Joshua Kaitan Lucas, who has worked for PIX 11 since 2024, has appeared in promotional material on Mamdani’s X account
An Al Jazeera-trained video editor for New York City’s local PIX 11 television station has canvassed for Zohran Mamdani and taken a starring role in promotional material for the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York.
Joshua Kaitan Lucas, whose LinkedIn page shows that he has worked for PIX 11 since May 2024, posted a video on Instagram in June of this year ahead of the Democratic mayoral primary, exhorting his followers to vote for Mamdani and asking them not to rank former New York governor Andrew Cuomo on their ballots.
“Don’t rank Cuomo,” Lucas said in the post, in which he tagged Mamdani. “Cuomo has received seven-figure donations from corporations and MAGA donors.”
He tagged Mamdani in another post from March 12 of this year, writing, “The world can be what we make it.”
Lucas has also appeared on Mamdani’s social media accounts. The nominee, currently a New York state assemblyman, posted a photo with several canvassers on Aug. 17 that featured Lucas posing right next to him.
PIX 11, though owned by Mission Media, is operated by Nexstar Media Group—which, according to several pages on its website, prohibits political activity among its journalists.
“Contacts with government officials, whether direct or indirect, shall at all times be maintained as proper business relationships,” Nexstar’s code of business conduct reads. “These contacts must never suggest a compromise of objectivity of such persons or cast doubt on the Company’s integrity.”
A letter from Nexstar management in a 2022 report touts the company’s decision to “codify a policy prohibiting journalists and news personnel from making political contributions or participating in local, state, and national politics.”
Another section in the same report, titled “journalistic integrity,” maintains that Nexstar reporters and editors “put [their] personal biases aside to approach the topics [they] cover with balance,” adding that “Nexstar journalists at all levels refrain from political activity.”
Lucas’s public political statements extend beyond his support for Mamdani. In a YouTube video he posted last month, the video editor said President Donald Trump’s push to clean up the streets in Washington, D.C., included treating the district’s homeless population “the same way Jews had to be dehumanized in Germany in order to do what happened to them.”
He wrote in a July Facebook post that the United States under Trump is doomed to fall into totalitarianism and once again compared Trump’s policies to those of Nazi Germany.
“If you think the midterms, or any election, is going to save us, you are underestimating the power of the Dark Side,” he wrote. “Russia has ‘elections’ too.”
He continued, writing, “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, acts like a duck, then it’s a concentration camp” and that “many will smile as many people die.”
“Don’t MAGA voters, like, LOVE the History?” he asked.
Lucas’s views appear to have remained consistent over time. Soon after earning his undergraduate degree at Columbia University and a master’s from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he worked as a “news fellow” at the Qatari propaganda network Al Jazeera.
“I worked in various departments of Al Jazeera English in Doha, Qatar in order to get an embedded perspective of how the organization runs,” his LinkedIn profile reads. “The majority of my time was spent working in the television news department: functioning in the same capacity as the deputy news editors on the news desk, putting together in-house packages and writing copy for broadcast and assisting the planning team.”
