The Murdoch Media’s New York Mayoral Coverage is All About Israel
Having recently listened to Fox News after perusing another fixture of the Murdoch media empire, the New York Post, I found my usual distaste for these outlets turning into disgust mixed with amusement. Although I’ve no more fondness for New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s politics than do former George W. Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino and the other Murdoch talking heads, I had to ask myself after enduring their nonstop attacks on this electoral frontrunner whether the most cringeworthy things about him are really his “Marxism” and hostility to Israel. I’ve also noticed Fox News’s invectives against Mamdani have transitioned from attacks on his “Marxist Leninism” to complaints that he really doesn’t mean what he says when he tells us that he misstated his views on “the global Intifada.”
Supposedly, this hardly practicing Muslim of Indian descent would turn the Big Apple into some kind of staging ground for Hamas terrorists once elected as New York mayor. This assumption has led the conservative establishment, for which the Murdoch media speak, to lavish praise on those Democrats who have withheld support from Mamdani. Thus, we see the Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who represents a heavily Jewish Democratic district, treated sympathetically by the Murdoch media, while New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, who represents a more radical but also heavily Jewish district, is relegated to outer darkness for backing Mamdani.
Rather than viewing this as a battle between leftist factions, Fox News has jumped into the fray on behalf of its own pampered leftists, against those Democrats we should scorn. One encountered a similar development when the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has generally leaned left in American politics, decided to defund Democratic politicians who were critical of Israel. This decision quite predictably became a “conservative” issue, as pro-AIPAC Democratic politicians became conservative heroes, while other Democrats, who were anti-Israel, were declared enemies of the American right.
I doubt these gestures by the Murdoch media will sway many New York Jewish votes in the November mayoral election. The Jewish left is not particularly influenced by Zionist arguments; and their members counted for upward of 20 percent of the Jewish vote that went to Mamdani. Those voters are found mostly in tony neighborhoods like Brooklyn’s Park Slope and Manhattan’s Upper West Side; and their residents don’t feel particularly threatened yet by violent crime, or even recognize the existence of left-wing anti-Semitism. (Unfortunately, I know lots of such people.) Their preferred enemies are white Christian “fascists” who voted for Donald Trump; and the Israeli government’s close relationship to the new Hitler, may be enough to render them insensitive to Mamdani’s anti-Israel rants.
Most other Jewish Democrats, by contrast, voted for Andrew Cuomo in the primary and are not likely to change their votes to Mamdani. It is highly unlikely that any Jewish person who listens to Fox News or reads the New York Post feels in any way tempted to support a leader of the “worldwide Antifada”, which occasions the question of why the Murdoch talking heads keep hitting us over the head with the obsessive charge that Mamdani is an anti-Israeli Marxist.
If I were choosing the most negative things to say about Mamdani, I’d be hammering on his war against the police force, his desire to coddle criminals, his activism on behalf of the transgender agenda, and his over-the-top anti-white racism. Although some of these stands do get inserted into the conservative establishment’s attacks on him, they are usually underplayed in favor of focusing on his putative Marxism (as seen in his support for more public housing and state-owned grocery stores) and above all, his explicitly anti-Israeli, pro-Intifada views.
Clearly, our authorized conservative sources are not stressing those issues most likely to win over voters who can still be influenced away from Mamdani. Instead, they have chosen to belabor those things that matter to some of their readers and listeners but especially their neoconservative donors. If I, for one, were going after undecided New York voters, I wouldn’t be wringing my hands about anti-Semitism, but speechifying about crime and police protection in a city that is facing rampant street violence. That is an issue that worked well for President Trump on a national scale in last year’s election.
But there is another reason that the Murdoch media are focusing on the kind of anti-Mamdani campaign they are now conspicuously featuring. They are obviously backing the corrupt incumbent, Eric Adams, a former Democrat, now independent, for whom the Post has been campaigning nonstop against the Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa. Sliwa has made law and order his number-one issue, and his credentials on this topic are impeccable. For years, Sliwa has led a civic group, the Guardian Angels, seeking to protect New York subway riders against criminal assaults.
The Murdoch media, however, have decided to back Adams supposedly as a more electable candidate, against the more vigorous law-and-order Republican. These influencers are determined to make the election about Marxism and about protecting New York against the “global Intifada.” They may have decided that the flailing Adams will play along with their program in return for their support.
These media may have also decided not to bring up Mamdani’s nutty LGBTQ cultural positions, since the conservative establishment sympathizes with most of them, or else doesn’t think they’re worth mentioning. In any case, cultural issues would be a distraction from the obsessive messaging issuing from the Murdoch media that Mamdani is a Marxist anti-Semite.