Is the New York Times trying to wreck Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral bid?
With their made-up scandal, combined with the pre-election editorial, the Times looks like it’s on a crusade against Mamdani
A recent New York Times news story immediately drew fire from readers – and for very good reason.
Headlined “Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application,” the article centered on Zohran Mamdani, the candidate for New York City mayor who drew national attention recently with his stunning win in the Democratic primary election.
Its gist was that as a high school senior in New York City, Mamdani – who was born in Uganda and is of Indian descent – checked a couple of different boxes about race when applying for admission to Columbia University.
So what, you might ask. Why is this even a story, you might also ask.
Excellent questions.
...
The Times’s decision to pursue and publish the story was, at the very least, unwise.
For one thing, it came to the Times due to a widespread hack into Columbia’s databases, transmitted to the paper through an intermediary who was given anonymity by the paper. That source turns out to be Jordan Lasker, who – as the Guardian has reported – is a well-known and much criticized “eugenicist”, AKA white supremacist.
Traditional journalism ethics suggests that when news organizations base a story on hacked or stolen information, there should be an extra high bar of newsworthiness to justify publication. Much of Big Journalism, for example, turned their noses up at insider documents offered to them about JD Vance during last year’s presidential campaign, in part because the source was Iranian hackers; in some cases, they wrote about the hack but not the documents.
The Mamdani story, however, fell far short of the newsworthiness bar.