Mediaite Q&A: Janice Dean on Cuomo Scandals, Media Conduct and Whether She’ll Run For NY Governor

Courtesy of Fox News

From the get-go, Fox News meteorologist Janice Dean sounded the alarm about New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s nursing home scandal — in which he required the state’s nursing homes to admit Covid-positive patients – even as her peers in the media were praising Cuomo’s response to the pandemic.

As time passed, Dean’s warnings about the governor proved ever more prescient. And last week, Cuomo announced his resignation following the release of a report by the New York Attorney General’s Office that accused him of sexually harassing 11 women.

On Monday, Mediaite interviewed Dean over the phone about her criticism of Cuomo and more.

The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Mediaite: New York General Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and New York Assembly Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Levine announced on Monday that the committee, “will continue to review evidence and issue the final report on its investigation of Governor Cuomo.” What’s your reaction?

Janice Dean: They should have done that from the very beginning. The fact that they had to be shamed to actually issue a report on their findings is ridiculous and he needs to be impeached. Their impeachment process needs to continue. So although I am finally grateful that they’re doing something they should have done in the very beginning, and that’s what we pay them for. The fact that we are not still in an impeachment process is infuriating. I don’t want this guy to be able to run again in his career.

The death of your mother-in-law and father-in-law caused you to speak out against Cuomo. Were it not for their deaths, would you have spoken out against Cuomo? Would Fox News have the coverage it did of Cuomo were it not for you sounding the alarm?  

I would hope so. I think it’s one of the biggest stories of the pandemic.

The fact that Governor Cuomo, the Covid-positive patients in nursing homes without the families knowing and knowing that they did not have any resources, the nursing homes, to take care of these incoming patients and not be able to test them. It was basically written out that nursing homes could not discriminate against people coming in whether they had the virus or not. And that’s why they were told they couldn’t test these people. They just didn’t have the places to put them. They were all on top of each other. And to do that for 46 days and not really give any kind of warning to families, I mean, we weren’t able to see our loved ones.

We didn’t even know my father-in-law was sick until Sunday morning when he got a call saying he wasn’t feeling well, three hours, three hours later he’s dead. And we don’t find out he died of Covid until the death certificate. This is a huge story, and I would hope that Fox would have covered it. But obviously, because I was personally affected and they knew that, we made the decision to tell my family story because if I wasn’t going to tell the story, who was going to? The other channels weren’t covering it. And that was one of the reasons why I became vocal is because every time I would see the governor, all of the other channels, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN with his brother, MSNBC, they were never asking about the nursing homes while bodies were literally piling up outside of them in storage facilities. 

But personally, would you have spoken out against Cuomo were it not for your in-laws dying?

Oh, gosh no. I’m sorry that I missed the point of the question. I’ve always been a person who has not been political.

If you talk to any of my friends that work there, I don’t think anybody has any idea who I voted for or who I’m partial to or what I think of the politics of the day. When I do comment it’s because I have some kind of personal attachment to it.

For instance, I commented about Afghanistan and the Taliban taking over. Because that’s what’s going to be happening when we have the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Why do I feel like I need to talk about that? Because my husband is a 9/11 survivor. He’s an FDNY and has been with the fire department for 27 years.

The only times I really speak out is when I have skin in the game or I know what I’m talking about. I don’t do it just for the sake of doing it. And I’ve always said I can’t wait to sort of get back to the day where I’m just doing the weather, talking about the storms coming our way and trying to protect residents from harm’s way. So I’m in kind of a weird situation. But no, to your point, I don’t think I, I don’t know that, I would have spoken out and what a tragedy that would have been, you know, had I not been a voice because there weren’t many of them to begin with.

Why do you think it was the sexual harassment scandal and not the nursing home scandal that finally caused the media to turn against him and brought Cuomo down?

That’s a complicated answer. But I think the bottom line is it was easier for the media to cover because the nursing home issue involves a lot of powerful people, high profile, powerful people, lobbyists, hospitals, Medicare, Medicaid.

