The New York Times (8/22/26) went after NYC-DSA’s co-chair for living in a home in Brooklyn….

Particularly in its editorials and op-eds, billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal (e.g., 4/19/26, 7/2/26, 8/9/26, 8/12/26) openly opposes socialist policies and people. The New York Times (e.g., 6/16/25, 10/20/25, 11/4/25) also opposes socialism, but it prefers a less direct and more insidious approach.

Instead of confronting the ideology head-on, the Times regularly relies on the analysis—as it did in covering the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders—of experts who oppose socialist organizers for undisclosed (or insufficiently disclosed) personal, professional, financial and ideological reasons. The paper foments fear over the threat socialism supposedly poses to the Democratic Party’s electoral fortunes, and gleefully amplifies right-wing talking points.

The Times (8/22/26) has lately joined the New York Post (8/18/26), a right-wing tabloid also owned by Murdoch, in impugning a socialist leader for living in a house in Brooklyn—purchased for less than the borough’s median home price.

At first glance, this might seem odd. Why would the Times cover socialists and socialism with as much bad-faith hostility as the New York Post? Unlike the Post, the Times is still, by some measures, a left-of-center paper; it’s endorsed every Democratic presidential nominee since 1956, when it endorsed Dwight Eisenhower for re-election. President Trump has labeled it a bastion of “Radical Left Lunatics.”

Both the Journal and the Times cater to elites: They are two of the top papers favored by educated Americans. But they have different audiences.

…just like the New York Post (8/18/26) did four days earlier.

Because the Journal is the country’s premier business paper, its readership is politically mixed, and the opinion pieces it publishes—many authored by members of the corporate elite—are rabidly anti-socialist. Paradoxically, that stance is not reflected in the paper’s news coverage, perhaps because its owners aren’t actually too worried about socialism swaying its readers.

By contrast, the wealthy Ochs/Sulzberger clan that has owned the Times for well over a century has been greatly concerned with keeping its largely Democratic audience from  leaning too far left (FAIR.org, 10/28/17). Like Murdoch’s, the heirs of anti-Communist Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who ran the paper from 1935 to 1968, have a financial interest in presenting socialism and its proponents, who favor raising taxes on the wealthy, in an unfavorable light.

Unlike Murdoch, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the current publisher of the Times, has stressed nonpartisanship and American values, saying that “an independent press is not a liberal ideal or a progressive ideal or a Democratic ideal,” but “an American ideal.” This is a far cry from Murdoch’s coziness with right-wing heads of state, from Margaret Thatcher to Donald Trump. President Trump “speaks to Murdoch now almost every day,” wrote the Times’ Maggie Haberman in 2017.

The Times’ executive editor, Joe Kahn, is also notably hostile to the cause of Palestinian rights, which the contemporary US socialist movement has adopted. They can’t trust their readers, who are far likelier than the Journal’s to identify as left of center, to reject socialism out of hand. What if they, like most Democrats, according to a recent poll, begin to see its appeal?

More subtle attacks

A Murdoch-owned media outlet is an “unlikely place” for a socialist to seek new voters (New York Times, 8/9/26)—but not, it seems, for the Times to seek story ideas.

The New York Times’ attacks on socialism are far more subtle than, say, James Kirchick’s defamatory 2025 Wall Street Journal op-ed (10/17/25), which referred mendaciously to the Democratic Socialists of America’s “vocal support for the murder, torture and rape of Jews.” But because the Times is perceived as left-leaning, and attributes its most unfair and inaccurate criticisms of socialism to the anti-socialist sources it favors, its war on socialism is arguably more effective.

The Times (8/9/26) recently declared in a news article:

The glare [of right-wing media] can be harsh and unflattering on an ideology that has languished on the fringes of the American left for decades. Democratic socialists have been scorned as faux populists and elitists, catering to mostly humanities graduates who know little of the working-class struggles they decry.

Scorned by whom? You won’t find an answer in the story.

Socialists have as much to fear from the New York Times as they do from the New York Post, whose talking points the paper of record has adopted. The Times (8/22/26) recently wrote that “differing accounts” of New York City DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo’s living situation—Gordillo has, at times, rented an apartment and lived in a house—are “raising doubts about whether the city’s left-wing organizers are ready for prime time.”

I’m a member of NYC-DSA, but many nonmembers might wonder: Are these accounts raising doubts, or is the paper? “You may ask why the address of an ascendant socialist leader matters,” the Times continued:

But the question gets at the heart of an issue that has loomed over the increasingly powerful movement: Are the leaders genuinely tapped into New Yorkers’ economic anxieties and connected to the working class?

Or as the Post (8/18/26) more bluntly and less unctuously put it, Gordillo is not a working-class person but an “Ivy League radical” who “attacked landlords.”

‘A guillotine-curious moment’

“Socialists agree” they are “a threat to the Democratic Party,” according to the New York Times (8/13/26), because “many socialists agree” the Democrats could nominate a socialist presidential candidate. It’s like saying that Democrats agree with Donald Trump that Democrats could destroy America because they think Democrats could win the 2026 midterms.

To the New York Times, one of the worst aspects of socialism is that it exposes Democrats to the possibility of being red-baited by Republicans. The paper (8/3/26) recently cited Neera Tanden—president of the corporate-funded Democratic think tank Center for American Progress, and a longtime antagonist of the left, as “predict[ing] that Republicans would make socialist policies ‘one of their main attack lines.’” Already, the paper added, “President Trump and other Republican leaders are going further, seeking to brand recent Democratic nominees, falsely, as ‘communists.’”

