Good morning. It is August 14th. Things are starting off cloudy and humid here in New York City. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. Usually we launch into the podcast with any breaking news that might have happened late in the day or overnight before we turn to the somewhat older news in the home delivery print edition of the New York Times.

But when I fished this morning's copy of the New York Times and its label, which bears the garbled and completely ineffectual message, “please deliver the paper on a bag out of the puddle of air conditioner drip that's always on the stoop,” and I looked at the top left corner, which had been deepest in the puddle, to see how waterlogged the paper was. My eye landed on the headline there. “In Mayor Race,
Candidates Hit A Nerve: Rents / Cuomo Jabs Mamdani on Apartment Cost,” and below that headline was a truly humiliatingly bad story. “A long running campaign fight over New York's soaring housing costs,” the Times writes, “reignited this week around an unlikely spark. The $2,300 a month rent stabilized apartment occupied by Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor. It began Friday afternoon when his leading rival, former governor Andrew Cuomo, unexpectedly attacked Mr. Mamdani, who makes $142,000 as a state assemblyman, for occupying an affordable unit in Astoria, Queens that he said should go to a needier New Yorker.”

That did happen. Andrew Cuomo, or somebody writing combative social media posts for Andrew Cuomo, did in fact advance the argument that there is something wrong with living in a rent-stabilized apartment. But from there, The Times's institutional commitment to covering politics through endless stories about who's up and who's down, built on boldly declared abstract fabulations about supposed shifts in the public's mood or perception of the politicians, combined with the newsroom's share of the paper's top-to-bottom seething resentment of Mamdani, and editorial commitment to trying to find some way, anyway, to use its influence to turn the tide against his widespread popularity and electoral success, to produce a piece of news writing so tendentiously stupid that the New York Post might have thought twice about running it. “By Tuesday,” the Times declared, “the broadside had escalated into a multi-day war of words that put Mr. Mamdani, the front runner in the race, on the defensive and highlighted the candidates' competing visions for how to bring down runaway costs in one of the world's most expensive cities. The particulars,” the Times continues, “were bitterly personal. Mr. Cuomo accused Mr. Mamdani of ‘callous theft’ and proposed a new law named after him to means test who can live in the city's roughly one million rent-stabilized units. Mr. Mamdani called it ‘petty vindictiveness’ and blamed the former governor and the real estate developers who fund Mr. Cuomo's campaigns for the city's housing shortage.”