If you look at what Cuomo did in the early days of the pandemic, when he issued his mandate to put Covid-positive patients in the nursing homes, he gave blanket immunity just like a day or two afterwards to all of the nursing homes. Why did he do that? Why do you think that he put blanket immunity, that no one could sue the nursing homes? Because he knew that there were going to be deaths. If you go down that path of who knew what, why the mandate was issued, why nursing homes really never had a say in the matter, why he didn’t use the facilities provided by the government, the Comfort ship, the makeshift hospitals, the Javits Center, they went virtually unused. Why? Is it because there wasn’t a money exchange? So it’s a complicated, big situation that I think implicates a lot of people and involves a lot of money.

Whereas the sexual harassment scandal – Cuomo in the beginning was blaming everybody else, right? G-d, Mother Nature, the nursing homes. He even at one point blamed the residents because they’re old, they’re going to die. But when you talk about sexual harassment, he can’t really blame anybody else except himself. He did try to blame the victims, like they misunderstood him or he’s Italian. He likes to hug people. But he really can’t blame anyone else for his actions. He owns that. And it’s salacious. The power dynamic of a boss harassing a young female is always going to bring more headlines, unfortunately, than the death of elderly people. Unfortunately, that’s the world that we live in.

Should CNN fire Chris Cuomo? 

At the very least, they should have suspended him. He is listed in the [New York] Attorney General report as somebody who was giving information and advice to his brother and that also could implicate him. So I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Chris Cuomo, his involvement in his brother’s misdeeds. Let’s just put it that way.

But if you were in charge of CNN, would you fire Chris Cuomo?

I think he would have to go, yes. But I also think that Jeffrey Toobin should have gone as well. Here is a channel that was very vocal when it came to the going-ons at Fox News. It’s quite hypocritical for them to not, at the very least, show some leadership and respect for the women employees that work at CNN. I’m pretty sure that a lot of those women have some feelings about Chris Cuomo and how he covered up for his brother and gave advice about sexual harassment without there being repercussions from management there.

Do you think the cable networks have a credibility issue when it comes to sexual harassment, whether it’s Fox News and Roger Ailes, CNN and Chris Cuomo or MSNBC and Chris Matthews? 

I think it has to be across the board. When it comes to sexual harassment, all of the leaders and all of the bosses that work at these cable news networks and all of these channels, they really need to get together and have across-the-board repercussions for this kind of thing, not just like, “Oh, well, it’s Fox News, so, of course, the leadership needs to go down and their name needs to be tarnished.” And so that’s okay for Fox News, but it’s not okay for CNN, MSNBC or NBC for that matter? Why isn’t it the same for everybody else, you know?

Do you think there’s a problem with media outlets on both sides of the ideological spectrum being chummy with politicians and other figures, whether it’s CNN and Andrew Cuomo or Fox News and Donald Trump?

At the end of the day, it’s not ethical, right? It’s not a good thing. But I suppose this has happened since the beginning of the media and politicians. Like everybody’s looking for favorable coverage. Everybody’s looking for favors. I wish we were back in the Walter Cronkite days where you just sat around at the dinner table and you watch the six o’clock news and you’ve got your information without all of the opinion. If you’re an opinion person, then okay, that’s what you do for a living. You have your opinion on something and you take a side. But if you’re a news person and you’re delivering the news, then you need to be impartial and you need to be able to do that without fear or favor.

Have you filed a civil suit against Governor Cuomo and Howard Zucker? 

We have not. It’s not to say that I haven’t inquired about that, and I suppose there’s always a possibility somewhere down the road. Without getting into a lot of details, let’s just say there’s not a lot of New York lawyers out there who were eager to go against this governor.

Will you run for New York governor next year? Are you considering a run?

No.

I think it’s really flattering when I hear my buddy John Rich say “JD for Governor.” That’s really kind. And something I would have never in a million years have thought as a girl from Ottawa, Canada, that moved to New York almost 20 years ago to try to do something in broadcasting. That’s pretty incredible.

If you could say something in person to Andrew Cuomo and Chris Cuomo, what would you say?

They had their chance. I wish they had done something, you know, months and months and months ago. I wish they had issued an apology. I would have wanted an apology, but I know that I’ll never get that. So what would be the point?