The Times failed to note that the red-baiting strategy has been employed in US politics countless times, with varying and heavily context-dependent degrees of success. It destroyed careers and lives in the first half of the 20th century, but failed to stop contemporary politicians like Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Though it helped block Bernie Sanders from getting the Democratic presidential nomination, it hasn’t kept him from being the country’s most popular active politician.

Sure, the Times (8/13/26) noted in a different story, “Democratic socialists are capturing more votes than ever before,” but they are also “run[ning] up against the limits of their appeal.” What evidence of these limits does the paper provide? Mainly that their political opponents refuse to seek common ground:

Moderates maintain that there can be no compromise with a movement whose national platform calls for abolishing prisons and the United States Senate, and which frankly views the Democratic Party not as a coalitional partner but as a means to an end.

While conceding that “the DSA’s appeal in a guillotine-curious moment in American politics is obvious enough”—the organization appeals to the large number of voters who despise both Trump and the Democratic Party—the article doesn’t bother to analyze why rank-and-file voters’ view of the Democratic Party has grown so dim, or how they became so “curious” about guillotines.

The Times has occasionally indulged in old-school, fact-based reporting on DSA:

[DSA] politicians have won voters on issues like data-center construction and the war in Gaza, where more mainstream Democrats have been slow to grasp major shifts in the electorate or are paralyzed by the commitments of the party’s donor class and interest groups.

Yet even this article, which contains some otherwise sharp analysis, pivots from substance to style, focusing on the group’s “terroir” as well as its agenda:

Events hosted by NYC-DSA…feel like parties for a fashionable new literary journal, heavy on writer types with stick-and-poke tattoos and Ivy League diplomas stashed in Bushwick closets.

The significance of those diplomas, which a quarter of Times reporters also have, is unclear.

‘Looking for fighters’

Wall Street Journal (8/3/26): “DSA says their membership has exploded since Bernie Sanders’ first run for president. In 2016, they had less than 6,000 members. Now that number’s over 120,000.”

By contrast, the Wall Street Journal (8/3/26) sent a reporter to Detroit to interview democratic socialist Donavan McKinney. It published sympathetic footage of McKinney declaring, “People are looking for fighters and champions on these working-class issues,” and described the rise of candidates like McKinney as “part of progressive momentum that has tapped into anger from Democratic voters at current elected leaders.” The paper even included this useful bit of context: “Polls show some Americans are losing faith in capitalism.”

Presumably because Journal leadership believes that DSA and its policies are abhorrent and alienating on their face, it covers them straightforwardly: “The membership group—not a political party—campaigns for policies including universal healthcare and wealth taxes,” it recently wrote (7/9/26). It added that democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier’s “agenda centers on government-funded healthcare, tenant protections, abolishing ICE, ending US aid to Israel and banning congressional stock trading.” Another story (6/21/26) recounted Chevalier’s platform nearly verbatim.

Whether or not it admires them, the Journal tends to take socialists at their word, as in the story, “Democratic Socialists Are on the Rise. What to Know About the Movement” (7/1/26). A forthright attempt to answer the questions posed in the subhead—“What is their agenda, and who are their leaders?”—the article’s lead sentence contains little a DSA member would object to, other than the adjective “far-left”:

Members of the Democratic Socialists of America have ended the careers of two Democratic House members and won a competitive open election in just over a week, catching Democratic leadership off-guard and bringing national prominence to a far-left group that believes in taxing the wealthy, defunding the police and supporting Palestinian self-determination.

‘A socialist running the financial capital’

Wall Street Journal (6/21/26): “The story of the year in American politics so far, after Donald Trump’s falling popularity, is the rise of the Democratic socialists.”

Perhaps out of a desire to awaken its readers to the threat it believes the organization poses, the paper also portrays DSA and its leaders as popular and effective: “The group…says that it thinks ‘working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few.’” Furthermore:

Mamdani focused his mayoral run on the high cost of living in New York City, saying he wanted to expand free universal childcare, make city buses free and freeze rents for cash-strapped New Yorkers. After taking office, he urged state lawmakers to increase tax rates on high-income earners and businesses. While he didn’t get those levies, his advocacy had an impact: Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature recently approved a pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes in New York City.

Many DSA members would also agree with the Journal’s analysis (11/4/25) of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the 2025 NYC mayoral primary:

Mamdani met with significant early opposition from the city’s business elite, fearful of a socialist running the financial capital of the world. Business executives poured tens of millions of dollars into pro-Cuomo super political-action committees ahead of the June 24 primary. The super PACs funded ads that attacked Mamdani as anti-Israel and highlighted his past comments calling for the defunding of the New York Police Department….

Mamdani also capitalized on shifting sentiment against Israel two years into the war in Gaza. He has vocally supported Palestinian rights and accused Israel of committing genocide. His stances on the issue excited young voters and didn’t torpedo his run in a city with the largest Jewish population in the US.

As noted earlier, the Journal’s anti-socialist editorials and op-eds are more reliably vile than the Times’. The paper just released a video (9/2/26), “Boutique Bolshevism and the DSA,” which is narrated by a 60-year-old white man in a suit—who, it may shock you to learn, graduated summa cum laude from Yale—explaining that the DSA is a movement of “layabout rich kids” whose proposals “sound like pure lunacy to the average working bricklayer or carpenter.” (Not interviewed: any bricklayers or carpenters.) The video reiterated the New York Post’s attacks on Gordillo.

Yet the Journal appears to maintain a stricter boundary between its newsroom and opinion page than does the Times, and its news reporting on socialism is more accurate.

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