does not believe Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. . . . A week ago, in an interview, Mamdani refused to condemn use of the phrase “globalize the intifada” — universally understood as a call to bring Hamas’s particular tactics of “resistance” to the Western world — and doubled down by favorably comparing the term to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
And still, Mamdani has won over the hearts of not only mainstream reporters, but much of the Democratic Party, which apparently has learned nothing from voters’ strong denouncement of the party’s lurch to the left in recent election cycles. Mamdani has secured endorsements from New York Governor Kathy Hochul, Congressional Black Caucus Chair Yvette Clarke, and several other members of Congress, including Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, who claimed it was “spineless politics” to “stay[] on the sidelines. . . . They need to get behind him and get behind him now.”
And back in July, when the Times dared to publish damaging information about Mamdani — leaked intel from a Columbia University hack that indicated Mamdani checked the boxes for “Asian” and “Black or African American” when applying for admission to Columbia in 2009 — the paper faced near immediate backlash from both staff and external critics. (Mamdani was born in Uganda to Indian parents and lived in South Africa for seven years before moving to the U.S. The Democratic mayoral candidate said he selected those boxes because the available options did not reflect the complexity of his background, conceding much of the conservative critique of the crude racial box-checking promoted by progressive elites.)
Mamdani’s media allies jumped on the Times for deeming the application newsworthy.
“Your absolute abrogation of the NYT standards would in a better era there have led the full range of you in management to resign,” said liberal commentator Keith Olbermann in a post on X. “Utter failure. Then again, if you don’t realize NYT is perceived as actively campaigning against Mamdani, you’re all lost anyway.”
Meanwhile, Times columnist Jamelle Bouie was outspoken against the piece on Bluesky, going so far as to the question the intelligence of one of the reporters on the story, Benjamin Ryan. “Everything I have seen about him screams a guy with little to no actual brain activity,” Bouie wrote.
Margaret Sullivan, in her column for The Guardian, called the Times’ decision to pursue the story “unwise,” Sullivan spends much of the column citing examples of Mamdani’s political opponents using the story to attack him. That the story was politically inconvenient is, of course, not the Times’ problem. She then moves on to argue that the real problem is that the story was based on hacked information.
While the national media heaped praised on Mamdani, it also largely failed to take seriously the candidacy of either Adams or Cuomo. So much so, that Adams says in his speech exiting the race that the media’s reporting for several weeks that he would be dropping out of the race ultimately played a part in his decision to drop out.
Headline Fail of the Week
NBC News was forced to issue a correction to its reporting that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents held a young autistic girl captive in order to pressure her illegal immigrant father to surrender to authorities, after the Department of Homeland Security clarified that the man actually abandoned his daughter while fleeing agents.
“ICE held 5-year-old autistic girl in Massachusetts to pressure father to surrender, family says,” read a headline from the outlet earlier this week.
But now NBC has been left to issue a correction after Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin clarified that Edward Hip Mejia had actually “ignored law enforcement emergency lights to pull over and drove back to his house. He fled from the car, gave officers the double middle finger, and darted inside his house. He abandoned his 5-year-old daughter in the car. Officers helped rescue the child and called local police to report the abandonment.”
McLaughlin also said the man has previous arrests for domestic abuse and strangulation, details that are not included in NBC’s reporting.
Now, NBC’s headline reads: “Video shows ICE with 5-year-old girl while agents attempt to arrest her father.”
“The Department of Homeland Security said the father ignored directions to pull over and ‘abandoned’ his daughter,” the subheading adds.
A correction on the article says, “An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the activities of ICE agents in the video. The article has been updated.”
Media Misses