It's The Post's City, We Just Live In It
Modern Progressives Don't Stand A Chance Against New York's Right Wing Rag
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If you read The New York Post recently, you might have concluded New York City is being overrun by gangs of drugged-out migrants, fanning out across all five boroughs to squat in people’s homes. That is not the case, of course. A handful of situations where squatters have had conflict with homeowners, something that has happened fairly often in the last 20 years around the city, have made newsrooms buzz and triggered a debate over the city’s squatter rights laws. For the New York Post, it’s another opportunity to sell a narrative.
For years now, a backlash developed to progressive policies on criminal justice, education, and immigration in New York City, frustrating leftists and Democrats. They have consistently pointed to the city’s right-wing daily tabloid, The New York Post, as one of the primary culprits. Now, they are targeting New York’s squatters rights laws, leading some Democrats, like State Sen. John Liu of Queens, to support laws weakening squatters rights, a move progressives complain is reactionary and empowers propagandists like the Post.
Owned by Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, the Post is the longtime right-wing voice of New York. It regularly endorses Republicans for office and pushes stories that favor Republican policies and ideals. Liberals despise it and conservatives herald it as the only fair voice in the corrupt media ecosystem dominated by liberals.
Contrary to many of my fellow local journalists who have defending the Post, arguing that around the activism, it occasionally does good journalism and hires good reporters, I have long believed it to be a menace to New York society. To me, it’s not about its political bent – there are a lot of news outlets in the city that lean conservative, I worked for one – it’s that the Post is an unprincipled rag that hypes up news stories and presents them out of context to help conservatives. It keeps eyeballs on its pages through offering it for cheap, and offering entertaining and salacious items enveloped around the “news.” My grandmother only read the Post so she could play the Word Jumble, while some of my friends picked it up to read the gossip columns on Page Six. They all had their views influenced by its headlines and I found myself repeatedly having to correct misinformation and provide context to the Post’s sloppy bad faith reporting. Whether it was accusing Barack Obama of selling out Israel for criticizing settlement expansion in the West Bank in 2011 – something that in hindsight he was clearly right about – or hyping up the return of the “squeegee men” after Bill de Blasio’s election in 2013, despite them being regulars in Queens Plaza for years before, the New York Post has used misinformation and lack of nuance and context to propagandize even those who weren’t interested in the hard news side of the paper.
I turned down job opportunities there because I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror if I was working for a place with so few standards. That perhaps wasn’t the best career move, but I couldn’t endorse what they do. There was a long-running joke among the press corps that is either true or exaggerated depending on who you ask; the Post has more lawyers on staff to fight libel lawsuits than reporters.
My own experiences with Post staff were not positive. On the first day of same-sex marriages at Queens Borough Hall in July 2011, the reporter assigned to cover it told me his editor demanded he find and interview a heterosexual couple getting a license that day who was angry about same-sex marriage. Since the first day the law took effect happened to fall on a Sunday, Borough Hall was opened specially to allow for same-sex couples to marry that specific day. That meant the only people showing up for licenses that Sunday were same-sex couples or a handful of heterosexual ones who were so supportive of marriage equality, that they wanted their wedding date to be on that day. When the reporter explained that to the editor, the editor demanded he knock on doors in the neighborhood and ask if anyone was offended. The reporter later quit.
After Hurricane Sandy, a Post reporter interviewed several friends of mine in Howard Beach and Rockaway about whether they were concerned about looting and asked one, who happened to be half Puerto Rican, if he “was worried about minorities coming around.” In 2014, while awaiting a press conference by Mayor de Blasio at the Richmond Hill Boys and Girls Club in Queens where the mayor was speaking to a young and mostly non-white class of future afterschool counselors, the Post reporter turned to the rest of us in the press pool and said “I wouldn’t trust my kids in the hands of those people.” Some of us audibly gasped. The same year after covering a fire in the Bronx, the Post reporter assigned to the story joked with his photographer about how the victims, who were believed to be undocumented immigrants, “would save us money on welfare” now that they were dead.
