Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, taking a page from communist predecessors, is moving to assure that he has a pliant, ideologically aligned press corps to serve as props for his policy initiatives.
The Trump administration has been targeted with lawsuits for excluding the Associated Press from certain Oval Office pooled coverage opportunities and for restricting some press access in the Pentagon, and he’s taken criticism as an authoritarian for offering access to friendly nontraditional outlets. Mamdani appears to be trying a similar approach but, unlike Trump, he’s so far gotten no apparent pushback about it, demonstrating a double standard.
A July 10 press conference by Mayor Mamdani, billed as "a consumer protection announcement," had the mayor announcing a crackdown that is supposed to make it easier for New Yorkers to cancel online subscriptions. That itself is an effort to starve free-market-oriented, or at least non-communist, press outlets from revenue that helps to guarantee their independence.
The press conference featured lines like this: "We’re going to start with Praj at the Nation. … We’re going to go with Sophie from Mother Jones next. … We’re going to go to the Jacobin next."
The transcript issued by the mayor’s office totally omits those cues. The three outlets served up softball questions and provided friendly coverage of the initiative rather than challenging the mayor on why he was meddling with regulating online subscriptions. That is something that is typically a state or federal matter, not a city issue. And it is not one of the key issues—freeze the rent, free and fast buses, free childcare—that Mamdani campaigned on. It’s not even a secondary issue—tax the rich, end the Gaza "genocide"—that Mamdani campaigned on.
Instead the Jacobin reporter asked, "To what extent will this affect people outside of New York City, and is this part of your vision of the kind of 21st-century sewer socialism?" The term "sewer socialism" is a marketing effort, a euphemism to make communism seem more pragmatic and less scary.
Mamdani first met Cea Weaver, now the director of his Office to Protect Tenants, in 2019, "at a reading group for the socialist magazine Jacobin," Jonathan Mahler reported in the New York Times magazine earlier this year. A 2018 tweet from Weaver said, "Impoverish the white middle class. Homeownership is racist/failed public policy." What is described as a "resurfaced video" has her saying, "I think the reality is that for centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good. And we are gonna... and transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently. And it will mean that families, especially white families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are gonna have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have." In a 2020 video she advised even tenants who had funds available to cease paying rent, and she talked about, "The short term transitional demands that we have to get out of this trap of private property."
The handpicked outlets dutifully produced friendly coverage. "A Little Law Gives Hope That Government Can Suck Less and Make People’s Lives Better," was the heartwarming headline over Sophie Hurwitz’s dispatch for Mother Jones. It concluded, "it’s nice to see that, at least on the local level, protecting people from predatory corporate tactics might still be possible." So nice!
Jacobin served up an Instagram post that garnered 123,000 "hearts." It read like the City Hall press release: "Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced yesterday a ‘Click-to-Cancel’ rule that will protect consumers from subscription traps and hidden junk fees. The move is expected to save New Yorkers up to $162.5 million per year." No one looks at it as costing companies or their shareholders up to $162.5 million a year.
The Nation’s Prajwal Bhat also basically provided a press release for the Mamdani administration. "New York City Makes It Easy to Cancel Subscriptions."
The flavor of the publications is apparent from the other headlines—"Lindsey Graham Chose Evil," "The Joy of Watching the World Cup in Gaza" (the Nation); "Scam Compounds Are a Natural Product of Global Capitalism," "We Have the Chance to Reel in Israel Right Now" (Jacobin); "He’s Pete Hegseth’s Wealth Manager. He Also Pushes ‘Pro-Israel Policies’ Like War With Iran" (Mother Jones).
The mayor’s press office didn’t immediately return a query asking what was up with the handpicked left-wing members of the press.
The Mamdani administration also gave press credentials to online influencers who celebrated the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Typically, Mamdani’s press events feature questions from a variety of outlets, including NY1, which exists because of New York City’s deal with cable television providers, and also CBS, NBC, Bloomberg, Politico, and the New York Post.
Mamdani has been scrambling to prevent pro-Israel ownership of CNN, posting on July 13: "Proud that New York is one of 12 states suing to stop Paramount's acquisition of Warner Bros. This is not a merger that serves the public. It would hand one company nearly a third of the movies and cable channels Americans watch, raise prices for streaming and cable, endanger the livelihoods of thousands of New York artists and entertainment workers, and threaten to shutter theaters across our city. New York's workers helped build this industry. They should not be sacrificed for the sake of further corporate consolidation."
At a Monday event, the mayor tried to recruit experienced product managers and software engineers to enforce the one-click stop policy. "It is possible to transition from the private sector to the public sector," one speaker at the press conference said. The mayor also announced that the $6 billion Rockefeller Foundation is putting "more than $2 million" into the initiative. Rockefeller charities have been campaigning against Israel and against fossil fuels, and while Mamdani and his socialist allies have been busy demonizing billionaires, the one kind of billionaire Mamdani apparently likes (other than George Soros) is a dead one foolish enough to have given his money away to a foundation that can posthumously support causes that undermine the system in which the fortune was created.
