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Protect and Serve

Why the New York Post can’t quit Eric Adams ? Jamison Lung

This story was commissioned and published in collaboration with Hell Gate, a worker-owned outlet covering New York City politics and culture. You can sign up for their free newsletters here.

In late April of 2021, two months out from New York’s Democratic mayoral primary, Eric Adams’s political future was far from clear. After launching his campaign in November of the previous year, he had yet to finish in first place in a single poll, even falling to third in some. Up to that point, the mayoral race had been defined by recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, an issue on which Andrew Yang polled best. But over the spring, vaccination rates steadily climbed while hospitalizations and deaths dropped. Vestiges of the crisis began to fade: schools resumed in-person instruction, restaurants began to return, and by the end of April, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the city would fully reopen come summer.

Along with these changes came a new dominant issue in the mayoral race: crime. According to a March 6 Emerson College poll, crime did not even rank in the top ten issues for likely mayoral voters. But that soon changed. A March 18 poll had crime tied as the sixth most important issue, and by mid-April, it had climbed its way up to second. By the end of May, crime was voters’ number one issue. What changed?

As the era of pandemic lockdowns faded, public life returned in unpredictable ways. While the total number of index crimes in spring 2021 was largely static compared to the previous year, the details told a more complex story, with increases in violent crimes offset by decreases in property crimes. The period just before the primary election saw a rash of high-profile assaults on the subway, though the overall crime rate per ride was declining that year. Looked at as a whole, crime in 2021 was still far below historic peaks—homicides increased to about their level in 2009, and major felony crimes roughly matched their levels in 2016.

Local media coverage told a less nuanced story. From March to July, coverage of “violent crimes” and what outlets described as a “crime wave” exponentially increased, before falling off just after the date of New York’s Democratic primary (it surged again in early 2022, after Adams was safely ensconced as mayor). Leading the way was the New York Post, the city’s pugnacious, reactionary, iconic, and—when it comes to local politics—most influential paper. In the two months before the primary, the tabloid devoted about a third of its cover stories to the supposedly out-of-control crime wave, far more than were dedicated to any other local issue that year. Perhaps more significant than the quantity of this coverage was its hysterical tenor. One June Post cover proclaimed: “That 70s show: return of graffiti latest sign of disorder on our streets,” though the 1970s averaged about triple the amount of violent crime per year as ultimately occurred in 2021. 

Other publications followed suit, and as the salience of crime rose in the press, so did poll numbers for Adams, the law-and-order ex-cop candidate for whom crime became a trademark issue. The paper’s synergy with the Adams campaign ran even deeper than this. As Noah Schachtman recently reported for New York magazine, the Adams campaign had vied aggressively for the Post’s approval, calling on wealthy donors to personally commend Adam to owner Rupert Murdoch. On May 10, citing “skyrocketing shootings,” the Postendorsed Adams, subsequently running ten covers either supporting him or trashing his primary opponents up to election day. The paper also chipped in three hundred largely positive news hits, many suggested by editor in chief Keith Poole, who was simultaneously developing a close relationship with Adams, per New York. Adams went on to eke out a victory of less than one percent, or just over seven thousand votes, in the final round of ranked-choice voting.?

Adams’s election demonstrates the Post’s near unparalleled ability to shape the city’s political agenda. But his term in office has shown that this power has limits. Even before becoming the first sitting New York City mayor to be federally indicted, he had earned the distinction of the lowest job approval of any mayor since Quinnipiac began polling the question in 1996—his popularity is lower with likely New York City voters than Donald Trump’s. Yet even as Adams has crashed and burned, the Posthas largely remained a stalwart ally.

Within hours of his indictment becoming public, their homepage boasted an opinion piece describing the allegations as “l(fā)ess than meets the eye”; another argued that his “woke rivals,” like Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who would become acting mayor if Adams resigned, would be worse. The editorial board defended him on due process grounds, writing that he should “stay and offer his defense to New Yorkers,” while the paper’s cover declared him a “target” of retribution by the Biden administration for speaking out against federal immigration policy. Even the Post’s infamous gossip columnist Cindy Adams joined the fray, questioning the importance of the indictment compared to Hunter Biden, migrants “stealing apartments,” and “freed thugs stealing hand cream” at drug stores.

How did the city’s premiere tough-on-crime outlet come to back its most prominent accused criminal? And more importantly, after powering him to the office in the first place, what kind of job security can the Post provide him now that he’s not an untested challenger but a deeply unpopular incumbent facing potential jail time?

