Last Friday, the New York Times published a news story, framed like an investigative scoop, by Sally Goldenberg and Emma Goldberg. The actual story is that Mamdani sometimes collaborates with influencers to get information about his policies visibility with the public at large — a potentially interesting, but not exactly earth-shattering story. But it is not framed as a regular story. They chose to frame it like a scandal. Just look at the dek.
The hedging here is what strikes me, for its vagueness if nothing else. The headline calls them a “Private Army,” as if they were Blackwater shooting civilians in the streets of Kabul. They chalk up “some of his popularity” — how much and with whom? — to this “private army.” But, then they call it “an influencer operation” — is the operation using an army of influencers in some sort of violation of media norms? How does that differ from a regular media operation? “The mayor’s office” — the emphasis is on using the government here, not Mamdani’s natural charisma that plays well on screen. Look behind that highlighted sentence, as well: who actually sees Mamdani as a social media wizard? We never learn.
I think this is worth discussing a bit because the story itself does not pay off on these promises of scandal: they reveal that the Mayor’s office sometimes uses Signal to invite influencers to various policy unveiling events. They are not paid for the content that produce as a result of these invitations. “Still,” the story cautions, “their proximity and access to a figure as popular as Mr. Mamdani can help increase their own social media following and, by extension, potentially put them in a position to attract paid content sponsorships from commercial brands.”
What is the problem here? The story seems upset at the existence of access journalism, or the official approval of journalistic access under implied rules that might limit reporting, which has deep irony coming from New York Times reporters.
The influencers are also invited to events with the mayor where some traditional reporters are excluded, and some influencers are given one-on-one interviews with Mr. Mamdani.
This isn’t really about excluding journalists. The sneer of this story comes from the presence of influencers themselves. Typically, it is journalists who officials include on “secret” Signal chats about government policy — that is, after all, how we got the “SignalGate” scandal just last year. No one wrote a 2,500 word story problematizing Jeffrey Goldberg’s inclusion in the Trump administration’s signal chat. Maybe they should have?
Access is not a goal in and of itself
A clue as to what is going on is the entitled priggishness many journalists express about any limitation in their access to government figures. Here is an example:
In case that doesn’t load: it’s CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins marveling that President Trump is extremely accessible to journalists, that any event can become a press conference, unlike Barrack Obama who would not engage with shouted questions. This is a mirror image to the industry-wide whine about how President Biden would not grant interviews or hold many press conferences, leading many journalists to cover him far more negatively than the more confrontational and negative candidate Trump. The mere fact of perceived access or not led to coverage frames.
Zohran Mamdani is not being super accessible to reporters, because he is being super visible online — part of that much vaunted “private army” of influencers who are… invited to things. Importantly, this stands in contrast to other Times reporting about political influencers, which takes the time to report its own material on a small number of paid left wing influencers but relies on small, local outlets to report on the far larger networks of right wing influencers who are corruptly paid far more. Conservative influencers have done this for foreign governments, too (Malaysia and Russia that we know of), though you’d never know of this imbalance from their coverage. Everything is equal, left and right in balance, but only in ways meant to soften the much worse behavior of conservatives, as one would expect from a liberal newspaper.
An industry in collapse
But there’s a deeper structural issue at work here. Institutional journalists are rarely willing to reflect honestly about the decline of their industry. From every single angle (each one of those is a different way of looking at the data), newspaper journalism in particular is smaller and less influential than it has been for decades — upwards of 50% smaller than it was in 1995. The modest growth in television journalism and digital publishing has not nearly made up for the catastrophic newsroom losses over time. This is one possible reason for the prevalence of access journalism — not okay for influencers, apparently, but just fine for, say, Maggie Haberman — the collapse of the industry makes reporting much harder to do at the same scale it once took place, and trading access in return for being able to write a constant stream of content is very tempting.
But it is also an old fear — the news media were openly hostile and dismissive of blogging 20 years ago, even though every major news site now operates a blog. That tumult now seems quaint, as journalism pretty seamlessly absorbed blogging (they shared many conventions). It has struggled with handling influencers, who are growing audiences in a way that must terrify the shrinking audiences of traditional journalism. As a result, whenever journalists develop real audiences in content creation, they seem to get shoved out the door. Compare how Dave Jorgenson built a sizable, respectable audience doing news explainers with The Washington Post, who fired him and replaced him with a dreary no-audience “podcast” of conservatives mumbling about patriotism. Outlets wind up having no institutional knowledge or procedures for handling influencer media.
And, of course, race
It’s certainly a new development that media-savvy, younger politicians are incorporating influencers and adopting their production methods into their public communications. I have written about this before, and it is a good thing. We should want politicians to be fluent in the popular media that their citizens, especially the younger ones, use to learn about the world. That traditional journalists seem unwilling to engage with this emerging media ecosystem on its own terms is certainly worth noting, but it is also pretty shortsighted. Just like with blogging, they seem determined to miss the boat and then wonder why their industry only keeps collapsing.