Last week The New York Times published an article that I haven’t been able to get out of my brain, headlined “In Attack on Mamdani, Vornado Chief Likens ‘Tax the Rich’ to Hate Speech.” The piece was a summary of remarks made by Steven Roth, the CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, criticizing Zohran Mamdani’s rhetoric about taxing the rich. 

The remarks themselves were not notable except for being idiotic: Roth said that the term “tax the rich” is “just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs.” The Times reports this straightforwardly, not as commentary on the bizarre nature of Roth’s statements but as part of a story about a few of Mamdani’s ultrawealthy critics.

The question this brings to my mind is: why is this a story at all? This is nothing more than the moderately unhinged opinion of a guy whose company owns a lot of real estate. Why is it in the newspaper? 

The answer is that there’s an entire genre of media coverage best described as “rich guy has an opinion.” It’s surprisingly common, and once you notice it you’ll see it everywhere: entire news stories dedicated to the otherwise unremarkable opinion of a rich person, or news stories that fold the opinions of rich people into their otherwise neutral coverage. It’s taken for granted in many newsrooms that a person’s wealth imbues their opinions with newsworthiness. 

This style of journalism has thrived in the Mamdani era. Barry Sternlicht, another investment fund CEO, went on CNBC late last year to rant about how bad Mamdani’s policies would be for the city. Sternlicht, who has no relevant policy expertise, pontificated on the merits of defunding the police, and said that “socialism has never worked anywhere on the planet Earth, ever.”

A lot of people have theorized about the relationship between the press and the rich. Back in 1990, a political scientist named W. Lance Bennett postulated the theory of indexing – the idea that the mainstream media index their views to those expressed by powerful institutional sources. Chomsky had theorized something similar in Manufacturing Consent, noting how journalists become reliant upon and socially embedded with elite sources. 

But this is something slightly different. It’s not just that elite opinions are bleeding into press coverage, it’s that they are being treated as news per se. It’s journalism consisting of quotes from rich guys.

One simple reason for this is that rich people are often able to reframe their opinions as news. During Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, rich New Yorkers started telling the press that they planned to flee New York City if Mamdani won the election. This wasn’t actually true: we’re several months into Mamdani’s tenure and there’s no indication of an exodus from the city by rich folks or anyone else (vacancy rates remain at historic lows, and some business leaders who threatened to leave quickly walked it back). That’s because it was never a genuine threat. The entire purpose of the exercise was to take an opinion (we don’t like Zohran Mamdani) and turn it into something that feels more like news (wealthy people will flee the city!). 

When the media isn’t printing the opinions of rich people verbatim, it’s printing the opinions of their proxies. There are countless interest groups that ostensibly represent the interests of “business” but in practice represent the interests of the rich people who run very large businesses. In New York the biggest player in this space is The Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit founded by David Rockefeller whose members include over 300 New York CEOs. 

The Partnership for New York City will do things like publish reports about the perils of higher taxes. They are frequently quoted in the media on political matters. While they say they represent the interests of “business,” the reality isn’t so clear: as The City reported last month, while the group railed against Mamdani’s candidacy, many employees of the Partnership’s member companies actually supported him. The group isn’t speaking for them; it’s laundering the opinions of their bosses.

Nonetheless, the Partnership is frequently quoted as a “business group” or “pro-business group” (the fact that pro-management organizations are postured as pro-business while pro-worker organizations are treated as a narrower interest group is a topic for another day). They’re mentioned or quoted in stories about raising taxes, political endorsements, consumer protection, philanthropy, the police commissioner, and transit strikes, to name a few. 

There might have been a time you could justify all of this by arguing that wealthy business types hold some special knowledge – that their money is proof that they understand something about the world that the rest of us don’t. But we live in an age where we have unparalleled access to the thoughts of rich people. The richest man in the world posts his thoughts on X all day, every day. Billionaires go on podcasts and talk about identity politics. This has given us confirmation that, whatever their talents, an extremely large percentage of rich people are, in fact, idiots. The Partnership for New York City itself is now led by Steven Fulop, who spent 12 years as mayor of Jersey City and left it in financial ruin.

Much of the media in the Trump era is in an endless state of self-flagellation over their failure to anticipate Trump. They believe they are in a liberal bubble, and they adjust for this by granting Trump and his supporters an endless supply of their credulity. But they’ve missed the ways in which they’re truly out of touch, like their steadfast belief that the voices of a handful of ultrarich cretins are important enough to deserve a megaphone.

Somewhere downstream of this is a political environment that very much reflects the preferences of the rich. In 2012, Martin Gilens published a book on the issue called Affluence and Influence. Gilens did some research and found that where the preferences of the rich and the lower classes diverge, the preferences of the rich tend to be enacted into policy. That’s not simply the result of this style of media coverage, of course. But it reflects a world where the views of the rich are paraded in front of us at all times, absorbed into our political discourse until they appear to be part of its organic composition. I don’t have a structural solution to this, but if you want to improve your media literacy, one simple way is to ask yourself whether you’re reading the news or just some rich guy’s opinion.