Zohran Mamdani. What A Story!

Lets Get it Right...

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On September 11, 2001, Zohran Mamdani was nine years old.

On January 1, 2026, he will become mayor of New York City.

A great deal has happened in the nation’s largest city in the last quarter century. Mamdani’s ascension is surprising, dramatic, and with vast and unpredictable impact.

OK, there was Rudy Giuliani, Mike Bloomberg, Bill DiBlasio, and the weird reign of Eric Adams. But the persona of Mamdani and the enthusiasm that led to his victory set a new standard in city politics. Richard Kim, the editor-in-chief of The City, a leading metro news organization, told me that in the 2021 election, only 11 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 bothered to turn out.

In 2025, that age group, the future, voted at 43 percent, which was the basis of what was a landslide.

I qualify as bona fide New Yorker. When I was a child, my parents lived in the Belnord on the Upper West Side, the setting for the hit series Only Murders in the Building. So many decades later, I know less about New York City’s politics than I do about how the news gets covered in this metropolitan region of about twenty million people.

I am also aware of the closest comparison to Mamdani as a phenomenon, Barack Obama. In 2002, he was a forty-one-year-old Illinois state senator who had been defeated in a 2000 congressional primary race. In 2008 he was elected president of the United States.

A much larger electorate, but very similar enthusiasm, elevated that man of color and charisma. Obama did serve two full terms in a presidency completely free of scandals.

But when he left office and in retrospect, Obama himself and a majority (I am convinced) of his supporters were disappointed and frustrated. Worse yet, the rebound on the national scene was the election of Donald Trump.

By the very nature of political leadership, disappointment is inevitable. There have to be compromises. There are large challenges — affordability and education — and small ones like snow removal. Successes tend to be elusive, especially if your ambitions are the idealistic platform of Democratic Socialism.

How well Mamdani performs in office will to some extent be measurable in data. But how well he is thought to be doing will be measurable by how he is judged by the media and a hard-to-please public. After three productive terms as New York’s mayor, Mike Bloomberg left office, I think, essentially unrecognizable to the people he served, on the streets or in the subway.

Thanks Mike, soon forgotten, an outcome Zohran Mamdani is unlikely to have.

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So, what is as close to the right way to cover Mamdani, as journalism can manage?

The media ecosystem of New York City is enormous. My view (offered many times in recent years) is that each of us is now editor-in-chief of our own news consumption, choosing where, when, and how we get information, from the loftiest source to the least reliable. The dominance of daily newspapers and local broadcast media has been greatly diminished. There are hundreds of news organizations operating — for communities, special interests, multilingual, print, digital, video and audio.

There may be news deserts around the country, but New York City is emphatically not one of them.

And yet, my sense is that the New Yorkers most interested in what is happening in their city aren’t satisfied with what they are getting. And there are reasons for that. The New York Times is a global brand with many more reporters assigned to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada than covering beats in the Bronx.

The Times’s metropolitan desk, smaller than it once was, still does an excellent job, focusing mainly on big pictures, trends, and overall atmospherics and investigations.

What is missing is the reporting closer to the ground that has the same quality of detail and sophistication that the Times brings to its coverage of the nation, the world, and culture. (Pause here to say that everyone I know can describe with intensity what they see as the Times’s shortcomings. And then imagine what it would be like if — as almost happened earlier this century — the company were in financial trouble.)

Which is where The City comes in. Founded in 2019 with mainly philanthropic money, its output is impressive in scale and style, given that its newsroom consists of about two dozen people. It has a new chief executive, Carroll Bogert, whose most recent leadership role at the Marshall Project, focused on criminal justice, was a prizewinning success.

Richard Kim had an eclectic background at The Nation and the Huffington Post. In an interview with an admittedly friendly questioner (as I was), he gave all the right answers about accountability journalism, a commitment to avoiding bias, and responsible growth. The challenge is visibility — Kim reports that there are about one million visitors a month to its website and other places where The City’s stories turn up, like Apple News.

But in the maelstrom that is news in New York, The City — to be blunt — has to have greater impact than it has now. And with impact will come funding resources to expand. (A rebranding of the name to something less generic than The City is also under discussion.)

The mayoralty of Zohran Mamdani offers a great opportunity for The City, along with enormous risks. Kim is determined that coverage will reflect the reality, the victories and defeats. The question is whether readers will be ready for what certainly will be seen as criticism, not opinions but reporting based on results.

Free buses? Affordable housing? Very big objectives.

Some of the most memorable improvements in New York life were much smaller, as in the 1980s, when the leadership of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority devised ways to all but eliminate subway graffiti, which made travel feel less menacing and has been largely sustained in the succeeding decades.

Overall, I have admired the mantra of Michigan’s two-term governor, Gretchen Whitmer: “Fix the damn roads!” Focusing on people’s daily hassles is not ideological. Will Mamdani’s voters be satisfied with that?

A final thought: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected to Congress in 2018 with the same meteoric momentum as Mamdani. She got star treatment with all that entails — including the dangers and suspicions that she was abandoning her principles. By any measure, she has grown in public and political stature because she is very smart, has proven to be effective, and hasn’t succumbed to the excesses of self-glorification, which may be the hardest part of all.

Zohran Mamdani has doubtless noticed.