Media Has Rightfully Covered the Cuomo Sex Story — But Shouldn’t Forget His Covid Scandal
These past couple weeks have been the worst in the career of New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whom the mainstream media is finally holding accountable with wall-to-wall coverage – a departure from the fawning attention it gave him early on in the pandemic, despite his sickening mishandling of coronavirus cases in the state’s nursing homes.
But it wasn’t that scandal that caused the media to make a critical sharp turn against the governor for good. Rather it was the report released by the New York Attorney General’s office that accused Cuomo of sexual harassment against 11 women.
We cannot forget the nursing home scandal, however. To recap: In March 2020, Cuomo required New York’s state nursing homes to accept residents who tested positive for Covid-19. Cuomo rescinded the executive order the following May, after the deaths of thousands in the state. In January of this year, the New York Attorney General’s office released a report that stated that the New York State Department of Health “published nursing home data reflected and may have been undercounted by as much as 50 percent.” The following month, The New York Post reported that top Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa, who resigned on Sunday amid the fallout from the sexual harassment report, told the New York Democratic leadership that the Cuomo administration withheld August 2020 nursing home data from state legislators since that data could be used in a potential federal probe. Cuomo disputed his mishandling of the nursing home scandal and denied that his administration covered up the number of nursing home deaths.
While Cuomo’s alleged sexual harassment deserves what is now overdue coverage, the nursing home scandal cannot be ignored as a result.
The media has been hesitant to cover the nursing home story from the start. Between March 1 and December 31, 2020, the NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news broadcasts had 400 stories about Cuomo, but only two mentioned nursing homes, according to the conservative watchdog group the Media Research Center.
Between January and March of this year, those nightly news broadcasts had just 17 minutes of coverage of the nursing home scandal – and “just over 100 minutes of Cuomo scandal coverage” that included the scandals surrounding both the nursing homes and alleged sexual harassment toward nine women – according to the Media Research Center. Those NBC and ABC broadcasts did not have further coverage of the nursing home scandal until the sexual harassment report’s release, according to the media monitoring service TVEyes, while CBS’s broadcast did not mention it whatsoever in its coverage of the sexual harassment allegations.
And only last week did the editorial boards at The Washington Post and The New York Times call for Cuomo to resign, though none of them mentioned the nursing home scandal, a scandal that resulted in loss of life. On Tuesday, Cuomo announced his resignation, which will take effect in 14 days.
Only last week did the mainstream media – even CNN, where the New York governor’s brother, Chris Cuomo still works despite going against journalism ethics even for an opinion host by advising his brother on the sexual harassment allegations – began to truly turn against Cuomo. While sexual harassment allegations should be extensively covered, no matter if they are against a Democrat or a Republican, the deaths of elderly victims in nursing homes as a result of blatant negligence should have elicited as much, if not more, coverage. This selectivity calls into question not only the mainstream media’s journalism judgement, but also their moral judgement.
Time to revoke the Emmy from Andrew Cuomo and give it to Fox News’s Janice Dean, who sounded the alarm about the nursing home scandal from the get-go and has not stopped holding Cuomo accountable – unlike most of her peers in the media.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
