Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty, New York Post
The bar was open. The ultraviolet lights were on. The New York Post’s annual holiday party was just heating up. It was December 20, 2022, and the paper’s staff was gathered inside a section of Slate, a cavernous, 16,000 square-foot Chelsea nightclub that features a mini-bowling alley, oversized Jenga, karaoke, a 20-foot slide, and briefly, on that night, Eric Adams.
The mayor even worked the coat check line for a moment, before taking selfies with staffers. “We all thought it was a little bit bizarre… I mean, on the one hand, there was this feeling of, ‘Oh, Eric Adams is here. Of course he’s here. He’s at a party.’ But also, ‘He really shouldn’t be here, because this feels very inappropriate,’” says one former Postie. “People want[ed] to get a photo just to say they did, but also being like, ‘Wait, this is such a conflict of interest.’”
It also shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise. The connection between Adams and the paper was, at points, beyond symbiotic. In a way, Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid made Eric Adams mayor. From its front page endorsement in the month before the Democratic primary in 2021 until the end of the election that year, the Post printed ten covers either boosting Adams or trashing his rivals. During that same time period, according to Nexis research results, the Post ran over 300 items mentioning Adams. I’m sure a few were wholly negative, but I couldn’t find a single one. At times, the Post let his team rebut negative stories that appeared in other outlets with narratives of their own, notably when Politico broke the news that Adams did not appear to live in New York. Eric Adams’ E-ZPass records appear to refute New Jersey resident claim, the Post headline read. Even members of his campaign knew at the time it wasn’t much of a defense. “It would have irrevocably fucked him if they had covered it fairly,” one tells me. Instead, with the Post’s help, he went to City Hall — and became on Thursday the city’s first modern mayor ever to be criminally indicted.
Back then, the coverage was so slanted that the City Hall bureau chief left in part over disagreements with management over the fawning coverage of Adams — one of a stream of key journalists who eventually departed when top editors seemed to make an exception to its take-no-prisoners policy for him. “If you had a good story about the city or about a city politician doing crazy shit, you’d get it in the paper — even if the paper happened to like that guy,” says another Post veteran, one of ten current and former staffers I interviewed for this story. “That changed massively after the paper endorsed Eric Adams, to a great deal of frustration among people on the city desk, in a way that I don’t know that anyone remembered happening before.” (A spokesperson for the paper declined to comment, other than to say, “The Post’s coverage speaks for itself.”)
The Post is, far and away, America’s most accomplished and aggressive journalistic outfit on the right. It provides fuel for sister News Corp outlet Fox News, as well as all of its imitators and also-rans, digital and broadcast alike. The Post’s instincts don’t always pan out, as those who remember their cover on Ron “DeFuture” can attest. But I’ve had more than a few political operatives tell me that they believe the paper’s relentless portrayal of crime surging, asylum-seekers going out-of-control, and “woke DAs” may have tipped the margins in a few congressional races in the suburbs, which in turn may have cost the Democrats the House of Representatives in 2022. Its shrieking coverage of the migrant crisis — and Adams’ even more shrill response — made its way into a thousand GOP talking points the following year.
But nowhere is the Post more dominant than in the city. The paper, which boasts hundreds of thousands of print readers and millions more online, functionally programs much of local television news coverage and sets the agenda for New York’s chattering classes. So its impact in a 2021 primary election decided by less than 7,000 votes cannot be overstated. “They became the ultimate secret weapon for Eric Adams,” says Chris Coffey, the veteran political operative who ran Andrew Yang’s mayoral campaign. In the days leading up to the June primary, Coffey’s candidate, then the front-runner, was repeatedly bashed by the paper. Things got so bad, they called him “the biggest flip-flopper” and “Boomer-Yang” — in the very same story. “It literally got to be, like, at four o’clock, if we haven’t heard from the Post by then, we knew we were going to hear from the Post.” Still, like many a New York politico, Coffey says he “loves” the Post, values its outer-borough instincts, and counts himself as a daily, voracious reader. “People shouldn’t underestimate how important it is.”
The Adams team worked long and hard to develop its relationship with the Post, especially in early 2021, when the paper’s endorsement appeared to be up for grabs. They pressured wealthy donors to whisper in Murdoch’s ear about the former Republican, former police captain fond of bashing the woke left and the two eventually dined together. One member of the Adams camp says that they also leaked a promising poll to Politico, in part to influence the Post’s decision. “That gave them sort of the permission structure to say, you know that, we can be all in for Eric,” that source says.
The Post’s May 10, 2021 front page.
Early that May, the top candidates for mayor were supposed to come into the newsroom to at least make the appearance of vying for the paper’s endorsement. It was understood by all involved that only a few candidates had a hope of getting it. But “the point was to have the discussion. The point was to try to shape the conversation,” says a source from a third campaign. Their candidate never got the chance. The Friday before a Monday appointment, “they called me and told me, ‘don’t even bother coming.’ We don’t even pretend this is an open process. I was like, ‘Oh, okay.’”
Adams came by around the same time. It was an odd scene, thanks to COVID. People were seated far apart in a mostly empty conference room where questions had to be practically shouted. “Adams had, in his defense, probably the most impressive performance of the editorial board meetings,” says a Post veteran. “And it was, like, immediately apparent that [editor in chief] Keith Poole was deeply enamored with him. He sort of checks a lot of the right boxes. Former cop, you know, crime was up in the city at that point. Pandemic recovery was halting at best. Adams said all the right things, and it was sort of like a strange synergy.”
