Mayor Mamdani and the News Judgments That Provokes

Careful about religious bigotry and brandishing “socialism”

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Four years ago, after the New York Democratic primary had made it inevitable that Eric Adams would be our largest city’s next mayor, I wrote a column about what I saw as a failure of local journalism. The shambolic corruption of Adams’s administration vindicated that judgment. Now, in the aftermath of a primary that has left Zohran Mamdani as Adams’s almost certain successor, my concerns focus on the national press, and questions about blindness and bigotry. (For the record, I voted for neither Adams nor Mamdani.)

Wherever you live, you have likely heard by now that Mamdani, a 33 year-old state legislator, is a Democratic Socialist and a Muslim. Those are the headline facts, and I am not disputing that in a man-bites-dog way, they meet the definition of news. (New York has never had a Muslim mayor, and while Fiorello La Guardia served one term in Congress as a Socialist, that was not his party affiliation as mayor.) But far too much of the coverage of these facts strikes me as rooted in ignorance of the country in which we are living, and in indulging in bigotry of a sort which deserves no place in decent journalism.

A matter of faith

I’ll get to socialism below, but let’s start with Mamdani’s faith. There are nearly four and a half million Muslims in the US. That’s somewhat fewer than the number of Mormons claimed by that church, a bit more than the number of Hindus and about 60% of the number of Jews. If we filled an average size NFL stadium with a randomly selected collection of Americans, there would be more than 900 Muslims in the stands. In New York City, roughly one out of every 11 people is a Muslim, while fewer than one out of eight are Jewish. New York has had Jewish mayors for most of the last 52 years.

the Democratic candidate and his pitch

Now ask yourself if you would be reading-- if we would be publishing-- the same sorts of stories about Mamdani’s religion if New York Democrats had just, even more unusually and statistically unlikely, selected a Hindu candidate. I think not. We need to ask ourselves, honestly, if the difference isn’t the most obvious sort of “othering,” of playing to ignorance and bigotry.

It’s not just the nut job Republican members of Congress who called for Mamdani to be deported, said his victory meant that New Yorkers had forgotten 9/11 (which occurred when he was in the fourth grade on Manhattan’s Upper West Side) and suggested New Yorkers were about to end up in burquas, which is not how either Mamdani’s wife or mother usually dresses. Nor is it only Trump repeatedly calling Mamdani a “Communist.” Mamdani is no more a communist than Trump is a libertarian or genuine conservative— these terms have real meaning.

It’s also CNN thinking that New York’s prospective mayor should be introduced to the country by focusing on the fact that his middle name was selected to honor the founding president of Ghana, that he didn’t come to New York until he was seven years old, and that he was once an aspiring rapper (!). What the audience wasn’t told: that Mamdani has no other ties to Ghana, or that two of New York’s last three mayors did not live in the city until they were much older than seven. Nor did the piece mention that more than a third of New Yorkers were born outside the US.

Even more recently, it’s the New York Times devoting three reporters and more than 30 paragraphs to a report that Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and then lived in South Africa before coming to America, whose parents have Indian roots and who was then still a Ugandan citizen, checked boxes on a college application (which was later rejected) indicating that he was “African American” and “Asian.” Wouldn’t it have been inaccurate to do otherwise? The story may have been worth reporting out— its key finding: “The Times could not find any speeches or interviews in which Mr. Mamdani referred to himself as Black.” But the piece should ultimately have been spiked.

Signs of the times

Going back to CNN’s use of the rapper video actually brings me to my next point. Rap and hip hop is today either the first or second favorite music genre of those under 40 in this country, and quite popular with many of those under 50. Ten years after the smash success of Hamilton I thought this would have been understood even by those, like me, who never watch the Grammys. Regarding an early rap video as a critical biographical detail for a 33 year-old in 2025 feels aggressively out of touch. It’s also politically tone deaf: I recall when, in 2018, the GOP hoped to use another rap video to defeat a Black congressional candidate in the overwhelmingly white Hudson Valley district where I spend most weekends. It didn’t work. The former rapper won, and is now New York’s Lieutenant Governor.

What even more people in the press don’t grasp, I think, is that what is true of liking rap music is also more true than they might guess about “socialism.” A recent survey done by YouGov for the libertarian Cato Institute found that 43% of US adults had a favorable view of socialism. That’s roughly the same as the current approval rating for Trump. Among those adults under 30, socialism does much better, with an approval rate of 62%.

Again and again in the last 10 years, we in the press have missed the strong movement toward a populism of the right, driven fundamentally, at least in my view, by the widening inequality in the country. With that populism now firmly in power, and with much of the inequality only being exacerbated by things like the Trump tax bill, it’s important that we not make the same mistake in the other direction. As no less than the Wall Street Journal editorial page recently observed, “If Trumponomics fails to deliver strong growth and gains in real incomes, the leftwing populists will be waiting as the main alternative.” Dismissing them by brandishing the word “socialism” represents weak news judgment and disserves readers.