The New York City mayoral race is revealing yet another major media double standard. A Newsbusters analysis of legacy media reports (ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS) on radical socialist Zohran Mamdani's victory in the NYC Democrat primary shows no mention of the term "extreme" or "extremist" for Mamdani, despite that label being applied to conservatives and Republicans regularly over the years. Mamdani---who is calling for government-run grocery stores, taxing "whiter" neighborhoods, arresting Israel's prime minister, and ending billionaires---was treated with kid gloves by journalists. Terms like "anti-establishment," "progressive Muslim American immigrant," "social media savvy," and even "charming" were used to describe Mamdani in various reports.
"Instead of calling him extremely liberal or far-left, they're calling him charming...that's the modifier," says Tim Graham, executive editor at Newsbusters. "Sure, socialism is charming when you take everyone's money!"
Graham points to another recent Newsbusters study that found in the first five months of this year, PBS used the term "far right" 127 times versus "far left" just 3 times...a ratio of 42-to-1. At the same time, the New York Times bragged about fact-checking the Trump White House after failing to do the same for the Biden White House over the last four years.
"You would get a very stilted image trying to figure out American politics, if you listen to what they call the mainstream media," says Graham. "You're going to think that America is bedeviled by a far-right, and that there is nobody on the left or far-left whatsoever."
"If you only paid attention to the legacy media and the labels they use, you would think that all the political battles of our time are between the far-right and non-partisans," he continues.
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