Conversation
-
The Snowflakes and Petals of Influence NYT Chooses to Ignore
source
I was always likely to write about this NYT article describing Zohran Mamdani’s ties to influencers who celebrate his implementation of policy.Mayor Zohran Mamdani had just decided to cancel a $9 million contract that New York City had with the consulting giant McKinsey, and gushing praise came pouring in from commentators, operatives on the left and even some comedians.
Alex Jacquez, who works at a progressive think tank, posted on X: “Really exciting that NYC is generating operational efficiencies by in-sourcing needlessly outsourced public services and functions, building city capacity. More of this!”
Akilah Hughes, a comedian with more than 200,000 followers on X, reposted a comment suggesting that Mr. Mamdani was an improvement over his predecessor, Eric Adams, who “paid McKinsey $1.6 million to research trash cans.”
Matt Stoller, a political commentator with more than 160,000 followers on X, wrote effusively that the mayor “just cut a $9 million contract that McKinsey has with NYC. And then brags about it publicly. More please.”
Some of the online adulation, like Mr. Stoller’s post, was organic. But some of it was actually part of a campaign orchestrated by City Hall to use social media influencers to boost the image of the mayor and his young administration’s policies.
Mr. Mamdani is a master of new media, and his rise to power has been driven largely by his ease in front of a camera and his ability to harness the seeming informality of social media to connect with broad constituencies.
I continue to find it frustrating that a nucleus of lefty pundits — many of whom came up alongside me in the blogging wave — refuse to understand the current attention economy. Rather than recognizing they are a part of that economy, they fancy themselves above it, tossing instructions to their servants in the Democratic Party who, the conceit appears to be, are the only ones who have the tools, day jobs, or ethical obligations as citizens to engage in that attention economy.
Those lefty pundits spent several days whining about this article rather than doing what they could to help win an election or even, seemingly, reading it to learn how influencers — the inheritors of the mantle we as bloggers used to wield — have been instrumental in making Mamdani successful in the attention economy in a way that many DC politicians are not. A success story of sorts — the kind of success story they’re looking for. They let a story about the attention economy negatively drive their own attention in the middle of a fight with a fascism that succeeds by dominating that attention economy.
To be sure, after laying out that Mamdani wielded the attention economy superbly, starting in ¶8, NYT spun it as something corrupt, suggesting (falsely) that a PR campaign misused public funds, implying that using Signal, by itself, defied transparency, and insinuating a $175,000 salary for the person who is a key reason Mamdani is successful is too much. It is a shitty article, but not among the top ten most hostile NYT articles targeting Mamdani.
Much of the rest is the kind of article that NYT used to write about us when we came up as bloggers, a threat to their monopoly of the means of narration. We were not sufficiently independent, they said. They don’t understand how we’re funded, they complained. Some of this was and remains hostile gatekeeping from a media under threat from newcomers, as Emilia Rowland, the women being paid $175,000 to help make progressive policies successful insinuated in a comment buried in (roughly) ¶47 and ¶48 of the story.
When asked whether the city has created a code of ethics for its engagement with influencers, Ms. Rowland suggested that traditional media might be in more need of tighter ethical guidelines.
“Is there a recommendation for disclosures from legacy media?” she said, adding that working only through “channels with diminishing reach” might mean failing to reach New Yorkers about important city services.
Notably, for reasons I’ll return to, NYT’s article came out on September 4, five days after WaPo published its own story about how a group of influencers who enthusiastically support Whiskey Pete Hegseth had been doing undisclosed work for the Pentagon, the element of corruption that NYT invented by insinuation for a story about Mamdani. We’ll come back to that.
Before I got a chance to write my own post about the NYT influencer story, Don Moynihan wrote this absolutely spectacular post on it. His story started by explaining why the idea of a news story reporting on the the success of the Postal Service could only appear in the Onion. He provided three reasons why:
- Negativity bias: The media covers failure much more than it covers success. Loss aversion means that humans are more emotionally aroused by stories of loss rather than gain, failure rather than success, scandal rather than honest competence. In other words, the media focuses on failure because that is what, as consumers, we click on.