The endorsement came a few days later. “From riding the rails with a badge, to serving in state government, to his current job as Brooklyn borough president, Adams has a depth of experience that would serve him well in City Hall,” the editorial board wrote. It overlooked the taint of scandal he had already acquired. His time in the State Senate was marred by ethical lapses, including taking money from — and sending confidential information to — lobbyists looking to secure a casino license near the Aqueduct racetrack. His many overseas trips as Brooklyn borough president became one of the foundational elements of the 57-page indictment against him on fraud and bribery charges. Both of these controversies were well-known at the Post. The paper had covered them as they were unfolding. (One headline among many: Albany’s load of horse$#*% – probe rips Aqueduct scheming.) Nevertheless, in 2021, they went all-in for Adams with one story after another:
Maya Wiley wants to defund the NYPD — while her home is protected by private security patrol.
Maya Wiley rails against billionaires — despite big-bucks backing by George Soros.
Eric Adams offers own cash as reward to catch broad-daylight sidewalk shooter.
Adams in Flushing: I’ll stop Asian attacks.
Eric Adams hangs with Charli and Dixie D’Amelio at NYC hotspot.
Poole would email tips — sometimes to reporters, sometimes to editors. “You’d fish around, and you would discover that Keith and Adams and were pow-wowing at some dinner hot spot,” one Post veteran notes. The tips weren’t necessarily bad. But they were never bad for Adams.
The Murdoch empire has operated this way for decades; on three continents, the baron has used his newspapers and television networks as tools to influence politics — and reward his favored politicians. How naked the favoritism depended on the outlet (the Wall Street Journal would never be so openly gung-ho) and the candidate, the candidate’s enemies, and Murdoch’s mood about the combination. In this case, it seems to have been all just right. Pressure came in all sorts of ways, depending on where you sat on the masthead. Some senior Posties say they were told to steer clear of Adams’s mysterious personal life, despite the sort of rumor swirl that generally sends the paper into overdrive. (Who can forget the Post’s coverage of Bill de Blasio’s post-mayoral dating life?) Lower down the organization, most others say the preferences of Murdoch and his deputies were so understood, there was no need for anything to be said. “Generally implicit, explicit when it needed to be,” is how one veteran describes the atmosphere at that time. Eventually, the combination got to be too much for City Hall bureau chief Julia Marsh who, after Adams was sworn in, decamped to Politico, where she now leads its California coverage. (She declined to comment.)
The union of the paper and Adams was bound to have an expiration date, especially with crime immediately rising under the new “law and order” mayor and buses of migrants starting to arrive from Texas. His days were too full of questionable decisions. His nights were too full, period. But the paper’s go-go-go approach to the news also had the effect of shielding Adams from some of its most potent reporters. The bosses generally prioritized quick-turn stories over investigative pieces, which required more resources. Posties told me they had to fight to get the time and bandwidth to look into all the Adams cronies who suddenly had major government positions — and all sorts of potential conflicts-of-interest. In July 2022, the Post had the making of an eye-popping exclusive: Adams was hiring his close friend Tim Pearson for a top government job — while allowing him to keep his position running security at a Queens casino. But the story didn’t publish for weeks. It was only later, when the Times broke the news in August, that the Post finally ran its own piece. Pearson resigned from the casino position shortly thereafter, but maintained a broad portfolio in City Hall where he is known as one of the most powerful people besides the mayor.
Though Adams was still cozy with the Post’s leadership (he showed up to that holiday party, after all), over time, more critical coverage began to leak out. NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks, Eric Adams put each other’s girlfriends in top posts, read one exclusive. A crisis can’t keep Mayor Eric Adams from the club, noted one rather arch item in Page Six, which showed the mayor in a polka-dotted blazer and ran with the caption: “Eric Adams checked out the ultra-exclusive private jazz a club at the Aman after declaring the city’s shelter’s to be at ‘breaking point.’”
It wasn’t until federal investigators seized the mayor’s phones last year that the paper’s famously aggressive instincts fully kicked in. Feds zero in on texts suggesting Adams fast-tracked Turkish diplomatic headquarters, noted one scoop that looks particularly prophetic, given last week’s indictment. Another, documenting one of the many lawsuits against Pearson unforgettably chronicled his demand for a piece of the lucrative contracts for migrant care: “I have to get mine. Where are my crumbs?” (Pearson’s phone was seized by federal agents earlier this month during a sweep of high-ranking city officials.) By this past March, the Post teased a scoop about the NYPD juking crime stats with a front page featuring Adams’s face photoshopped into the ‘This Is Fine’ meme. “Everything worse than six years ago,” one of the bullet points read, which is almost more amusing than the image. Six years ago, de Blasio was mayor, and the Post roasted him every day for his alleged incompetence.
The paper had a point, if an inadvertent one. New York’s unhinged, unrepentant tabloid probably shouldn’t be friends with its chief executive. The front page on the day after Adams’s indictment for his Turkish ties was classic Post: GRAND THEFT OTTOMAN.
But turn to the inside of that same edition and there was a different message. “It is in the best interest of fairness — and the best interest of New York City — that Adams be allowed to present a defense while he continues to serve his term,” intoned the editorial board, the institutional voice of the paper. At least for now, the Post can’t quite quit the man they were so instrumental in elevating.
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