The answer to these questions lies in the history of the Postunder Murdoch—how he transformed the long-running tabloid into something looser, rougher, and lethally influential—as well as in the role the paper serves in a national conservative media ecosystem dominated by social media and television.

A raucous new book, Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media, brings together interviews with more than 240 former Poststaffers, rival journalists, politicos, socialites, a convicted Ponzi schemer who briefly controlled the outlet, and others to paint a comprehensive portrait of thepaper’s pugilistic essence. Founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, the Postarguably holds the distinction of being, as Public Enemy once put it, “America’s oldest continuously published daily piece of bullshit.” For much of that history, it was a liberalpaper; one former columnist joked that under Dorothy Schiff, the paper’s pre-Murdoch owner, a typical headline might read “World Ends. Blacks and Jews Suffer Most.” But at the end of 1976, when the paper was on track to post a substantial loss for the second year in a row, Schiff sold the Postto Murdoch, a forty-five-year old Australian upstart, then owner of a number of Aussie and British tabloids—most notably The Sun, infamous for spreads of topless women.

Though he purchased New York magazineand the Village Voiceat roughly the same time, Murdoch took a special shine to the Post—or more likely, to the size of its readership. He immediately rolled up his sleeves and reshaped the paper with zeal, personally involving himself in everything from designing layouts to writing headlines to, in some cases, taking over the newsroom and micromanaging the publication during moments of crisis. He also flooded the staff with crude Australian lackeys (many supposedly rocking “white man afros,” per Paper of Wreckage), marginalizing or pushing out employees who failed to fall in line.?

By all accounts, Murdoch had an exceptional talent for making papers that people wanted to buy. According to Paper of Wreckage, in his first full year of ownership, the Post’s daily circulation jumped from 505,000 to 621,000. By 1982, its circulation was above 906,000. That readership was likely more diverse than many give it credit for, as is true of the paper’s readership today. Though many correctly see the tabloid as right-wing, to thousands of New Yorkers, the Post is simply an affordable and easily available source of entertaining, accessible, non-paywalled news coverage. From Upper East Side elites to the outer-borough working-class, there’s something for everyone: national news, sports, celebrity and high society gossip, state and municipal politics, and of course, dedicated coverage of hyperlocal quality of life issues, all presented in a concise, engaging manner. Putting content aside, it’s often funto read the Post, with its delirious, acerbic headlines and punchy copy.

Under Murdoch, the Post honed its essential framing: using individuals to represent broader systems—every cop a city savior, and every criminal (or innocent black teenager) a sign of the rot at the heart of liberal governance—and replacing dry analysis with gripping personal dramas. The paper’s sensational outlook can be seen as a particular creation of the mid-1970s, when Murdoch purchased the Post. Those were, to be fair, sensational times. Crime was legitimately soaring (1976 saw over five times the number of murders as 2023), the Son of Sam killer stalked the city for a summer, fires and blackouts raged, the unemployment rate hovered around the double digits, City Hall was a year out from bankruptcy, the tax base was fleeing, and powerful business interests were using the fiscal crisis to reshape municipal politics around austerity. Murdoch’s narratives imposed order on that chaos, providing ready-made heroes and villains and manufacturing a faux-populist common sense. Systemic analyses were less compelling to readers than pure emotional catharsis, which Murdoch could tap into and redirect toward his own ends.

What were those ends? In 1977, Mayor Abe Beame, an unpopular incumbent widely seen to be overwhelmed by the role, faced challenges from a number of ambitious opponents in the Democratic primary race. There was New York Secretary of State Mario Cuomo, a liberal darling; the even more liberal Manhattan Congresswoman Bella Abzug; Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton, the first major black mayoral candidate; Bronx Congressman Herman Badillo, the first major Puerto Rican mayoral candidate; and somewhere in the middle-to-back of the pack, a bellicose lower Manhattan congressman named Ed Koch.

Koch was languishing in the polls, but Murdoch found a kindred spirit in his anti-union, pro-death penalty, anti-affirmative action, pro-cop positions. Though he briefly flirted with backing Badillo, after a private sit-down, Murdoch threw his full weight behind Koch. “Murdoch did something we hadn’t seen since the days of the press barons. He decided, ‘I’m going to make this guy mayor,’” says former Post writer Clyde Haberman in Paper of Wreckage. That he did—and on multiple occasions, Koch credited Murdoch for his victory. 

