How the New York Post Wins

The power of a vacuum

Explaining the New York Post to anyone who is not from New York is always difficult. This left-leaning city has a daily newspaper that is owned by a right-wing media tycoon and this newspaper’s politics, generally, aren’t aligning with the 68 percent of New Yorkers who voted for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump. This newspaper, despite its proud conservatism, boasts one of the most popular news websites in the city—or anywhere. Its print edition is widely available in neighborhood supermarkets and bodegas. Politicians in both parties take it very seriously, and it has the power to almost single-handedly drive news cycles. If it would be an overstatement to say the Post made Eric Adams mayor, it certainly didn’t hurt him that the brawling, British-style tabloid decided to endorse him and behave, for many months, as his propaganda organ.

There are two sources of the Post’s power in New York City: its canny, populist instincts, which veer into demagoguery, and the overall decline of granular news coverage of the city. The former can’t be handwaved away; the Post gets the id of New York very well. New York is a heterogeneous place, home to an entire borough that enthusiastically supports Trump and other neighborhoods, in southern Brooklyn and eastern Queens, that have swung to the right. Democrats, meanwhile, come in many different flavors. Leftists and college-educated liberals revile the Post. Other Democrats, who tend to be middle-income and longer term residents of the city, have a more complicated relationship with Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid. Some are old enough to remember when it was a liberal paper and keep reading it out of habit. Others come to it for the sports section, which remains the most robust in the city. A certain kind of liberal dislikes most Republicans, Trump included, but frets over the city’s quality of life. They don’t like the subway crime, the homeless, and believe, despite the obvious data, the city is worse off now than it was in the 1990s and 2000s. They vote Blue No Matter Who but badly miss Michael Bloomberg. Some of them, in 2022, secretly voted for Lee Zeldin for governor, believing “Crime Wave” Kathy Hochul couldn’t manage the state any longer. The Post speaks to their anxieties.

The Post worldview is fairly straightforward. Crime is inordinately high, liberals are to blame, and only Giuliani-style policing can bring it under control. Homelessness is a scourge, and policing, mostly, is the answer. The rich are treated poorly by urban liberals and must be taxed far less. Children should be educated in privately-run, publicly-funded charter schools. Congestion pricing will destroy Manhattan. The migrants will destroy everything. And wokeness, as always, runs amok. Abroad, the Post favors standard neoconservatism and is relentlessly pro-Israel.

The Post has a surprisingly anguished relationship with the once and future president. Donald Trump is a regular Post reader and, in many ways, embodies the sleazy, populist, big city nativism that makes the tabloid what it is. Murdoch, for long stretches of the last decade, did not take Trump seriously. He personally preferred conventional Republicans like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and even Mitt Romney. In 2022, he signaled to the Post’s editorial board that Ron DeSantis, not Trump, should be considered the future of the party. Trump’s re-election announcement was buried deep in the print edition. The trouble for Murdoch was that Trump veered too much from fiscal conservatism and his isolationism sounded suspiciously like the anti-war left’s. What got Murdoch on board with Trump each time was victory. The Post wasn’t going to be left in the dust; it wasn’t going to become the National Review. The same movie, in essence, played out in 2016 and 2024: the Post bet on someone else in the Republican primary and pivoted hard to Trump once it became clear he was going to be the nominee. In all the general election campaigns, the editors gleefully fell behind Trump, skewering Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. Ultimately, the Post and Trump cannot quit each other. Trump has been calling in salacious gossip to the tabloid since the 1970s. The Post knows it cannot be a serious conservative bastion without puffing up the 45th and 47th president, especially when there’s no meaningful Republican opposition.

Local broadcast TV and conventional radio do not get as much attention and viewership as they once did, but they still matter in New York City. They collectively represent many cameras and microphones, and there’s a sort of meta-narrative that gets scripted among them that local residents, especially those who vote in primary elections, can lock into and absorb. TV and radio take their cues from the Post. When I was a young City Hall reporter, I remember watching a veteran radio broadcaster carefully turning the pages of the tabloid, hunting for stories. If the Post decides to fixate on anything for long enough, broadcast TV and news radio will follow. Bill de Blasio, Adams’ predecessor, found this out the hard way. For eight years, the Post bludgeoned and tormented the progressive mayor on a daily basis, mocking him endlessly on their front pages. Many of these front pages (or “woods” in news parlance) would go viral on the old Twitter, feeding further news cycles. Despite his policy accomplishments, de Blasio saw his popularity erode. Some of this was his own fault—he had poor political instincts—and he never understood that the Post can be exploited by any politician who is savvy enough to work with them. They are a weapon to be wielded against your enemies. No paper is a better dumping ground for opposition research. If you’ve got dirt on someone you don’t like, take it to the Post. They’d rather skewer a progressive Democrat, but they’ll sink anyone if the story is good enough. Even Adams, who the Post was desperate to defend, eventually found himself in their crosshairs, even if their attacks, relative to those on de Blasio, were muted.

