Old Media Meets New on Primary Day in New York

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Yesterday, the nine major Democratic candidates for mayor of New York City agreed to appear on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, a local-media institution, to make their closing arguments ahead of the primary, which takes place today. The program felt like something of a throwback: a respected mainstream forum had convened a disparate group of politicians in the same place; Lehrer proceeded, with minimal fuss, to invite them to talk one by one, in alphabetical order, and was unfailingly fair and polite as he did so. I’m not quite sure what it was—perhaps something in his scratchy audio; perhaps something in his intonation or turn of phrase—but listening to one of the candidates in particular, the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, felt like a full-on time warp, like listening to archival radio from the New Deal era. “It’s ‘Who can make government work to clean up the city?’ And I fit that bill,” Cuomo said, before dismissing his principal rival, the Democratic Socialist state lawmaker Zohran Mamdani, as being “about public relations.” When it was his turn, Mamdani criticized Cuomo for demonizing him using language “that is more befitting of a beast than a person.”

The aesthetics of the program might not have been so jarring if the Democratic primary race hadn’t to this point looked like a demonstration of how new forms of media are leaving old ones behind. The rise of Mamdani, who is only thirty-three years old, looks like a case in point. He was initially a nonfactor in the race, but Politico noted back in March that he had started to gain momentum through his prowess on social media, where he posted videos that showed him, for example, submerging himself off Coney Island in a suit, after saying to camera, “I’m freezing… your rent as the next mayor of New York City!” (In this, Politico wrote, he offered a template to national-level Democrats who have proven of late that they absolutely suck at making online content.) Since then, he’s appeared on webshows like Subway Takes (in which people, you guessed it, share takes on the subway) and on Twitch with the popular left-wing influencer Hasan Piker; meanwhile, previously apolitical influencers have endorsed him, with Rolling Stone going so far as to conclude that he has changed influencer culture in the city. Whatever Mamdani has been doing has worked: he’s climbed in the polls to become the main challenger to Cuomo, the front-runner, with one posted yesterday even showing him winning under the ranked-choice system that New York now uses. His rise has occasioned some saltiness from his rivals. A different progressive candidate, the state senator Jessica Ramos, said at a recent debate that she now regrets not running for mayor back in 2021. “I thought I needed more experience,” she said. “But turns out you just need to make good videos.” (She has since endorsed Cuomo.)

Cuomo, by contrast, does not make good videos—certainly not ones showing him bathing fully clothed. He has, in the past, made good TV—who can forget his reassuring televised briefings and supposedly endearing (yet, actually, obviously compromising) chats with his brother, Chris, on CNN during the early days of the pandemic, when he was governor—and could thus be seen as a very old media type of figure. (Traditional outlets certainly lavished Cuomo with praise and attention during the pandemic, helping to burnish a certain mythology around him, as Ross Barkan wrote for CJR at the time. Incidentally, Barkan has also written for CJR about “switching sides” from journalism to run, unsuccessfully, for state senate in 2018, when his campaign manager was a young man named Zohran Mamdani.) 

But Cuomo, in his own way, also reflects the decline of the traditional media’s gatekeeping role. In 2021, he resigned as governor after news stories—but, mainly, a scathing official report—accused him of sexual wrongdoing. Some political reporters expressed shock that he appeared to be going down without a fight, but as I noted at the time, a tactical retreat that conserves some hope of a comeback can be a form of fighting, and his announcement of a mayoral campaign, and quick surge to the top of the polls, seemed to bear that out; I argued earlier this year that his return seemed to reflect an age in which the media’s ability to hold leaders accountable for previously career-ending scandals is much diminished, and part of what The Atlantic’s David A. Graham called a “selective amnesia” that is “afflicting many areas of American culture.” Cuomo may not be a new-media natural like Mamdani, but he had, in his time away from politics, hosted his own podcast, and his first major interview after getting into the mayoral race wasn’t with an old-school journalist, but with the sports commentator turned presidential-bid-flirter Stephen A. Smith. After that, he spoke with upstart outlets like Bari Weiss’s Free Press while apparently declining to sit with stalwarts of city politics like Lehrer and Errol Louis, of NY1. (“He’s leading,” Lehrer told The New Yorker’s Eric Lach when the latter pointed this out earlier this month. “Why take the risk of putting yourself in a public situation where you might stumble in a way that a lot of people will notice and care about?”) Indeed, Cuomo has mostly dodged reporters. Late last month, he drove past a crowd of them without stopping to take questions. As he made his getaway, he ran a red light.