If you squint, the Post’s approach to boosting Koch in 1977 looks a lot like their playbook for Adams in 2021. Murdoch gave Koch the paper’s first ever front-page endorsement. This was followed by months of glowing Koch coverage and negative, borderline slanderous attacks on his opponents (consistently making light of Beame’s height, or portraying Abzug as “a big fat dumpy broad,” as one former writer put it), with some possibly fake polling mixed in for good measure. The slanted Koch coverage was less popular with Post staffers, or at least the old guard yet to be replaced by Murdoch; after the election, fifty of the newsroom’s sixty reporters signed a public petition of protest. Former staffer Joyce Purnick argues in Paper of Wreckage that Murdoch’s motivated coverage proved extra effective in the emaciated media environment of the day, decimated as it was by the fiscal crisis: “Murdoch resurrected a kind of political coverage—and politically skewed coverage—that the city had seen in the past, but with only three or four newspapers left, it was like the old days, but on steroids.” 

The mayoral election was just a stepping stone. In 1980, the Postbacked Ronald Reagan—their first Republican endorsement in the Murdoch era—andran fawning support of him alongside dogged criticism of Carter, repeatedly elevating Mayor Koch’s criticisms of the sitting president over Israel. Reagan ultimately flipped New York, and his campaign credited Murdoch with the victory. His administration went on to help Murdoch consolidate power, greasing the wheels of various media laws and ultimately facilitating the creation of the Fox News empire. Today, the Post’s ability to affect not just local but national political conversations remains one of its defining features.

The specter of the late 1970s still haunts the Post today, with the politics of its era of rebirth continuing to permeate all aspects of the paper. Though its coverage remains impressively broad, often boasting quality muckraking work, the tabloid is broadly saturated with conservative ideology, both explicitly and through the elevation of certain issues over others. It’s about what gets a cover story and five follow-up articles, and what is relegated to three paragraphs in the bottom corner of page twenty-seven. When the Post does want to make a political point, it’s not scared of blurring the lines between opinion and news coverage.

“A lot of so-called liberal news outlets don’t want to come off as ideological, so they’re actually going to run away from the political implications of what they’re reporting,” a recent former Post staffer told me. But the Post“will realize that certain things are getting more play in the political sphere, like politicians are clearly listening to it, or it’s getting a lot of readership, and they’ll just keep harping on those things because they realize that they do well for the newspaper.”

Last year, Murdoch handed off control of News Corporation, the print publishing arm of his media empire, to his son Lachlan, and it had already been a long time since he played an active role in the Post’s day-to-day operations. Not that it mattered—the particular alchemy he perfected therehas taken on a life of its own. In 2021, the Post hit its first profit since Murdoch repurchased the paper (he was forced to sell it for five years in the late 1980s and early 1990s), but he had been more than willing to run it at a loss, valuing influence over money. Today, subscriptions are up by more than 113,000 since 2020, sitting a tick above 517,000 for weekends, a figure that dwarfs the New YorkDaily News’s115,000. Their website boasts 65 million unique monthly visitors.?

In a bleak age for local media, the Post’s coverage casts an increasingly outsized shadow. In August, the New York Timesannounced it will no longer make endorsements in local races, confirming the Postas the dominant state and city political validator. As more websites and neighborhood papers fold, and as the Times routinely junks its Metro Desk for spare parts and longtime rival the Daily Newsfinds its newsroom decimated by new owner Alden Global Capital, its editorial board reportedly reduced to one, the issues the Postchooses to write about and how they write about them can define their broader portrayal. The Post’s readership, while strong compared to other publications, makes up just a fraction of the city’s voters. But its real influence lies in aggregation. With gutted staffs and limited capacities, other outlets, especially TV networks, rely on what’s already been reported.

“There’s literally a whole NY1 segment where they go over what’s in the papers,” another recent former Post staffer told me. “If the Postdecides to foreground something like bail reform or [Manhattan District Attorney] Alvin Bragg, that’ll send people into a tizzy, and it has a sort of a ripple effect beyond the actual content of the stories . . . then you have CBS or NBC or ABC or PIX11 also interested in that issue, then that just becomes what people start talking about.”

Even if these outlets don’t take the same conservative editorial line as the Post, they’ll help elevate issues the Postsees as important. Take, for example, the great “squatting crisis” of the spring of 2024. Following a viral TikTok, in March of this year alone the Post wrote more than twenty-five stories about a supposed epidemic of squatting—despite little evidence that anything? more than just a handful of examples existed nationwide, let alone in New York City. These stories attained wide circulation through outlets ranging from the Joe Rogan Experience to national television. By the summer, the city council proposed creating a task force against squatting; the New York state legislature, notorious for its inability to pass housing policy, quickly pushed through an anti-squatter law; and states like Florida cracked down on the near non-existent phenomenon.?