The Post succeeds, too, because it’s licentious and reliably entertaining. It’s MAGA, but not fully MAGA—there’s an opening for readership that doesn’t want constant and slavish coverage of Trump—and most of its crusades are local in nature. Of late, the Post has become fully obsessed with annihilating any support congestion pricing might have in New York City. The coverage has grown so overheated and absurd—the editors seem rather giddy a local activist who backed congestion pricing later got attacked on the subway—that it’s gained a self-referential quality. The Post, plainly, knows what it’s doing. A $9 peak hour toll to enter Manhattan is not going to cripple the city. The tabloid, so furious when anyone hops the turnstile and doesn’t pay the subway fare, is exulting in the “clever” tactics motorists are employing to dodge the toll, including a “plate flipper” typically found in a James Bond movie.

The Post would be less successful today if it still had a worthy rival in the Daily News. New York’s other tabloid, for many decades, was a colossus in the outer boroughs, and once boasted a daily circulation north of two million. The Daily News, unlike the Post, is centrist or even left-leaning, depending on the issue. If its old owner, Mort Zuckerman, once got the editorial board to endorse Romney for president, the News was far less likely to spend most of its days vilifying Democrats or any other liberal policy objectives. It exudes less wrath, more nuance. The News still employs talented reporters but its hedge fund ownership has hollowed it out over the last half decade. There are no dedicated outer borough bureaus and its City Hall and Albany coverage has shrunk dramatically. Without the News as a counterweight, the Post has far more narrative control. The same is true of the Village Voice, which offered a decidedly liberal point of view and was far more culturally influential than its twentieth century circulation indicated. Today, the Voice hardly exists at all.

The decline of the News and Voice are typical American newspaper stories. The internet obliterated their business model, which relied heavily on print advertising, and they were horribly mismanaged. There is a parallel universe where the Voice is operating today like a stronger version of Hell Gate, the plucky leftist news startup that is filling some crucial coverage gaps. Or the News converts to a nonprofit like The City and maintains an aggressive online operation in the vein of Gothamist, which is underrated in how comprehensively it covers the city, thanks in part to WNYC’s backing. These outlets, along with the Albany and City Hall stalwart City & State, are a reminder that plenty of strong local news coverage still exists in New York City. None of them, though, can punch at the Post’s weight. They lack the wide print circulation, the famed brand, and the highly-trafficked website. They don’t have the Murdoch lucre. One only hopes a well-heeled local owner can buy the News and start to fund it again. Perhaps, in due time, their hedge fund overlords will relinquish the newspaper.

The goliath left to stand against the Post prefers not to fight. The New York Times is, unquestionably, the most successful and influential newspaper in the United States. Its power has only grown as regional rivals contract. There’s a good chance more residents of Los Angeles are subscribing to the New York Times than the Los Angeles Times. With its strategic gaming acquisitions—you play Wordle, the Times makes money—and its extensive global coverage, the Times is profitable and growing, which is true of very few news organizations in the United States. At the same time, it has reduced its New York coverage. There is no longer a standalone Metro section in the print edition and there are very few Times columnists who write regularly on the city. Even in the 2010s, there were at least three—Michael Powell, Clyde Haberman, and Jim Dwyer—who were reporting and opining on the happenings in the neighborhoods and City Hall. The Times still does strong investigative work and when stories are published there, they are well-researched and substantive. But it simply isn’t enough. The truth about New York City, in 2025, is that you have to read the Post to get a grasp on what is happening in Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx on any given day. The Post is writing regularly on the public schools, mass transit, and local political races. Its coverage must be treated skeptically because editors will skew facts or willingly mislead, but the tabloid is truthful enough to be needed. Both the News and Times have higher standards for accuracy, yet neither offers the scope of the Post. The News simply can’t compete because of its deleterious ownership. The Times, chooses not to compete.

Six months from now, a Democratic primary will likely determine the next mayor of New York City. The Times has already announced that its editorial board, which will continue to make endorsements for the president of the United States, will not weigh in on the mayoral race. Newspaper endorsements are a silly practice, generally, but they carry real value because they force politicians to sit down and answer questions for an extended period of time. In the internet era, the Times would publish the full transcripts of its interviews with mayoral contenders. For voters, this was a resource—and its one that will now be absent. The Post will make an endorsement because it understands its power. The Democrats running, absent Adams, probably don’t want a direct signoff from a right-wing tabloid. What they would prefer, though, is that Murdoch leaves them alone. This must be on Andrew Cuomo’s mind, as he strongly considers running. Cuomo, the disgraced former governor, was once a Post favorite, and their conservative Albany columnist, Fred Dicker, spent years cozying up to him. But Covid changed how the Post saw Cuomo. Cuomo’s lockdown policies alienated conservatives, and the Post led the way on exposing how Cuomo covered up Covid deaths in nursing homes. In 2020 and 2021, the Post delighted in Cuomo’s unraveling. Now that Republicans largely hate Cuomo—he’s mostly liked by the MSNBC left—the Post will be motivated to savage him each and every day, as long as Adams remains in the race. Cuomo’s only hope, as far as the Post goes, is that there’s a clear left-wing frontrunner for the mayoralty and only Cuomo can stop them. Then, the editorial board will reverse course. Until then, Cuomo must know what he’s in for. Once, he reveled in how the Post tormented de Blasio, his great Democratic rival. Now he may have to buckle up for the same treatment.