And yet, much like Cuomo’s car, it’s best if we put the brakes on the idea of old-media obsolescence for a minute. Candidates in the Democratic primary have spoken throughout with traditional outlets. Cuomo sat for an early, lengthy, and, in the paper’s telling, “testy” interview with the editorial board of the New York Post (and did eventually talk to Lehrer, of course). Mamdani has done conventional hits, too; Politico’s Calder McHugh noted yesterday that his “media strategy in the closing weeks of the campaign has subtly shifted in an effort to broaden his appeal,” taking in “national—and center-left—podcasts like The Bulwark, Pod Save America and Derek Thompson, one of the co-authors of the new book Abundance” (though whether these destinations qualify more as old or new media is an open question, with even Thompson, an Atlantic staff writer, having recently left the magazine for Substack). There was also a pair of debates on local networks, the second jointly moderated by Lehrer, Louis, and Katie Honan of the New York news site The City. The most memorable moment—Cuomo suggesting that Mamdani has never really done anything, and Mamdani responding that “I have never had to resign in disgrace, I have never cut Medicaid, I have never stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the MTA, I have never hounded the thirteen women who credibly accused me of sexual harassment, I have never sued for their gynecological records, and I have never done those things because I am not you, Mr. Cuomo”—was almost Sorkinian in its made-for-TVishness.  

If old media is now irrelevant in shaping voter perceptions, someone seemingly forgot to tell the Mamdani supporters (and others) who have criticized coverage of the candidate in major outlets, particularly when it comes to his positions on Israel. (Writing for In These Times earlier this month, Adam Johnson accused the Times of trying to manufacture tension between Mamdani and Jewish voters when he was not polling notably badly with that group; Lach, of The New Yorker, wrote yesterday that “outlets like the New York Post and the Free Press have tried to make him a bogeyman,” though Lach allowed that “part of the reason that reporters have kept asking Mamdani about Israel is because his answer isn’t very convincing.”) Ditto those who obsessed over whether the Times would endorse in the primary or not. The answer to that question turned out to be very confusing: the paper’s editorial board suggested last year that it would no longer endorse in city races, but last week it did offer voters “advice,” including that they not rank Mamdani; that article did not explicitly endorse anyone, but the stated reason for that—that no candidate “seems likely to be the city’s next great mayor”—itself seemed to contradict its prior stance, as my colleague Bill Grueskin pointed out in this newsletter on Friday. (Kathleen Kingsbury, the Times’ opinion editor, told Grueskin that that stance was “imprecise,” and that the editorial board will reserve the option to endorse in the future.) Veteran observers of city politics nonetheless read the runes for an implied endorsement, and reached different conclusions. (Cuomo! Brad Lander!) For good measure, Ezra Klein then used his Times column to personally endorse Lander, the current city comptroller.

As Grueskin put it on Friday, the Times’ apparent-yet-not-actual decision to end city endorsements seemed strange at the time: “Voters tend to be less engaged in local elections than presidential or congressional races, so presumably, an endorsement in a mayoral or city council race would have more impact.” In 2021, the paper’s endorsement of Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, helped boost her candidacy to the point where she came close to toppling the eventual winner and current mayor, Eric Adams. (Adams is running again in the fall, as an independent; I considered meditating on his own media relations in this column, but they’re so weird they really require a separate piece.) Last week’s mess struck me as an apt metaphor for this wider media moment: a major old-media player doing its best to negate its own influence when quite a lot of people did seem to want to hear what it had to say. The Times’ opinion section also convened a panel of prominent New Yorkers to weigh in, and that, at least, was more definitive, with Lander emerging as their clear favorite. Lander touted the support, leading Ben Smith, the former Times media columnist, to conclude that the paper remains the “best brand” in city politics, “for all its ambivalence about the affair.”

And yet, of course, this influence is limited. If Lander’s candidacy cut through in the final stretch, that had less to do with any Times articles and much more to do with his arrest while accompanying a migrant in immigration court—a dramatic illustration of Trumpian authoritarianism that, as Lach noted, “also made, not incidentally, for good videos” on social media. Mamdani has surged in spite of the Times editorial board—and various others besides—blasting him as unfit. (Writers at the Times have a right to their opinions, Mamdani responded, but “these are the opinions of about a dozen New Yorkers and a democracy will be decided by close to a million New Yorkers.”) If he were to win, it would, again, be tempting—and not altogether unfair—to see this as a victory for new media over old.

And yet there’s much more to the story. When Politico explored Mamdani’s messaging strategy back in March, it stressed that while the medium was important, the message itself—a very clear one, focused on the cost of living—was central. (If traditional-media elites are mostly scathing of Mamdani, that might say more about what they stand for than the forums in which they stand for it.) Ultimately, I see this wider moment less in terms of a competition between old and new media than a great swirling together of all of the above. Mamdani’s debate moment may have been Sorkinian, but it also made for a neat clip on social media, which is where I saw it; that’s also where I’ve seen viral videos, in recent days, of Mamdani campaigning in very analog ways, including by walking the entirety of Manhattan to meet people. (“New Yorkers deserve a mayor they can see, they can hear, they can even yell at,” he said.) Yesterday, Lach acknowledged that when Mamdani told him, a few months ago, that he planned to have his supporters knock on a million doors in the city, he’d been skeptical that it would work. “What I hadn’t considered is that…it makes for great content,” Lach wrote. “The story of Mamdani’s door-knocking campaign and other old-fashioned efforts reached millions of people online, gave the campaign shape, and helped it become a movement. Ding-dong and TikTok. In politics today, one can feed off the other.”

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