- Independence: Media don’t want to be seen as the lapdog of politicians, so tend not to uncritically accept good news stories. I’m not going to publish your press release!
- A bias toward theater: People like stories. Stories that involve colorful characters, human stakes and theatrical tropes, such as deception and conflict, are more compelling. And so media coverage of government reflects such stories, and down-weights other factors that are harder to humanize, such as administrative systems, or structural factors, even if those these factors are often important, as they are when it comes to managing government. Really great writers manage to tell stories about government that incorporate structure while using relatable characters, explaining the stakes, and detailing emotionally arousing conflicts. But sometimes, reporters on a deadline simply do not cover stories that lack the aspects of theater, and focus on the opportunities that do.
Having provided those three reasons (but not yet dug into them), he first laid out Mamdani’s success at selling the nuts and bolts of successful implementation — the equivalent of bragging about how well the Postal Service is doing, but instead focusing on potholes and basketball hoops. He then reviewed the NYT story, showing the lengths it went to to make the reliance on influencers look corrupt. “It is not until paragraph 20 that the reporters clarify that the Mayor’s office does not actually pay the influencers.” Then, brilliantly, Moynihan went back and looked how the NYT covered the very same story, about Mamdani cutting a McKinsey contract, as compared to how NYT covered Mamdani’s hiring of McKinsey partner Anthony Shorris.
Let’s go back to the primary example the story gave, because I think it would have been useful if the reporters grappled with it a bit more. The Mamdani administration cut $9 million in McKinsey contracts as small part of a relatively impressive effort to balance the budget. So how did the New York Times cover this story? I found two mentions of it in their coverage, both of which were passing references in larger stories:
- From May 1, in a story titled “What We Know About New York’s Proposed Tax Increases”: “Mr. Mamdani has already begun to explore slashing roughly $3 billion in expenditures, like consulting contracts with companies that his base despises, like McKinsey, and a rental-assistance program called City FHEPS that he once championed.”
- And from March 23, under the headline “Mamdani Now Plans $1.3 Billion in Cuts in Programs That He Favored”: “Mamdani vowed to cancel New York City’s contracts with McKinsey and other private companies.”
So, the McKinsey contract cancellation was mentioned barely at all by the New York Times, in two stories with relatively unfavorable faming (Mamdani hiking taxes and abandoning programs he favored).
Given this context, working with influencers makes a lot more sense. The Times did not see this story as much of a priority. Of course, the Times is not obliged to cover this topic, but when Mamdani appointed a former deputy Mayor and McKinsey partner to his administration that was the primary subject of two separate stories rather than an afterthought, and mentioned in a third story about his efforts to reassure the business community.
I doubt that Mamdani communicated his hire of a McKinsey partner to his influencers, but it is not clear to me why this is inherently more newsworthy for the Times than his cancelation of contracts with McKinsey. I don’t think the contract cancelation is simply populist point-scoring, but reflects a theory of governance that is substantive, and considers structural aspects of state capacity.
This was brilliant media criticism — a demonstration of how media genres drive and silence certain kinds of stories (the kind of thing I’ve written academic articles and delivered conference talks on).
Moynihan then put on his Public Policy professor hat and (in a Substack post, which phenomenon is itself worth contemplating) explained why the decision to cut the McKinsey contract reflected a theory of governance that could have a real positive impact; click through for that part. Moynihan did the same analysis for a second Mamdani initiative — sort of a reverse DOGE — and explained how that got treated as a boring story, too, even by lefty pundits on Bluesky.
The New York Times did not cover the announcement of the new office.
Some local news covered it, basically reprinting the press release. The other coverage came from outlets working on tech and government, for whom it was a big story. If you are a political advisor concerned about the Mayor generating good headlines, this is a pretty sparse return on his efforts.
