The Times and Post: diverging paths, but a shared fixation on Mamdani
One dog barking: an occasional column by John Dineen
It’s a tale of two newspapers.
Margaret Sullivan this week contrasts the changing fortunes of what had been, by general consensus, the two leading newspapers in the United States: the New York Times, continuing to ascend, and the Washington Post, choosing self-immolation.
The numbers are stark: The Times now has 2,300 newsroom employees; the paper assembled a 60-person team to cover the Academy Awards. The Post, once with a newsroom of 1,100, now employs 400 journalists — none of whom attended the Oscars.
Yet oddly, as the two papers proceed down divergent paths, they seem to share a fixation on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Numerous critics have cringed at the Times’ coverage of Mamdani. Sullivan was among them when she wrote in July of last year, “Is the New York Times trying to wreck Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral bid?”
At issue was the Times’ “scoop” on what ethnic boxes Mamdani checked when, as a high school senior, he applied for admission to Columbia University. The Times found it noteworthy that Mamdani, born in Uganda and of Indian descent, struggled with the ethnic slotting required on an admissions form to a school he didn’t ultimately attend; he was not accepted. The Times print headline: “Mamdani Faces Scrutiny Over College Application.”
And last week, the Times offered another example of its curious approach to its Mamdani coverage: in this case, that the mayor’s public response to the recent terror attack outside his official residence did not include one of his campaign-style, signature TikToks, but rather two written statements and a joint appearance with Jessica S. Tisch, the city’s police commissioner.
The reporter points to Mamdani’s religion in weighing the difference:
Mr. Mamdani may have risen to power on the strength of his strong communication skills, but in moments that cut close to some of the city’s deepest fault lines and his own religious identity as the city’s first Muslim mayor, he has come to favor a more cautious and stiffer approach.
Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and executive editor of Just Security, posted on Bluesky: “One day the NYT’s editors will read these stories again and be ashamed of themselves. Mamdani called the attack ‘heinous,’ ‘criminal’ ‘reprehensible’ ‘terrorism’ and the antithesis of who we are. The insinuation that he’s conflicted about this is disgraceful.”
The Times’ official response: “The Times’s reporting covered the Mayor’s comments — and their careful, measured nature — fairly and accurately, including the departure from his more direct and engaged messaging strategy during his election campaign.”
Sullivan was public editor at the Times for four years, a columnist at the Post for six years. The Times’ public editor position, which served as an in-house critic of the paper’s journalism, has since been abolished. Sullivan believes the paper has gotten better at responding to critics, but its answer still tends to be the same, whatever the complaint: “We were right.”
Even if the Times has trouble seeing Mamdani with clear eyes, at least they are talking about the mayor of New York. To the south, one-time rival Washington Post appears to suffer from its own version of Mamdani derangement syndrome.
Since Nov. 1 of last year, the Post has written 14 editorials about Mamdani. I’m not counting the post-election editorial, “Outside New York, democratic socialism lost.” The lead sentence: “This is not Zohran Mamdani’s America.”
I counted five Post editorials during the same time period about politics and governance in … Washington, D.C.
Obviously, Mamdani’s political philosophy is a trigger for the Post’s new, free-market religion. And while the paper insists this is not Zohran Mamdani’s America, it certainly seems like the paper worries the scourge could spread at any moment.
There’s an old expression that Puritanism was the fear that someone, somewhere was having a good time. Much the same way, the Post fears that someone, anywhere is fiddling with unfettered free markets. The past four and a half months have included scoldings for Chicago, San Francisco, South Dakota, Kansas, Utah, Boston (naturally), Massachusetts (naturally), Seattle, the Netherlands, Australia. I could go on. It is the voice of the judgmental busybody.
The abrupt change in editorial philosophy cost the paper hundreds of thousands of subscribers. To what end? Who are these editorials for? Are the (remaining) Post readers up in arms about Kansas? Are they worried that something is rotten in the Netherlands?
Or are these screeds aimed at an audience of one, owner Jeff Bezos?
The Times should answer for its dubious treatment of the mayor. But at the Post, fewer and fewer people can be bothered asking the question.
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