Who gets to own the Luigi Mangione story?

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.” 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- 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 maki