Brian Lehrer and Errol Louis Take the Pulse of New York City

To be an informed New Yorker, or even an informed human being, you could do a lot worse than tuning into Brian Lehrer’s and Errol Louis’s respective daily broadcasts. Lehrer interviews political newsmakers and takes calls from New Yorkers with all manner of comment and complaint, as the host of “The Brian Lehrer Show,” which airs weekdays at 1src A.M. on WNYC, and Louis takes the evening shift, as the host of “Inside City Hall,” a political show that airs at 7 P.M. on the local cable channel NY1. Lehrer and Louis take the pulse of the city, playing the roles of municipal policy analyst, therapist, and philosopher—sometimes all three in the course of one episode. Both have engendered a loyalty in their audiences which verges on the religious. “I’ve said on air, Errol Louis is the single best reason to still have cable,” Lehrer said recently.

The pair first met decades ago, when a thirtysomething Louis appeared on Lehrer’s show (then called “On the Line”) to discuss his work running the Central Brooklyn Federal Credit Union, a community bank in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which tried to support low-income residents in a neighborhood where capital was hard to come by. “My one serious detour from journalism after college,” Louis, who also writes a local politics column for New York magazine, now calls it. Back then, Lehrer’s show was already a pillar of the city’s local media, listened to by yuppies and yippies and youse guys alike. “You would get in a cab, and maybe thirty, fifty per cent of the time, they would be listening to Brian,” Louis said, sitting beside Lehrer at a restaurant in Chelsea. Lehrer nodded serenely. “We love our cabdrivers,” he said.

Lehrer and Louis are a natural double act, Louis’s assertive bluntness contrasting nicely with Lehrer’s dead-air calm. In the early two-thousands, when Louis was a reporter at the New York Sun, he started filling in for Lehrer during Lehrer’s summer vacations. “Wayne Barrett would always give him shit about that,” Louis said, referring to the legendary investigative reporter at the Village Voice. “Because amazing stories would break while he was away, and he actually put himself in a place where you could not reach him. It was a real vacation.” Lehrer rolled his eyes. He has been broadcasting nearly every weekday since the Reagan era. “When my kids were growing up, we would take two full weeks in August,” he said. “Only in the United States would this be considered an unusually long break.”

On Thursday, June 12th, Lehrer and Louis, along with Katie Honan, a reporter at The City, will moderate a debate between seven of the leading candidates running in the 2src25 New York City Democratic mayoral primary. The second of two debates includes Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor and mayoral front-runner, who will appear side by side with Zohran Mamdani, the thirty-three-year-old democratic-socialist assemblyman who has solidified his hold on second place in the polls. Most of the other candidates who will appear onstage—the current city comptroller, Brad Lander; the former city comptroller Scott Stringer; Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the City Council; and Zellnor Myrie, a progressive state senator representing a swath of central Brooklyn—boast long experience in local government, and have detailed policy plans on issues including housing, policing, and mass transit. One candidate, the businessman Whitney Tilson, who ran a hedge fund after helping found Teach for America, is seeking public office for the first time.

At the first televised debate, this past Wednesday, the non-Cuomo candidates spent much of the time criticizing the front-runner’s record and rhetoric (Mamdani suggested he was a stooge for his corporate backers), trying to bait him into a gaffe (Adrienne Adams was incredulous that Cuomo had no personal regrets in his political career), or back him into a corner (Michael Blake, a former state assemblyman, pressed him on whether he’d once acknowledged the validity of arguments for defunding the police). But with so many people onstage, it was hard to sustain any theme or point for more than a few seconds. Cuomo endured the attacks with the good cheer of a man sitting in the dentist’s chair. The challenge for Lehrer, Louis, and Honan is to draw the candidates out further, to lay down markers of policy and temperament to help New Yorkers fill out their ranked-choice ballots by June 24th.

A few days ago, I met Lehrer and Louis for lunch to discuss the state of local news in the largest city in the country, Eric Adams’s adversarial relationship with the local press, and what’s going on with Juan Soto. Thursday’s debate will take place at John Jay College, and will air on NY1, C-SPAN, and WNYC, and in Spanish on NY1 Noticias. (The Spanish and English broadcasts will also stream on YouTube). Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

There used to be this figure called the city columnist. Everybody knew who they were, and their opinion held public attention in a very particular way. Some people say the city columnist is extinct; some people say the job has morphed or evolved. I’m putting the question to you guys, because your work seems related to whatever that role used to be. What do you think happened?

LOUIS: They got a job in TV! I’m not kidding. At the Daily News, I had a column that ran twice a week, including Sunday, which was the biggest day for the Daily News. It was Jimmy Breslin’s old column. I inherited it. Breslin, Pete Hamill, Mike Daly—those guys were legendary. I thought of them as the Irish guys. You know, it’s a gig, you have to develop a personality, you have to develop a voice. You’re telling a big story, the story of a great city, in installments.

LEHRER: Personal stories of individuals.

LOUIS: Exactly. You have to go out and report these things, you’re not just going to sit there and bloviate. But you have to make it look as if you just got up one morning and said, “Oh, here’s what’s been bothering me.” There’s a lot that goes into it.

It’s also part of what changed with the business plan. The old, general-purpose daily, there were some people who only came for the sports, there were some who only came for the comics, or the horoscope, or whatever. But there were a lot of people who came for the columnists. That’s why the papers would pay a bunch of money to a Jimmy Breslin, because there were people who were going to follow him to whatever paper he went to.

What changed?

LOUIS: I suppose that they have found other ways to make or lose money, depending on what it is these newspapers are up to.

New York City still has this robust group of reporters that cover City Hall and the Mayor every day, from Politico, the Post, the Daily News, the local television stations, etc. The current Mayor’s relationship with them is terrible. He’s started bypassing them, the City Hall reporters, in favor of talk podcasts, conservative outlets, and the remaining bits of the ethnic media that still exists in the city. Is this situation good for the Mayor?

LOUIS: The strategy took him from something like sixty-per-cent approval down to twenty-per-cent approval, to the point where he wasn’t viable as a candidate in the Democratic primary. So I think the strategy speaks for itself. I’ve told his people this is a really, really bad idea. Trying to bypass the people whose job it is to know and understand fully and deeply the different policies that you’re trying to enact? We can help you explain it. That’s literally what we want to do.

The podcasters can’t parse them?

LOUIS: No. They’re picking people who have a surface-level understanding of the policy!

LEHRER: I think it’s happening more and more over time, in most of politics, that politicians are choosing their favorite media outlets. I wonder, Errol, if you would agree that if we go back as far as either of us can go back, that each successive mayor has limited their press access more than the last one. I say that even though Bill de Blasio came on both of our shows every week. That was part of his media strategy.