13 April 2021: A Profile of Governor Andrew Cuomo

Andrew Cuomo's White-Knuckle Ride

We counted no fewer than 8,334 words in the main body of this article, which appears in the New York Times' Walter Duranty tradition. The words "nursing-home" appear six times. Here's the first reference:

Once liable to be spotted about town, flashing a thumbs-up from a 1968 Pontiac GTO with a “1” license plate, Cuomo has ventured out recently under only the most prescribed of circumstances. Amid his overlapping crises, which include allegations that he was responsible for and then covered up the Covid deaths of nursing-home residents, aggressively groped an aide at the mansion and sexually harassed a half-dozen others, his news briefings proceed via conference call now, with staff members carefully screening the questions. In-person public appearances have been closed to reporters under the implausible pretense of virus protocols, even at cavernous vaccination sites where Cuomo has invited dozens of guests to salute his continued leadership.

Here's the second, third, and fourth references:

Much seems clearer with some distance: Those who called for a lockdown earlier than Cuomo, including de Blasio, were correct. (The governor appeared to spend critical days in March 2020 on a semantic disagreement over the mayor’s use of the phrase “shelter in place.”) Cuomo, celebrated initially as a man of science, has been far more skeptical of expertise than his “get the facts” messaging let on, eventually all but declaring war on members of his own Health Department. (State health officials have said they often found out about major pandemic policy directives from the governor’s news conferences, before being asked to match their health guidance to his words.) And the state’s nursing-home requirements, which forced facilities to readmit those who had been hospitalized with Covid but recovered, would become perhaps the most controversial policy flare-up of Cuomo’s tenure. Last June, as Cuomo was pursuing the book deal, senior Cuomo aides rewrote a report by state health officials to remove the total number of deaths of nursing-home residents, an early indication of what lawmakers now call a monthslong bid to conceal data from the public.

When Letitia James, the state attorney general, published a finding in January that the administration had undercounted those nursing-home deaths, the rebuke caught Cuomo off guard as little has during his time as governor....

And that's as deep into the "most controversial policy flare-up of Cuomo’s tenure" as the Duranty-channeling Matt Flegenheimer goes, never gathering that "most controversial policy" and his attempted cover-up of its deadly consequences tells us more about Andrew Cuomo's true character than any of the episodes he spends thousands of more words upon. Perhaps Flegenheimer is auditioning for a future career at CNN.