Despite my hatred for the Post, I have respect for its game. It’s brilliant really. Murdoch’s media empire has mastered the art of selling right-wing talking points in digestible portions in a way that progressives can’t even begin to fight. When dabbling in progressive politics, I often warned that the Post’s influence would be detrimental. Leftists repeatedly rejected the premise. I felt like my own experiences in the New York City press corps gave me a unique insight into how media narratives form and undermine progressive policy and I could help preempt that.
When dabbling in progressive politics, I often warned that the Post’s influence would be detrimental. Leftists repeatedly rejected the premise.
Many progressive leaders dismissed these warnings as “concern trolling.” Activist groups felt they knew the city’s voters better. While the Post sent reporters out to Asian neighborhoods to talk to people about their feelings on anti-Asian hate crimes and attempts to get rid of the standardized testing requirements for specialized high schools that benefitted Asian-American students, progressive groups were gathering in Zoom meetings or Bushwhack coffee shops to hear from their self-appointed “outreach directors,” who advised leftists to ignore the “right wing talking points.” Progressive groups would trot out token members of these communities to assure progressives that everything was fine there was no backlash.
Of course that was a delusion. These were issues people cared about and progressives offered no solutions. Crime, quality of life and other progressive policies and ideas helped swing New York to the right in the 2021 and 2022 elections, leading to a complete takeover of Long Island by Republicans, the election of quasi-Republican Eric Adams as New York’s mayor, the near election of a Trump-loving Republican as New York’s governor and the loss of five U.S. House seats that helped deliver control of the chamber to Republicans. It also stopped the growing progressive movement in its tracks. While groups like Democratic Socialists of America were eyeing state and city legislative seats in the far reaches of Queens, Bronx and Brooklyn before 2020, now they’ve all but disappeared from anywhere outside their inner Brooklyn and Queens bases. Liu, who is pushing the anti-squatter law, had won his Flushing State Senate seat defeating a turncoat Democrat in 2018 with the support of progressive groups.
Voters don't think crime is bad and the quality of life sucks because the Post tells them that. They think it is because of their own everyday experience. The Post only validates what they're already seeing and experiencing, while progressives deny or downplay those real-world experiences. Not every attempt by the Post is successful. Back in the early 2010s at the height of Occupy Wall Street, when Democrats were debating raising taxes on the rich, the Post ran a cover decrying the plan to “kill the golden goose.” Their argument was Wall Street is so vital to New York’s economy, any attempt to regulate it would hurt. It was widely mocked by even some conservatives. The lack of success in that attempt at propagandizing might have left progressives thinking the Post’s days as an influential right-wing narrative creator were over.
However, there's a reason its crime narrative worked but its pro-Wall Street narrative didn't land. The idea that Wall Street greed is necessary for New York to thrive, whether true or not, is not tangible to most New Yorkers. It’s an abstract concept. We can’t see it, feel it, taste it, or experience it directly. If anything, we experience the opposite. Extreme wealth has closed off much of the city to its middle and lower class residents. Crime, quality of life issues, and education however are all issues that directly affect us day-to-day. We see videos of Asian women being attacked or homeless people pushing subway passengers to their deaths. Just this week, a video of an elderly woman being sucker punched outside a church went viral across New York media.
Further, Asian-American communities see the path to success opened by attending schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science through its graduates. The Post struck a chord when it presented the change in standardized testing as an attempt to take that away.
Progressives do not understand this because they don’t share these emotions. More than a few progressives, including a few who fell victims to crime, have told me in no uncertain terms over the years that the issues of crime and quality of life are ones they can’t win on, so they choose to not engage in it and “shift people’s focuses” to more favorable issues. Some more radical progressives actually support crime and disorder because they believe it will hasten the collapse of the Capitalist system. This strategy leaves them on the defensive when voters prioritize those issues and makes their movement seem shallow, disjointed and utterly hopeless. Right wing propagandists like the Post know that and take good advantage of it.
Who can blame them?
“Some more radical progressives actually support crime and disorder because they believe it will hasten the collapse of the Capitalist system.”
Yep. There are few political stances that irritate me more than “let it all burn down and then utopia will rise from the ashes.” It’s awfully reckless and stupid (and frankly, privileged as all hell) to want to throw it all away when—if history is any guide—whatever fills the vacuum could *easily* be far worse.
what a useful idiot you are, Nick