Lately, it has been difficult to ignore a tendency at The New York Times to make astonishingly bad news judgments. The paper’s obsession with a view from nowhere is long-standing, but as Republicans increasingly circulate insane conspiracy theories and racist nonsense, the cult of centrism has taken a self-destructive turn.
The most recent — and perhaps most egregious — way this has surfaced is a story about New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s application to Columbia University in 2009, when he was a high school senior. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and is of South Asian descent, identified himself as “Asian” and “Black or African American” on the checklist provided by the application. “Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background,” Mamdani told the Times.
It is an odd story. (Mamdani didn’t even go to Columbia, for one.) You can imagine a different way of framing the story — a thumbsucker about identity with the headline “What does it mean to be a Ugandan Indian?” But the Times’ racist framing, which implies Mamdani was trying to game the admissions system, is one that plays better with the increasingly racist right-wing ecosystem.
The New York Times declined to comment on the story’s framing. Instead, spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha sent the following statement:
Reporters receive tips from people with biases and bad motives all the time, but we only publish such information after we’ve independently verified it, confirmed it, done our own reporting on it and judged it to be newsworthy. In this case, Mr. Mamdani himself confirmed the information. And, the information was valuable to the public in that it helped readers get a better understanding of the candidate.
That’s a reference to the sourcing of this story: hacked materials from Columbia. Typically, when the source of a story is a hacked document, it is best practice to identify what goals the hacker may have in passing the document along. The Times itself previously reported the hack was “politically motivated” and as it happened, “a smiling image of President Trump appeared on some computer screens at the university.” The alleged hacker told Bloomberg that their goal was “to acquire information about university applications that would suggest a continuation of affirmative action policies in Columbia’s admissions, following a 2023 Supreme Court decision that effectively barred the practice.” No acknowledgement of either of these things appears in the Mamdani story that emerged from the hacked materials. The New York Times declined to comment on why it didn’t follow best practices.
A normal journalistic outfit might find this kind of thing embarrassing
The materials were provided by a source the Times identifies as “Crémieux” — “an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race.” The name Crémieux rang alarm bells for me, as a reference to Adolphe Crémieux, a French politician who notably excluded Muslims from French citizenship. Would it surprise you to hear that Mamdani is Muslim?
The Substacker “Crémieux” has already been identified by name: Jordan Lasker, a prominent internet eugenicist. As for the Times’ description of him as an academic, that may be a stretch. Lasker is the co-author of two papers so racist that they played a role in getting another co-author fired. In one paper, he is listed as affiliated with the University of Minnesota, though he does not appear on the department page — or any version of it archived since 2016, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. On another paper, Lasker’s affiliation is Texas Tech — where he at least had an email address. Whether this counts as being “an academic” is left as an exercise for the reader.
Now, a normal journalistic outfit might find this kind of thing embarrassing, especially so when other reporters — such as Liam Scott at the Columbia Journalism Review, Tom Scocca, and Margaret Sullivan, a former public editor for The New York Times itself — sit up and take notice. There’s much more attention on the sourcing of the story than the story itself. But Patrick Healy, the Times’ assistant managing editor for standards and trust, defended the story on X, saying, “On sourcing, we work to give readers context, including in this case the initial source’s online alias, as a way to learn more about the person, who was effectively an intermediary.” Curiously, that context did not include linking the Guardian story that identified Lasker. The New York Times declined to comment on why Lasker was not identified by name, or how it defines “an academic.”
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