The Times is under fire from internal and external critics for reporting on Mamdani’s Columbia application.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the response to the New York Times’ recent reporting on New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and cover more media misses.
The Times Commits an Unpardonable Sin
The top of the New York Times masthead is facing backlash — both from staff and external critics — for daring to publish damaging information about New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
The Times got a hold of leaked information 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. 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.
The story provides Times readers with unique insight into how the front-runner to become the next mayor of New York views his own identity, which wouldn’t be a particularly salient topic if we lived in a saner political environment; but in the modern Democratic party, Mamdani’s self-conception is, unfortunately, quite relevant to how he might govern.
Nevertheless, 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.
He also took issue with where the leaked information came from, saying, “i think you should tell readers if your source is a nazi.”
The hacked materials were provided by an intermediary known on social media as Crémieux, who was described as an “academic and an opponent of affirmative action. But according to The Guardian, Crémieux is Jordan Lasker, a promoter of white supremacist views. The Times updated its article to say Crémieux “writes often about IQ and race.”
Bouie later deleted his posts, saying they violated the Times’s social media guidelines.
But he still shared a post that said, “NYT & many of its elite white readers are still obsessed with race-conscious college admissions.”
Another Times columnist, Lydia Polgreen, said she understood why Mamdani had filled out the form as he had.
“I can see why a political young man like Zohran might fill out his college application the way he did,” she wrote on Twitter. “Because if you are like me, you struggle to be known in this country. Our visual sorting is so simplistic and quite brutal.”
Progressive activist Parker Molloy, writing on Substack, argues that the Times has effectively outsourced its news judgment to white supremacists. It shouldn’t have to be said, but for Molloy’s sake, here we go: Journalists constantly publish information obtained from unsavory sources and refusing to do so would severely limit the amount of information about powerful people and institutions they can expose to their readers.
Like Polgreen, Molloy argues that Mamdani’s application is merely the product of a teenager trying in good faith to navigate the complexities of his diverse background.
Chris Rufo posits a different — and vastly more plausible — theory:
Over the long weekend, the New York Times scooped a story about New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s application to Columbia University, in which he claimed that his ethnicity was “Asian” and “Black/African American.” In his defense, Mamdani claimed that his parents are both Indian, which is why he checked Asian, and that he was born in Uganda, which is why he checked black.
If only it were so innocent. As any ambitious youth in America understands, there is a huge payout in marking “black” for college applications. Mamdani’s father is a professor at Columbia, and his mother is a famous filmmaker, so the idea that he did not understand the Ivy League’s racial calculus is not credible.
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.
“Traditional journalism ethics suggests that when news organizations base a story on hacked or stolen information, there should be an extra high bar of newsworthiness to justify publication,” Sullivan writes. The story is certainly newsworthy, for the reasons mentioned above. But if Sullivan doubts that, she should ask herself why it has generated such a significant response, from Mamdani detractors and supporters alike.
Semafor’s Max Tani reported that the Times was motivated to drop the story over a holiday weekend because their reporters caught wind that Chris Rufo, the conservative activist, was preparing a story on Mamdani’s Columbia application. That the Times did not want to cede another politically inconvenient story to Rufo suggests that raw competitiveness is starting to win out over political litmus tests in the Times newsroom.
The Times’ upper management has stood by the story, but it’s notable that they felt the need to take the rare step of publicly explaining their editorial choices.
Assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust, Patrick Healy, noted the report didn’t only rely on leaked sources. “When we hear anything of news value, we try to confirm it through direct sources. Mr. Mamdani confirmed this information in an interview with The Times,” he wrote.
“We believe Mr. Mamdani’s thinking and decision-making, laid out in his words, was newsworthy and in line with our mission to help readers better know and understand top candidates for major offices,” he added.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries seemed to confirm that the story was potentially damaging by refusing to answer a question about the report.
“I think to me, you know, the issue that we have to deal with in New York City, which our Democratic nominee did talk about extensively during the primary campaign, is affordability,” Jeffries said when asked whether the report is a “real issue.” “And particularly in many of the neighborhoods that are being overwhelmed by gentrification and wiped out by housing displacement.”
“That whoever’s going to be the next mayor of the City of New York really needs to articulate a concrete plan for making sure that working-class communities, including working-class neighborhoods of color, can still have a place in our great city,” he added.
“The city that both of us love, but we know, is changing significantly in terms of the opportunity for working families and middle-class folks to be able to continue to call a home,” he said.
Headline Fail of the Week
“UPenn will strip a trans swimmer, Lia Thomas, of her records and ban trans athletes in women’s sports,” Axios recently reported.
As Becket Adams writes for NR:
The obvious drawback to the press’s partisan language-policing is never clearer than when it tries to cover trans issues. Sharp, concise, accurate news reporting goes out the window. Entire stories become undersold or hopelessly muddled. The whole controversy over Lia Thomas revolves around the fact that he is a man. He is a man competing against women. Without context, readers have no better understanding of Penn’s actions than they did before reading the Axios headline.
Media Misses
• After flooding in central Texas left at least 82 people dead and others missing, CNN couldn’t miss out on an opportunity to politicize the tragic event. Juliette Kayyem, CNN Senior National Security Analyst and consultant for The Atlantic, said, “The question we have to ask is whether any ability to notify or warn was impacted by decreases/DOGE on weather services.”
She later added, “MAGA and RW media seem very upset today as a chorus of us experts discuss the impact of cuts to weather forecasting. This is the world of disaster information wars. I say this: a total tragedy in Texas and we owe those young girls the willingness to learn from it.”
Meanwhile, CNN reported on its site: “Weather agency under scrutiny: The National Weather Service issued a slew of warnings about flood danger ahead of the storm, but questions remain about how many people they reached — and whether critical vacancies at the agency’s forecast offices impacted its response.”
Yet Texas meteorologist Matt Lanza explains, “We have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that current staffing or budget issues within NOAA and the NWS played any role at all in this event. Anyone using this event to claim that is being dishonest.” In fact, the National Weather Service actually had extra staffers working that night, according to the Associated Press.
NBC News reported that the San Antonio weather forecasting office did not have two of its top positions filled: a permanent science officer who would conduct training and is in charge of implementing new technology, and a warning coordination meteorologist, who works with the media and is the public face of the office. However, the outlet notes, there are employees acting in those leadership roles and the office had enough meteorologists to respond to the weather event.
• Taylor Lorenz defended the hateful anti-Israel tirade of British punk-rap duo Bob Vylan at Glastonbury last week. During an appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Lorenz controversially claimed, “The Israeli army is committing genocide, so I completely understand why people are upset about anyone sort of calling for death, but it’s important that the reason they’re calling for death for this sort of amorphous military entity is because that military entity is currently slaughtering babies and committing genocide in Gaza.”
She said people who are upset by the band’s comments should instead “advocate for the end of the genocide.”