It’s happening again. As Democratic Socialist currents gain ground in some deep-blue corners of New York City politics, mainstream media is struggling — and largely failing — to make sense of what it means.
One of the enduring weaknesses of mainstream political reporting is its reflexive attraction to false equivalence.
Confronted with the cascading excesses of Trumpism, too many journalists go hunting for a balancing offense on the left rather than honestly reckoning with the asymmetry before them.
They train disproportionate attention on the anti-police rhetoric of a small fringe in Mamdani’s camp, then imply, without quite saying so, that such views somehow represent the Democratic mainstream.
In the name of balance, this approach consistently softens or sidesteps legitimate concerns: the influence of Big Money in politics, systematic voter suppression, the racial logic underlying the assault on DEI programs, the politicization of the Justice Department, the heavy-handed conduct of ICE, and an Iran policy that lurches between belligerence and incoherence.
Balance is an essential journalistic value. But it does not require treating unequal offenses as though they were morally or politically equivalent.
We should be vigilant against importing this same false equivalence into our own thinking. The desire to appear reasonable — to strike a broad, big-tent posture — must never come at the expense of common sense or clear moral judgment.