In an early taste of CBS News’s editorial direction under its newly anointed editor in chief, the anti-woke pundit Bari Weiss, the storied outlet elevated a hit piece on Zohran Mamdani, the progressive New York City Democratic mayoral nominee.
CBS News on Friday published a segment featuring Olivia Reingold—a reporter for the Weiss-founded Free Press, which is now owned by the same parent company as CBS. Reingold, whose previous work for Weiss includes a much-criticized August story that attempted to downplay the Israel-induced famine in Gaza, shared her reporting on Mamdani on a CBS morning program.
“Some NYPD officers worry about Mamdani becoming the NYC mayor, The Free Press reports,” reads the title of the segment posted on CBSNews.com. (Until Monday, “Mamdani” had been misspelled “Mandani.”)
Reingold reported that officers in the New York Police Department are worried about Mamdani, with some “considering retiring.” The evidence? In total, her Free Press article contains quotes from four of the at least 33,000 uniformed officers serving in the NYPD. None of them are named.
One lieutenant was worked up over whether Mamdani is “going to cut a billion dollars out of our budget” and whether his caseload will “keep piling up while we just get more and more short-staffed.”
Mamdani has proposed reducing the NYPD’s overtime budget and establishing a Department of Community Safety to take on certain nonviolent situations in the city, thereby freeing up the department’s ability to focus on serious crimes.
Another was worried about a possible reduction in the department’s overtime budget. But not all NYPD officers would view reducing overtime negatively; according to The New York Times, many officers have actually quit their jobs because of the significant demands of compulsory overtime.
Another source of Reingold’s was a Republican cop who has been dissatisfied with the department’s direction since the tenure of Bill de Blasio, the city’s Democratic mayor from 2014 to 2021. The other interviewed officer said he plans on staying in the department but is concerned about its waning “culture of brotherhood”—though he did not directly attribute that to Mamdani’s expected election.
All told, the story is thinly sourced, fearmongering, tabloid drek. It elevates the voices of a handful of cops who happen to share The Free Press’s editorial line: hostility toward Mamdani’s election. It’s highly unlikely that CBS News would have published a story like this—one unquestionably elevating questionable reporting from a biased outlet—before Weiss took the reins last week.
The post Would CBS News Have Run This Story a Week Ago? appeared first on New Republic.
