IS NYC'S NEW MAYOR ZOHRAN MAMDANI ALREADY AT WAR WITH THE PRESS?
GROUP FLYING TERRORIST FLAG THREATENS TO RAPE AND MURDER A JOURNALIST BUT THE NEW MAYOR IS SILENT?
Fake news conference with "influencers” inside the Blue Room at City Hall. Photo credit: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.
MALONE, NEW YORK Jan. 10, 2025 OPINION
With New York City's new mayor Zohran K. Mamdani banning the press from his first City Hall news conference in favor of fawning influencers, refusing to disavow an attempt to cement censorship of the press into city law launched by his corrupt predecessor Eric Adams and failing to condemn demented terrorist-flag flying protesters who threatened to rape and kill a journalist, its fair to ask:
Is Mayor Mamdani already at war with the press?
By now, every politician in the world knows the way to control the narrative isn't to sweettalk, flatter, indulge or threaten the press into repeating their talking points. The way to control the narrative is to flood the zone with propaganda, to be endlessly repeated and amplified by loyal influencers on social media.
Pres. Donald J. Trump proves this strategy works, every day.
For example, the Trump Administration's response to the killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on Wednesday. Instead of committing to an impartial investigation that might result in murder charges against the agent, Government officials called Good a "terrorist" and exaggerated the danger the agent faced when he pulled the trigger.
Duly re-broadcast by Fox News and loyal social media influencers.
It wasn't enough to win over anyone on the Left, but it was enough to keep his base loyal. Which is all that's required, in the Digital Age. Divide the People and prevent effective opposition from coalescing. That’s what you get when you place party loyalty above loyalty to country and the public interest.
Mayor Mamdani knows the power of social media to sway the electorate. As candidate Mamdani, almost his entire campaign was based on short videos broadcast on social media. He knows he doesn't need journalists to get his message across to New Yorkers. His successful, grassroots campaign proved it.
Bill de Blasio, when he was mayor, was the first to institutionalize social media as part of the mayor’s public relations strategy. He stood up the Mayor's Office of Creative Communication in 2015 and put former news photographer Rob Bennett in charge of it.
(Full disclosure: Bennett and I were colleagues once. Standing in City Hall's rotunda one day in 2015 we caught up and he suggested I go from working primarily as a free lance news photographer to reporter. His advice intrigued me and I gave it a shot because why not? 10 years later, here I still am.)
But de Blasio also tried to control the narrative in old school ways too.
Karen Hinton, his press secretary, basically sicced the NYPD on this reporter while he was on assignment for the New York Daily News as a news photographer covering a building collapse in mid-town Manhattan in 2015. Emails later uncovered during discovery in a federal civil rights lawsuit showed Hinton was worried the Daily News would write a negative story about the collapse blaming the mayor's office.
After Hinton expressed her concern, someone ordered the NYPD to keep the press away so they couldn't photograph victims of the collapse as they were extricated. The NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner for Public Information himself showed up at the scene to ensure his orders were followed. I got "the shot" of one of the victims being taken out anyway.
The NYPD was so pissed they took my NYPD-issued press credential and refused to give it back until I sued them and a federal judge "suggested" it be returned. That took seven months
The same federal judge later approved a settlement that totally revamped how the NYPD handles press credentials and their suspension or revocation—preventing the NYPD from using their power over credentialing to effect censorship. Like it did at that building collapse in Manhattan.
When the City Council got wind of the settlement, they used the opportunity to strip the NYPD of press credentialing altogether. They transferred it into the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment. That was in 2020.
Five years of the most expansive press freedom the City has ever seen followed. New media of all kinds won official press credentials, a lot fewer journalists were arrested and no one got threatened by a cop with having their press credential revoked just for doing their job.
The true freedom to report journalists had won grated on Mayor Eric Adams—a former NYPD officer with an obsession for control and the "old ways." Then-Mayor Adams went to war with the press almost immediately. He was so petty he even exiled reporters who for decades had offices inside NYPD headquarters to a trailer parked outside.
