24 February 2021: Media Cheerleaders Learning Heroes of Their Narratives Are Really Monsters

The Media Have Finally Realized That Cuomo and Newsom Are Terrible. Will Voters?

This analysis reviews how the positive narrative promoted by highly partisan and biased media organizations boosted the political fortunes of Governor Cuomo while enabling the more disastrous portions of his policies to go unchallenged.

Though Cuomo's blameworthy nursing home directive has been an open secret for many months, the national news media largely averted their glance from this story while people like Fox's Janice Dean sounded the alarms alone. (Locally, journalists at the Newark Star-Ledger were ripping the policies of New Jersey and New York as far back as May 2020, but national media outlets took fairly little notice.) Of late, they've taken a gruffer stance, even examining Cuomo's past and present of strongman bullying. A New Republic headline reads, "The Andrew Cuomo Show Has Lost the Plot"; New York Times headlines declare "Uprising Grows Over Andrew Cuomo's Bullying" and "Cuomo Faces Revolt After Handling of Nursing Home Deaths" and even "As Outcry Over Nursing Homes Grows, Cuomo Lashes Out at Critics"; The Wall Street Journal bluntly asks if Cuomo did the same thing to disabled people that he did to the elderly in "Another Cuomo Cover-Up?"

Another Times article notes that Cuomo has for years "berated aides and elected officials, brought people to tears and threatened to fire them or end their careers. People outside the governor's direct control who have clashed with him said he told them they would be subject to negative news stories or political challenges or, in one case, would be publicly likened to a 'child rapist.'" Most recently, Ron Kim, a New York state assemblyman (and fellow Democrat), has come forward with stories of Cuomo calling him to threaten him after Kim called the nursing home cover-up an "obstruction of justice." Kim has also declared his intention to pursue impeachment proceedings in a scathing piece in Newsweek.

We're among the few, independent news outlets that have regularly provided analysis of Governor Cuomo's COVID-19 nursing home scandals from almost the beginning, with our active coverage extending back to April 2020. In the months since, we have regularly updated and curated this now lengthy timeline of the main scandal, providing a hopefully useful resource that also helps ensure that neither the media nor the Cuomo administration can continue sweeping the scandal under the rug.