On Monday morning, a judge overseeing the New York state case on the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO ruled that some evidence collected by police could not be shown to a jury.
It wasn’t the only news coming out of the hearing. Outside the courthouse, Molly Crane-Newman, a New York Daily News reporter, captured on video several attendees giving incendiary remarks to the press. One of the attendees, Lena Weissbrot, said the children of Brian Thompson, who was shot and killed in December 2024, were “better off without him” and that they “needed to learn to not be like their dad.” Another attendee who identified themselves only as Ashley chimed in, “I’m standing on business. Fuck Brian Thompson. I don’t give a flying fuck he died.” They went on to discuss the US for-profit healthcare industry and people who have died without necessary medical care.
Ordinarily this would be a minor tabloid news item, along the lines of previous coverage of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering Thompson. I had seen — and interviewed — the attendees in question at previous hearings while covering the case. They, like other supporters of Mangione, have become regulars at the courthouse in lower Manhattan. But this time the comments spawned a different kind of news cycle: This handful of attendees had press credentials hanging from their necks.
Local reporters criticized the fact that the city had apparently doled out press passes to the three supporters, who run social media accounts under the moniker “The Mangionistas.” Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams described them as “reporters” and accused the current administration of being “reckless” in how they credential journalists.
The city-issued press passes require applicants to submit six examples of on-the-ground reporting, which can include traditional formats like a written story or a broadcast — but the application leaves room for more nontraditional formats as well. The city defines a member of the press as someone who “gathers and reports the news, by publishing, broadcasting, or cablecasting articles, commentaries, books, photographs, video, film, or audio by electronic, print, or digital media, such as radio, television, newspapers, magazines, wires, books, and the Internet.” What separates a reporter from a person who witnessed something and posted about it? Is a Substack essay on equal footing with a reported story? How do you demand that a reporter disentangle their personal opinions or feelings from the story they’re covering? (I’d argue this is nearly impossible.) It’s a definitional quagmire that could affect newsgathering beyond the Mangione case and shut out smaller outlets or independent journalists.
At the same time, there are practical reasons the city might want to be more rigid in its credentialing. A press pass is required to cross police and fire lines and attend city-sponsored press events. Even before the Mangionistas, some local reporters have raised concerns about the city’s credentialing practices: A right-wing anti-vax local political candidate known as the “Sperminator” managed to get a press pass at some point during the Adams administration. The New York Post reported that the city blocked him from renewing his credentials in 2025 after he was accused of impersonating a reporter. If everyone can theoretically become “media,” credentialing becomes useless.
Who gets to decide what is and isn’t reporting?
By the end of the day, The New York Times reported that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration was reviewing the press credentialing process, and on Tuesday Mamdani said that the three Mangionistas should not have been issued press passes to begin with. (Reached via email, the Mangionistas declined to comment.) City Hall pointed The Verge to Mamdani’s comments earlier in the week, in which he said the three fans “don’t fall within [the] debate” of who should be able to get a press pass. Weissbrot appears to have started publishing dispatches from Mangione’s court hearings in September on a blog called The Bicoastal Beat, though there is no disclosure that she is directly involved in organizing for Mangione; a message to the author’s Bicoastal Beat email address was not returned.
“These individuals do not represent the views of Luigi, nor the tens of thousands who have shown their support from around the world,” Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a lawyer for Mangione, said in an email. “The only people who speak for Luigi are his attorneys. We condemn these vile and irresponsible statements that have no place in the discourse around these cases.”
The incident is weird on several levels. For one, it has become increasingly difficult to draw clean distinctions between a journalist, an influencer, a gadfly, a fan, and an activist. Who gets to decide what is and isn’t reporting, and who might be blocked from access if stricter rules are put in place? The situation also reveals the fault lines within the larger Luigi Mangione universe, and the messiness inherent in making a celebrity out of someone on trial for murder.
This situation might be an edge case, but the questions it raises cut across wider changes in our information ecosystem and evolving media consumption habits. Some of this comes from the way people are consuming the news: through vertical video, through clips, or through “news influencers” who are not doing their own reporting but instead summarizing or responding to the news. Institutions and those in power have also cozied up to personalities who do deliver news and information to their audiences, albeit lacking journalistic standards or rigor: Donald Trump and his administration have used content from MAGA-aligned influencers as justification for carrying out immigration raids. Influencers are getting exclusive White House briefings. Mamdani has also hosted influencer-only events and press conferences where creators can interact with him and make content. It’s probably reasonable to expect a baseline level of decorum from everyone, press pass holders or not — but if the Mangionistas had not made the statements this week, would it still be a problem that they, as a kind of Mangione influencer group, had gotten credentialed? All of a sudden the mayor’s office finds itself having to referee what opinions or views are acceptable for members of this loosely defined press to have. Revoking a press pass is also not so simple — it requires a hearing with the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings.
It’s fitting we are arguing about whether Mangione fans should get press credentials — his case is all about narrative control. From the beginning, the killing of Thompson was less about the individuals involved than it was about what they represented: the US health insurance industry versus everyone else. Mangione supporters have long expressed frustration with how “the media” writes about them (they typically are referring to the more sensationalist coverage labeling them as ghoulish and loony). Many supporters of Mangione are adamant that they do not condone this specific violence, and instead use the case to advocate for healthcare reform and for a fair trial for the accused.
But there are also tensions within the wider community of people following the case closely. When I spoke with supporters in December outside the courthouse, some complained about other attendees — the ones who show up dressed “like they’re going to Comic-Con,” or those who seem more interested in the spotlight. The annoyance stems from a belief that it both makes all supporters look bad and also takes the focus away from the man who is actually on trial. (I also spoke with Weissbrot that day; she has attended many of the pretrial hearings in the New York case against Mangione.)
Indeed, some of the loudest condemnations of the Mangionistas’ statements have come from within the Mangione support network. People Over Profit NYC, a healthcare reform group that has become a mainstay outside the courthouse, issued a statement denouncing the comments. Some Mangione supporters wondered whether his legal team could bar the Mangionistas from court, or whether Mangione could get restraining orders against them. Others accused the three women of purposely sabotaging Mangione by saying maximally controversial things to elicit negative public opinion. It speaks to the wider challenge of how to talk about the case: If you ask supporters, Mangione is some combination of a folk hero, a symbol of the failures of the US healthcare system, an innocent man, and someone who is guilty in a literal sense but shouldn’t be by legal standards.
Threading that needle is impossible in a case where public participation has been a hallmark of its notoriety. Supporters have sent in more than $1.5 million to Mangione’s legal defense fund; he is reportedly inundated with letters in jail. The upcoming jury selection process will similarly be a spectacle, and prospective jurors will surely be asked if they’ve shared some Luigi meme in the last year and a half. This is the problem with being the internet’s favorite defendant, of having support so fervent it becomes a recurring Fox News or Daily Mail cliche. Eventually someone will put their foot in their mouth and you will have to answer for it.