I posted about this on BlueSky which is about as liberal and pro-Mamdani space you could wish for. And still, many of the replies argued that the creation of PIT Crew “just not much of a story”; “It feels like a paragraph in a story about the budget.” “A news story can only happen once the PIT crew is something more than a budget line, at which point there will be people to interview and actions to record.” Or that the media should not just cover press releases.
For the reasons I outlined above, I think this is wrong. The story is substantively important example about the model of governance Mamdani is pursuing. If you needed a hook Mamdani creating a tech office in the aftermath of DOGE provides a hook (I provide an example below). His tech team involves some of those displaced by DOGE, who have some pretty impressive achievements that provide a human interest angle.
Of course, DOGE itself was made sexy because the trillionaire troll made it so, often by stoking conspiracy theories designed to undermine trust in government.
After pointing out how hard it is to get even very sympathetic people, like Bluesky pundits, to magnify good news, Moynihan then laid out the 18 stories one or another (or both together) of the NYT journalists had covered, including three on Mamdani’s conflict with Netanyahu, demonstrating the stories — many far more hostile to Mamdani than a story about his influence economy success — NYT chooses to cover.
It was a superb takedown of the limits to legacy media and, because of those limits, the gap in communication that exists where successful leaders will — must! — seek to rebuild trust in government.
You can’t have successful government if the only stories that get told are intentionally negative. But the question is, by whom.
Moynihan then ended with a very gentle scold about how media should be able to tell the good news about government like it tells the bad.
One downside of negativity bias in media coverage is that it has fed a corrosive mistrust of government, which has fueled anti-government forces who then justify that mistrust with mismanagement. We very much need a skeptical media to hold government to account and journalists are doing essential work in that department right now. And big promises of government improvement should invite real investigation of success. But we also need them to tell us when government is working well and trying to do better. Reporters don’t have to become influencers to embrace a little bit of positivity bias.
I would join this scold and note that the same is true of the blogger generation pundits. When Ezra Klein first did a long post on Joe Biden’s frailties only to be followed by a second when Biden did step down, I argued that the guy who got his start explaining the intricacies of policy — the guy who got where he is now by explaining how good Barack Obama’s policies were, as the influencers (and Matt Stoller, who also came up in that blog generation) are now doing for Mamdani — would have done far more for democracy and the Democratic Party in 2024 if he had been doing the same for what were remarkably successful Joe Biden policies. Joe Biden was a failure as President because in a much more intense attention economy, he didn’t have what Mamdani does: a way to tell his very good story. And yes, his age and frailty made all that much harder but that doesn’t excuse Ezra for ignoring those very good stories he is uniquely qualified to tell, to instead observe from on high and toss directions, as if they were coat check tickets, to Democratic operatives.
Joe Biden didn’t tell his story in part because the blogger generation pundits now, for the most part, see their own role (paid or not) very differently, and especially don’t seem understand that they can use their social media platforms to stomp all over Democrats or to combat Trump or even to magnify good things Democrats do that lefty pundits repeatedly confess they’re oblivious to, such as multiple strands of efforts to combat Trump’s corruption, a story which many of them complain is not being told.
Not being told by someone else, they always mean.
Meanwhile, as all this was going down, over on Xitter, a parallel meltdown was playing out. As I noted here and as Bulwark described in all its delectable hilarity, far right troll turned senior State Department official, Sarah Rogers, tried to feed far right troll Jennica Pounds (better known as Data Republican) a bullshit attack on disinformation experts. She fucked up in her effort to seed disinformation about disinformation experts!! That led to Pounds’ self-exposure as a secret troll for Whiskey Pete Hegseth. As a bunch of other far right trolls rushed, in unison, to defend Pounds’ ethical failures (or, alternately, to parrot Sean Parnell’s false claims that WaPo had broken the law by telling its readers something China and Iran already know — that US forces are stretched dangerously thin because of the means by which Hegseth is losing the Iran war), one of the journalists those trolls were trying to jail reported that a number of them had secretly been on DOD’s payroll.