Now. What is the evidence that Zohran Mamdani, who crushed Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary by running explicitly on a program of affordability in general and a rent freeze on rent stabilized housing in particular, has been put on the defensive on the issue of housing affordability? Here's the sum total of what the piece has to say about how this particular attack, which it calls part of an “increasingly caustic approach,” from Cuomo, has improved Cuomo's standing relative to Mamdani. “There were some signs,” the Times writes, “it was gaining traction. By personally challenging Mr. Mamdani on housing affordability, an issue that has been central to the Mamdani campaign, Mr. Cuomo tapped a sensitive nerve for New Yorkers who routinely agonize over who pays what in rent and what housing arrangements are fair. His initial post on X had garnered 34 million views by Wednesday though it also prompted a large number of negative replies.” That's it. That's everything. That's what they got. The assertion there were “some signs” in the classic sloppy journalistic plural points the way to one sign, which is that Cuomo's post got 34 million views on x.com. Now, visibility and engagement on x.com are, and have been for quite a while now, directly manipulated by Elon Musk, the site's owner, who has dedicated the largest fortune in the world to promoting far-right political propaganda. Musk routinely and actively squashes left-wing content on the site and amplifies attacks on left-wing figures. The whole site is riddled with Nazis and bots and Nazi bots out to stoke conflict and normalize reactionary resentments, but people who consider themselves objective, responsible journalists have still not stopped marinating their brains in the site and mistaking Musk's fire hose of reactionary content for the tide of public opinion. Getting 34 million views on X says absolutely nothing about how authentically popular or resonant a post is. But even in the light of that, even with that as the sole piece of evidence that this was a good play for Cuomo, the Times was forced to concede that those 34 million responses weren't even positive. The only sign that there was anything effective about Cuomo's attack is the existence of this news story itself, which indicates that the nerve it really struck was the nerve by which the leadership of the New York Times reflexively jumps to attention when anyone says or does something that reflects its own hostility toward Mamdani. The story says that Cuomo lives in an $8,000 a month market-rate apartment. It doesn't say that he took it over from his own daughter when he desperately needed a place to establish any sort of residency, in a city in which he doesn't live. And eventually, when it's done praising Cuomo for his acuity and trying to tap into New Yorkers' anxieties about housing costs, this story gets around to the merits of the plan that Cuomo put forward in attacking Mamdani. Mr. Cuomo's so-called Zohran's Law proposal, which he rushed out just hours after first mentioning it, would effectively allow units in the rent stabilization program to be leased only to New Yorkers who pay at least 30 % of their income a year in rent, the threshold at which households are generally deemed to be rent burdened. That is Cuomo's idea of a populist rent policy would be to require everyone to live at or over the threshold of officially paying too much of their income in rent. So if you get a raise that would seem to give you a little breathing room, that raise is earmarked for your future landlord. “The plan,” the Times writes, “drew sharp criticism from some housing experts, tenant advocates, and even some former allies of Mr. Cuomo, a one-time federal housing secretary. They said that it showed he did not understand the depth of the city's housing crisis and that it could do more harm than good if enacted.” The story also notes that this Zohran's Law, I presume Cuomo is calling it, Zohran's Law, because he still can't or won't figure out how to say Mamdani, would only apply to new applicants for rent-stabilized units, meaning it would do nothing to address cases like Mr. Mamdani's. Further down, very near the end of this piece about how Cuomo has put Mamdani on the defensive on housing, the story also notes that the Mamdani side has pointed out that as governor Cuomo allowed tens of thousands of units to be removed from the rent stabilization program and the Times writes “Mr. Cuomo also signed a change into law as governor that protected the right of higher income New Yorkers to stay in rent stabilized apartments.” 

Meanwhile, on page A21, Nicholas Fandos, the same person who wrote the front page story about Cuomo's great move, delivers the news that former governor David Patterson, who had endorsed Cuomo in the primary, has switched his endorsement for the general election to incumbent mayor Eric Adams. 

As for Adams, the story below that on the page is, “Ex-Adams' aide pleads guilty in corruption investigation.” Now, why is Mamdani's perfectly normal and lawful apartment situation being played as a vulnerability on page one, while the chronically corrupt sitting mayor's ever deepening web of corrupt connections goes deep inside the paper? Is because once the Times has developed a rooting interest in the news, it loses all sense of proportion. Cuomo and Adams are both actually scandalous figures who are totally unfit for office. But rather than documenting that, the Times is obsessed with trying to prove that the squeaky clean Mamdani must also somehow be disqualified. It's the same impulse that led them to spend the summer of 2016 with a six reporter team hammering away to try to expose the potential for the appearance of conflict of interest in the dealings of the Clinton Foundation. 

Here's where I disclose that my wife worked for the Clinton Foundation long before that. While steadfastly refusing to pick up on or follow the Washington Post's coverage of how the Donald Trump Foundation was a completely corrupt personal slush fund operated by the Republican presidential candidate, through which, among other things, he diverted money meant for children's cancer research for his own personal use. 

And how did those coverage priorities work out for everybody? Let's turn aside from the Times and look at popular.info, which reports on July 4th, 2026, President Trump plans to celebrate the 250th anniversary of America's independence by hosting a UFC match on the White House lawn. The story goes on to say that today, UFC is owned by TKO Group Holdings, which is also the parent company of WWE Wrestling. Linda McMahon, the secretary of education and a major Trump fundraiser, owns over $50 million worth of stock in TKO. And then a little further down, the story says, “the announcement of the White House fight coincided with UFC's new deal with Paramount, which will have the exclusive rights to air fights. Paramount secured the deal after the Trump administration approved the company's merger with Skydance. That approval came after Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a frivolous lawsuit Trump filed against CBS News, a Paramount subsidiary.” 

That is the news, more or less. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Keep sending those along if you can. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.