The “squatting crisis” serves as a prime example of the role the Post plays in broader conservative media. From its location behind enemy lines in liberal America, it provides endless fodder for the national culture war, whether reporting about migrants, transgender people, anti-Zionist college students, or any other MAGA bogeyman likely to call New York City home. 

In the Adams era, what they have declined to cover is just as telling as what they’ve published. In an example reported by New York magazine, the Postsat on a scandalous exclusive in 2022 about Adams’s plan to hire Tim Pearson, the mayor’s close personal friend, to a senior role in the administration while allowing him to maintain a position at a Queens casino that was hoping to expand its operations with support from the city. Though this type of blatant corruption is usually irresistible to the Post, they squashed the story for months, only writing about it after it was first reported by the Times.Pearson then swiftly stepped down from his casino position, though he kept his NYPD pension in addition to the income from his role with the city. 

The Post’s approach to the Pearson story has been their playbook for much of the Adams administration: belated or watered-down coverage of his New Jersey residency issues, shady inner circle, sexual assault allegations, general failure to post a single notable achievement, and odd personal habits. It is a profound loss for all New Yorkers that the ideological symmetry between Adams and the paper has robbed us of quintessential Post coverage of the single weirdest mayor in the city’s long history. It’s likely, though, that as unpopular as he is today, he’d be far worse off without the support they’ve provided.

No matter how influential, no institution can rescue Adams now. Before the indictment, his approval ratings were already deep underwater. Now, polling shows that 69 percent of New Yorkers think he should resign, and 81 percent do not think he should run for reelection. Every single demographic group disapproves of his job performance. It’s possible Adams can fight through his current term, especially before a trial occurs, but with these numbers, reelection is impossible, regardless of the verdict. 

So why has the paper so far stood by a mayor with no long-term political future? For one, they are unlikely to find another candidate so eager to cozy up to them. When asked about the Post editorial board’s defense of him amid his administration’s scandals last month, Adams told a reporter: “I don’t agree with everything in the Post, and the Postdon’t agree with everything that I do. And, you know, when you respect people, the goal is not that I got to agree with everything you do, but when I look at that just common-sense approach to how to keep a city safe and raise the standards in the city, I like the stories that’s in there, you know?” The editorial in question had called on him to jettison Pearson as well as Philip Banks III, Adams’s deputy mayor for public safety. “Gotham needs Adams to survive politically, to maintain his sensible anti-crime, pro-business agenda and hold the line against the radicals already storming the gate,” the Postwrote. “Sticking with the tainted crew around him puts all that in jeopardy.” By early October, both Pearson and Banks had announced their resignations.

That’s not the kind of responsiveness The Postcan expect from Jumaane Williams, a staunch progressive, should he become acting mayor, nor from Adams’s already announced challengers, who are all varying degrees to his left. The paper recently wrote an editorial urging Republicans like City Councilmember Joe Borelli to run for mayor, but even in a non-partisan special election, the odds are long in this overwhelmingly Democratic city. Out of the top possible candidates, former Governor Andrew Cuomo probably shares the paper’s political outlook most, but he is also a longtime Post foe with high unfavorables; supporting him holds unique risks.

Beyond policy, Adams may be more useful to the Postas a cudgel in the presidential election, as the paper once used Koch against Carter. They have already ludicrously tried to reframe the mayor’s legal woes as retribution for criticism of Biden’s immigration policy, or even for his support of Israel. One news piece gloated that his scandal will hurt Democrats in the suburban house races that are crucial for control of Congress, and another trumpeted Adams’s embrace of Trump’s support. But in this regard, Adams’s utility has a clear expiration date.

In the 1989 mayoral primary, the Postbacked Koch, its chosen candidate, to the hilt, and they were the last paper to stand by him as he lost his bid for a fourth term. But Koch drastically reshaped the city; the paper may be too savvy to go down with a loser with no major policy accomplishments, especially with more legal trouble on the way. For now, the tabloid pragmatically stands by its man, but there are few narratives more irresistible to them than a scandalous fall from grace. The Post’s outrage machine is a wave, swelling up from deeper political currents. It can carry you to the top, or suck you into a riptide. One way or another, its force is sure to come crashing down on someone.