WaPo’s story is the counterpart story to the original NYT story (but preceded it by five days). Here, known influencers were secretly working for DOD.
The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the matter and corroborating material.
At least some of the influencers have been assigned to civilian roles that could lead to changes in policy, the people familiar with the matter said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Neither the Pentagon nor those involved have disclosed the government roles despite the Trump administration’s claims that they are running the most transparent Defense Department ever. [my emphasis]
They weren’t paid to be trolls. They were paid to do policy work, as Thomas Anderson, who is best known as Cynical Publius, justified to WaPo his lack of transparency that he was on the DOD payroll for something else.
“At no time have I ever received any compensation of any kind from any government source of any kind for anything I write or have ever written on X or in any magazine or other source,” Anderson wrote.
The self-inflated Publius has been on a meltdown worthy of a Hegseth stan ever since, misrepresenting how his real name has been discoverable and complaining over and over and over and over that journalists did journalism, in the process revealing to taxpayers what America’s adversaries can discover by watching where US aircraft groups sail.
It’s pretty hilarious stuff.
Another of the trolls, Kurt Schlichter, tried to defuse his exposure by suggesting the WaPo said something it didn’t.
Let’s examine the lessons we can draw about regime media through the lens of how Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp of the Washington Post decided to write a story about what I, @RobManess, and Tom @CynicalPublius Anderson did for the Department of War. The problem for the Washington Post is that what we were doing for the Department of War was boring – three retired colonels with extensive civilian experience did a review of the military war college system to try to help modernize it and make it better at producing future senior officers. Yawn.
The story was sexy because we were all, as the Washington Post acknowledged, Massively Influential Conservative Influencers™, but that was it. So they had to jazz it up by insinuating that we were brought on board to “amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration.” That was false.
Schlichter claimed the WaPo said they were brought in to amplify Whiskey Pete’s lies. The WaPo, instead, said they did so “as they” amplify Whiskey Pete’s lies.
But no one denies they were (or had been, until days before) on the Pentagon payroll without disclosing it, all while repeating Whiskey Pete’s lies.
And thus far, it might be a lesson in comparative use of influencers. Whereas Mamdani reaches out to influencers to celebrate wonky policy decisions, Whiskey Pete reaches out to them to undermine trust in journalism or (in the case of Sarah Howard) to attempt to inflame scandals over packaged bullshit. That’s actually a really instrumental lesson about how we move forward, if we are to be successful. The shitty NYT story was useful for highlighting how Mamdani is succeeding in building his support among New Yorkers, even while doing boring things like replacing missing basketball hoops.
Except for this.
In the period when NYT was “interview[ing] more than a dozen influencers who have worked with Mr. Mamdani’s team and [reviewing] dozens of videos and portions of influencer group chats” for a story about Mamdani, someone — presumably someone else than the two journalists on the Mamdani story — at NYT was deciding that the equivalent story about Whiskey Pete, except, in that case, the influencers were getting paid (albeit to do something else), was not newsworthy.
NYT’s selective decision to chase some influencers and not others is an editorial choice, one that says as much about bias — the political bias NYT attempts to disavow with its scolding about ethical guidelines — as the other far more hostile NYT stories about Mamdani.
But it doesn’t have to stop at NYT.
Yes, NYT is biased and also hostile to Mamdani generally. But the same rules about telling bad stories applies to all of us who can influence politics, especially those of us graced with significant platforms.
The way the world is right now — the rise of fascism — owes a great deal to changes in the attention economy. There are cracks in the far right attention economy, as government employed trolls faceplant in one or another way. But there really is a lesson to move forward.
And some of that really does has to do with being willing to tell good stories.
The post The Snowflakes and Petals of Influence NYT Chooses to Ignore appeared first on emptywheel.