The Media Research Center continued its ongoing meltdown over Zohran Mamdani in an Oct. 14 post by comedy cop Alex Christy:
NBC’s 51st season of Saturday Night Live is off to a rough start. Last week, they made fun of J.K. Rowling for daring to oppose the left on transgenderism. This week, cast member Sarah Sherman joined the Weekend Update segment to play the role of Rhonda LaCenzo, a paranoid and Islamophobic critic of New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Unsaid throughout the skit was that Sherman herself has campaigned for Mamdani.
Weekend Update co-anchor Michael Che played the role of the straight newsman, “Well, thanks for being here. I got to say, Rhonda, you have very panicked energy already.”
Not even a week after Mamdani, a man who has previously claimed he wants to globalize the Intifada, marked the second anniversary of October 7 by saying the real story is how horrible Israel is, Sherman’s character explained, “Oh, me? Why would I be panicked? Oh, I’m just thrilled that our city is about to be taken over by my favorite type of person, bum-bum-bum-a-bum, hooray, a hipster jihadist.”
After Che informed Sherman that her voting for Andrew Cuomo 48 times is illegal, Sherman continued, “You know what should be illegal, Che, all of Mamdani’s socialist policies, free buses, huh? Rent freeze, universal child care? You know, I read that Mamdani himself said that he’s going to act—enact Sharia Law in the city. Sharia Law. He can’t do that, Che. I know Sharia. She’s my nail tech, and she should not be a law. Coffee, Che.”
Ah yes, rent control, the policy of every economic illiterate ever.
Christy didn’t bother to explain why rent control has a constituency despite supposedly being economically “illiterate.” Instead, he whined that “the truth is Mamdani is a hard-left socialist who poses a grave threat to the city’s economy and has a history of anti-Semitism.”
Clay Waters grumbled in an Oct. 29 post:
As Election Day approaches, the New York Times has passionately defended New York City’s socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, changing the subject to accusations of “Islamophobia” when one of his opponents (either former Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo, or Republican Curtis Sliwa) dares to bring up Mamdani’s history of hostility toward Israel and abject failure to condemn the terrorist group Hamas, and his membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, an anti-Semitic organization.
They’re openly campaigning for the socialist.
[…]Often the Mamdani cheerleading appeared high in the headline deck, as in Emma Fitzsimmons’ report on Sunday: “Vance Criticizes Mamdani’s Comments About Islamophobia After 9/11 — Zohran Mamdani said the vice president’s attack on social media was one in a series of “cheap jokes about Islamophobia.” Opponents “pounced”!
Waters didn’t deny that he’s an Islamophobe — indeed, he seems to be embracing his Islamophobia. Indeed, he whined at the end: “Mamdani is doing that just fine with his callous rhetoric and refusal to condemn Hamas.”
Chjristy cranked out a so-called “study” in an Oct. 30 post:
In the Trump Era, the late night comedy shows have been looking for any glimmer of light they can find, and over the course of the first ten months of 2025, they think they have found it in New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. As the industry puts itself squarely in the middle of Mamdani Mania, it has done its part for the campaign by telling 95 percent of its mayoral election jokes about his rivals. Only three out of 63 jokes were about the socialist front-runner.
NewsBusters analysts examined ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, and NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Meyers from January 6 through October 29..
Stephen Colbert led the way with 13 jokes about Eric Adams, 10 about Andrew Cuomo, three about Curtis Sliwa, one about Brad Lander, and one about Mamdani. That is a 27-1 count against Mamdani’s opponents, or 96 percent. Colbert also interviewed Lander and Mamdani on June 23.
Christy repeated his attack on Mamdani:
“The greatest city in the world” did not nominate its finest. Of the four main general election candidates, each had something to make fun of. Adams had a corruption scandal involving Turkish Airlines, Cuomo had COVID nursing home and sexual harassment scandals from his time as governor, and Sliwa’s solution to the city’s rat crisis was to create feral cat “colonies.” Sliwa’s Republican candidacy was a long shot that never had a realistic chance, so the limited number of jokes about him is unsurprising. However, there were still more jokes about him than Mamdani, the frontrunner and radical leftist who has trafficked in anti-Semitism and had to be shamed into saying Hamas must disarm.
Christy didn’t explain why the non-Mamdani candidates should not have been made fun of, as he seems to imply. He’s just mad that Mamdani wasn’t. Notably, he failed to include the late-night show of right-wing Fox News Greg Gutfeld in his count, which would surely have covered the Mamdani joke deficit.
Jeffrey Lord went spelunking through history to slam Mamdani in his Nov. 1 column:
One suspects this election of 2025 and its enthusiastic, loving media coverage of Mamdani has been despairing to another candidate in the race – former New York Governor (and Democrat!) Andrew Cuomo. While there are a handful of days left to run in this election, Cuomo, once touted as a sure-thing presidential candidate, is regularly lagging in the polls, with the GOP candidate, Curtis Sliwa, behind Cuomo.
Yet the Mamdani-loving media coverage is not taking into account one serious problem for the current Golden Boy. Which is to say, as one socialist office-holder after another has discovered, socialism as an actual governing force doesn’t work well, usually ending up with a mess on the hands of the socialist political practitioner of the moment.
But if John Lindsay’s media experience of going from mayoral Golden Boy to a media untouchable, an experience also lived by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani by the time he ran for president and later became a serious Trump supporter, says anything it is that when a potential New York Mayor swims in media adulation, as Mamdani is now doing, the media tide can – and will – turn and decidedly turn in the opposite direction.
And one suspects that once in practice, Mamdani’s socialism will not help him. Even in the New York media.
Lord made sure to suck up to the one notable conservative mayor, Rudy Giuliani:
Giuliani, quickly dubbed “America’s Mayor” turned out to be a seriously good and popular mayor, although not enough to make it to the White House. But even he could not finish his career unscathed, as his performance in various aspects of the Trump presidential campaign and in the Trump-Ukraine episode brought him tons of both legal problems and negative media coverage.
Weird that Lord didn’t expound on the “legal problems” Giuliani faced, or why he didn’t mention Giuliani’s malicious libel of a pair of Georgia election workers.