Zohran Mamdani surged to an easy victory as the "democratic socialist" mayor of New York City, complete with media enthusiasm that carried echoes of silly Obama love songs. The badly named "mainstream media" earnestly promoted the most extreme candidate.
Andrew Cuomo must have felt so betrayed. In 2020, he was the media's pandemic prince. His press conferences on COVID were carried live nationwide. That November, the Emmy Awards people decided to give him a special prize for his "masterful use of television" during the pandemic. Now he's been cast aside like month-old milk.
After Mamdani won, New York Times media reporter Michael Grynbaum warned about the opposition of reprehensible right-wing media outlets. The New York Post puckishly called New York "The Red Apple," with the subhead "On your Marx, get set, Zo! Socialist Mamdani wins race for mayor."
Grynbaum summarized: "As is often the case in these matters, the screaming front page of The New York Post, the city's mischievous tabloid that like Fox News is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, summed up the conservative id."
It's the "conservative id," is it? Would Grynbaum be able to locate a "leftist id" at his own newspaper? For example, on the front page of the Times on Jan. 10, 2021, they compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. These slanderous citations are repetitively spewed in the leftist press.
Grynbaum added this warning: "Some of the harsher right-wing attacks on Mr. Mamdani have been marked by Islamophobia. Steve Bannon, the right-wing podcaster and provocateur, has called Mr. Mamdani a 'neo-Marxist jihadist.'"
At the end of his article, he noted Small Business Administration leader Kelly Loeffler referred to Mamdani "talking about seizing the means of production." At a February 2021 meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani proclaimed: "But then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it's BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel), right, or whether it's the end goal of seizing the means of production."
The Left energetically claims it means nothing. When Trump called Mamdani a commie in June, PolitiFact typically went expert-shopping to move the goalposts: "Multiple political scientists and communism experts told us Mamdani's mayoral race positions did not amount to communism." They doubled down on this in July. Their funniest expert was Geoffrey Kurtz: "I had the impression that Mamdani intended that phrase as lighthearted hyperbole."
In 2020, Mamdani tweeted, "What kind of mayor does NYC need right now?" and hailed "Comrade Arya Rajendran," a Communist Party mayor in India!
What about jihad? At a December 2023 DSA meeting, Mamdani talked up the loathing of Israel: "For anyone to care about these issues, we have to make them hyper-local," he said. "We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it's been laced by the IDF." PolitiFact won't be evaluating that metaphor. They haven't "fact-checked" a single Mamdani statement.
Mamdani's associations suggest a comfort with Hamas backers. His radical political mentor Linda Sarsour boasted that the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations was the "largest institutional donor to the pro-Zohran PAC."
In October, he praised Imam Siraj Wahhaj -- an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing -- as a "pillar of the Bed-Stuy community." In January, he visited the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, whose imam Muhammad Al-Barr made a fiery speech months before that visit, praising the effectiveness of the Hamas "mujahideen" in Gaza and calling on Allah to "annihilate" Israel. Isn't that ... Judeophobia?
The leftist media that dismiss the "conservative id" aren't coming to grips with Mamdani's actual public record.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM