The Secretive Alliance Between the New York Post and Eric Adams Rupert Murdoch's paper helped elect Adams and hasn't qui

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, oversize Jenga, karaoke, a 20-foot-long slide, and briefly, on that night, Eric Adams.

The mayor even worked the coat-check line for a moment before taking selfies with staff members. “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 wanted to get a photo just to say they did but were 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 more than 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’s 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 sitting mayor ever to be criminally indicted.

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