They won their old offices back, but it took a year.
Before he slithered out of City Hall free and clean thanks to Pres. Trump, Adams left a parting gift for journalists: proposed new rules on city-issued press credentials that would make them harder to get and easier to take away. Chief among the problematic proposals is a new rule that would allow the City to revoke a journalist's press credential if something they did placed “a person in reasonable fear of physical injury."
The “snowflake rule.”
This proposed addition is unnecessary because the rules already allow the City to revoke the press credentials of journalists who commit crimes on the job. What the new rule seeks to do is expand the scope of punishable conduct beyond crimes as a means of intimidating and silently censoring the press. First Amendment lawyers call this “chilling effect.”
All it would take, under the proposed rules, for the City to take a journalist’s credential would be for one person to say that reporter or news photographer made them feel "unsafe."
The Free Lance broke the news of the proposed "snowflake rule" and the other changes on Jan. 3. In reporting the story, we reached out to Mayor Mamdani's press office. No one bothered to even respond—much less disavow Adams's proposed changes.
Then on Wednesday Mayor Mamdani held his first official “press conference” in City Hall's Blue Room—the usual location of real news conferences. Instead of journalists, Mayor Mamdani packed the room with social media influencers.
To be clear, influencers are not journalists and they don't adhere to standard journalist practices and ethics. Instead, influencers are best generally understood as "amplifiers"—who, when it comes to politics and politicians, ask softball questions and re-broadcast Government propaganda without really testing its truthfulness.
When real journalists attempted to get into Mayor Mamdani's "fake news" conference, his press office told them "the room was at capacity."
"We offered to go in with just a cellphone and were told 'maybe,' but ultimately, we were excluded, along with other outlets," CBS News reported.
Also on Wednesday the traditional tension between City Hall and the press corp exploded into public view when the New York Post and Daily Mail.com door-stepped Cea Weaver on her way to work, unleashing a flood of crocodile tears from the polarizing and ordinarily outspoken director of Mayor Mamdani's Office to Protect Tenants.
If the snowflake rule were in effect, the journalists who attempted to question Weaver might lose their press credentials.
As if on cue, fragile persons who couldn't stand up straight in a strong wind posted self-righteous statements condemning standard reporting procedures as "harassment."
But door-knocks and reaching out to the subjects of news stories are part of a journalist’s job and even their ethical responsibility.
On Thursday, the New York Times reported Mayor Mamdani went to Steven Spielberg’s Central Park West mansion moments after his populist inauguration on Jan. 1 and kissed the Hollywood mogul’s ring. Spielberg is no friend of the free press.
The week ended with the new mayor condemning pro-Hamas chants by people protesting the sale of Israeli-occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank to prospective Zionist settlers in Queens.
The mayor was silent on chants yelled by pro-Israeli counter-protesters who flew the flag of another, if less well known terrorist group: Kach—a Zionist terrorist group.
Mayor Mamdani was also silent on threats the Kach group made to rape and kill a journalist covering the dueling protests.
Let that sink in.
Men flying the flag of a designated terrorist group threaten to rape and murder a journalist—on American soil—and the mayor fails to condem it?
This indifference comes when violence against journalists is at or near an all-time high. 126 journalists were murdered last year—85 by Israel in Gaza alone. In the US, assaults on journalists are spiking too. At the end of 2025, the "number of assaults on reporters in the US nearly equals the last three years combined," according to the Associated Press. Reporting is also being criminalized everywhere, the US Press Freedom Tracker reports.
So we have to ask: is Mayor Mamdani at war with the press already?
An email asking this question sent to Mayor Mamdani’s press office was not immediately responded to.
For tips or corrections, The Free Lance can be reached at jasonbnicholas@gmail.com or, if you prefer, thefreelancenews@proton.me.