Breaking news from New York: the mayor laughed. That’s the story, according to the Daily Mail. Its headline: “AOC and Mamdani are seen LAUGHING together while names of dead 9/11 victims are read out.” Laughing, in capital letters, in case you missed the horror. * Here’s what happened. Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were at the Ground Zero memorial on Friday. The reading of the names goes on for nearly four hours. At some point, a camera caught the two of them sharing a laugh. About what? The Mail doesn’t say. It didn’t need to. The picture was the story. * This is 1990s tabloid journalism, still running in 2026. Back then, political coverage meant who wore what, who looked bored and whose socks didn’t match. Somebody forgot to tell a few newsrooms that the decade is over. * People are human. They cry at weddings and laugh at funerals. Sit through a four-hour ceremony next to a friend and you might share a quiet laugh. That doesn’t mean you don’t care. It means you’re a person. * And a mayor isn’t a face. He’s a job. Mamdani runs a city of eight million people. He made big promises on rent, buses and taxes. Pick any of them apart, that’s fair game. That’s the real work: look at what a politician does, not at what his face did for a moment. * In our view, turning a laugh into ammunition is the cheapest trick in the tabloid book. It’s quick, it’s easy and it gets people angry. What it doesn’t do is tell readers anything about how New York is actually being run. * So here’s a free tip for the Mail: judge the mayor on his budget, not his dimples. Readers can handle the real stuff. They’ve been handling it since the 90s.