14 February 2021: Cuomo Reputation Damaged by Nursing Home Death Coverup; News Media Complicit in Coverup

Nursing home disclosures taint Cuomo's pandemic performance

The Associated Press has been one of the few major news outlets that has actively reported on Governor Cuomo's nursing home scandals. In this article, they describe the impact of the Governor's coverup scandal on his reputation:

"He stepped in it, more than a little bit. It would be bad enough if this had come out and he had not been publicly sort of celebrating, and been celebrated, for his handling of the pandemic," said Jeanne Zaino, political science professor at Iona College. "But putting that aside, it doesn't get more serious than this. You're talking about the deaths of 15,000 people."

Pimping a book promoting his leadership and accepting Emmy awards while deliberately concealing human misery can be expected to carry a political toll.

And Cuomo — who says he will run again in 2022 — is now facing criticism that is increasingly coming from members of his own party.

"The governor's lack of transparency and stonewalling regarding his administration's nursing home actions is unacceptable," said state Sen. John Mannion, one of 14 Democratic state senators who said Friday that Cuomo's expanded emergency powers should be repealed as soon as possible.

The higher death tolls were only divulged hours after a report late last month from Democratic state Attorney General Letitia James examining the administration's failure to include nursing home residents who died at hospitals. The updated numbers backed up the findings of an Associated Press investigation last year that concluded the state could have been understating deaths by thousands.

It gets worse, as the AP reports:

Debra Diehl, 62, who lost her 85-year-old father, Reeves Hupman, to presumptive COVID-19 in May at a nursing home outside Albany, wants to know why Cuomo and the state didn't do more to separate residents who may have had the virus, perhaps by putting them in field hospitals.

"They had people coming up, sent from downstate hospitals up here," Diehl said. "It just seemed like Typhoid Marys, just spreading it further. He did not know what he was doing, or he did not care."

As we now know, New York's Department of Health waited until November 2020 to set up dedicated facilities for providing care to COVID-19 nursing home patients to prevent introducing coronavirus infections to nursing homes where they might spread "like fire through dry grass". It's no accident the Cuomo administration kept silent on this long delayed action, because announcing it would have contrasted sharply with its previous policies.

Cuomo Didn't Protect Seniors From COVID-19. But it Was the Media That Covered it Up | Opinion

This op-ed picks up on the failures of broadcast news media to seriously investigate or to cover Governor Cuomo's coronavirus nursing home scandals. CNN and MSNBC's performances are singled out, particularly for the fawning coverage they chose to provide instead.

One media outlet's performance still to be addressed: The New York Times. We've been following the story for months and have found its coverage to be strangely lacking. It seems odd that the newspaper's editors and reporting staff have almost completely failed to break any of the news taking place in its own proverbial back yard.