Why the Media Hates Zohran Mamdani and Worships Andrew Cuomo
To the people who run America’s newsrooms, a man who covered up nursing home deaths is redeemable but a brown socialist from Queens is where they draw the line.
In a city that survived COVID by sheer will and mutual aid, where rent eats half your paycheck and the subway works when it feels like it, the mayor’s race is supposed to be a referendum on who can fix things.
Yet somehow, the narrative that’s taken hold isn’t about ideas or competence. It’s about the alleged danger of Zohran Mamdani.
You’d think Mamdani was running on a platform of forced collectivization and gulags, the way major media outlets cover him.
He’s called a threat to capitalism, a radical, a destabilizer. Meanwhile, Andrew Cuomo, a man whose political career collapsed under the weight of sexual harassment scandals, COVID death cover-ups, and patronage rot, is enjoying a reputational rehabilitation tour, complete with glowing profiles and talk-show respectability.
The discrepancy is absurd. Because this isn’t about Mamdani or Cuomo, it’s about the media class. Who it serves, what it fears, and how it polices the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable politics.
What we’re witnessing isn’t bias in the conventional sense but a systemic alignment.
The press once claimed to speak truth to power. Now it manages the power’s optics. This shift didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the institutions we still call “media” have slowly fused with the same economic and political class they were meant to scrutinize.
When moral memory erodes, when history becomes PR, and when elite detachment turns structural, you don’t get tyranny — you get simulation.
You get institutions that look like they work, sound like they work, but exist primarily to preserve appearances.
What’s priced in is credibility.
Elite media doesn’t need to report truthfully, it only needs to maintain the appearance of neutrality to maintain its market value. And that’s precisely what we see playing out in this election.
Cuomo is priced in. Mamdani is not.
Legacy media — The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN, the city’s big dailies — operate within a closed loop of capital, access, and performance.
They are owned or funded by billionaires, sponsored by corporations, and staffed by credentialed elites whose success depends on proximity to power.
This setup doesn’t just shape what stories get told; it shapes how they get told. It trains journalists to flatter the worldview of the rich. And it punishes any attempt to challenge that worldview.
Why? Because the incentives are fixed.
Stories that make billionaires look visionary — like Cuomo, who cozied up to real estate, finance, and pharma — face low resistance. They require minimal reporting, sail through editorial, and offer clear career upside to the reporter: a bigger platform, a book deal, a cable hit.
Stories that suggest billionaires are the problem — that landlords, hedge funds, and hospital chains are gutting the city — are met with friction. Editorial meetings get “complicated.” Legal starts asking questions. Sources dry up. The reporter gets labeled “biased” or “emotional.”
In this environment, objectivity isn’t a method. It’s a brand — one that protects establishment ideology by laundering it through the language of reasonableness. A centrist framing that upholds private equity’s right to own housing stock isn’t seen as ideological. But a critique of that very ownership model? That’s “activism.”
Now zoom in on the Mamdani-Cuomo coverage.
Cuomo represents continuity. Yes, he’s abrasive. Yes, there were scandals. But he governed in a way that reassured capital. He kept donors happy. He played the Albany game. For media execs and the city’s institutional class, Cuomo’s sins are forgivable because they are legible — and because they were committed in service of power, not in defiance of it.
Mamdani represents disruption. He challenges landlords, demands public ownership, and supports ceasefire resolutions. His rise suggests that the old coalition of donors, developers, and deferential media may no longer be enough. That makes him dangerous — not because of what he’s done, but because of what he symbolizes: the end of elite consensus politics.
To the media class, that’s unforgivable.
Which is why the coverage follows a script:
Mamdani is labeled as “divisive,” “inexperienced,” or “far-left,” even though his legislative record is concrete and locally responsive.
Cuomo is cast as “experienced,” “battle-tested,” even “misunderstood,” although his last stint in office ended in disgrace.
The rules are inverted. Reformers are treated as risks. Disgraced insiders are treated as known quantities. The system absorbs corruption more easily than it absorbs change.
This inversion persists because the people enforcing it don’t see it as ideological. They see it as responsible journalism. But what they’re really defending is the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable politics — a boundary drawn not by democratic consensus, but by economic comfort.
The contradiction is this: media institutions that claim to protect democracy are actively undermining it by narrowing the field of political possibility. By turning anti-capitalist ideas into taboo. By turning technocratic failures into statesmanlike maturity.
And the journalists doing it aren’t necessarily bad actors. Many are skilled in their jobs, sincere in their intentions, and unaware of the forces that shape their incentives. But intent doesn’t matter in systems. Outcomes do.
The outcome is clear: the more legitimacy Mamdani gains on the ground — with renters, students, transit users — the more legitimacy media elites try to strip away through narrative warfare. The louder Cuomo’s scandals echo in public memory, the more effort is spent rehabilitating him.
Elite risk management has entered the chat dressed as objective journalism.
Don’t expect the incentives to change on their own. The system is working exactly as designed: to reward obedience and punish divergence. But you can change how you read it.
When you see a political profile, ask: Who benefits from this framing?
When you see words like “electable,” “moderate,” or “extremist,” ask: according to whose interests?
And when you see a candidate smeared not for corruption or incompetence, but for wanting too much public power in public hands, understand that you’re not watching politics. You’re watching class warfare.
Only it’s being waged through columns, not clubs.