Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo benefited from cheerleading news coverage provided by CNN, the broadcast news network that prominently features his brother, Chris Cuomo, as a presenter. These two articles appeared on 12 May 2021, both report CNN's reputation and trustworthiness have been harmed by its heavily biased coverage.
- The new CNN is more opinionated and emotional. Can it still be ‘the most trusted name in news’?
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The first article appears in the Washington Post, which shares many of CNN's editorial biases, but which questions CNN's management, editors, and journalists choices to integrate its editiorial biases throughout its broadcast news coverage. The following excerpt picks up from examples of CNN president Jeff Zucker's policy of encouraging journalists to become emotional and share their personal biases while covering stories on-air.
Yet to some ears, and during some stories, CNN’s new emotional rawness can sound like bias at a network that built its reputation on studiously neutral impartiality. “For tens of millions of our fellow Americans,” Tapper intoned after CNN called the election for Biden, “their long, national nightmare is over.” Awaiting the verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial last month, host Don Lemon confessed that “I’m anxious about it. . . . We shall see what the value of a black life is.” When the Minneapolis police officer was convicted in the death of George Floyd, Lemon proclaimed, “justice has been served.”
And prioritizing personal connections to current events can backfire. Chris Cuomo — who has exemplified the New CNN as much as any on-air personality — won over many viewers early last year when he both chronicled his own battle with covid-19 and hailed the public-health efforts of his brother, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, in regular segments where the two would banter cutely about their childhood. That decision put CNN in an uncomfortable position when the New York Democrat became mired in scandal — allegations that he sexually harassed women and that his administration concealed the number of covid deaths in the state’s nursing homes — and the network decided that one of its primetime stars is now too conflicted to discuss one of the biggest political stories in the country.
The article provides background into its cheerleading coverage of Governor Andrew Cuomo and its obvious, inherent conflicts of interest in doing so:
Cuomo, who worked as a traditional correspondent for ABC News, came to CNN in 2013 as a traditional morning news co-anchor — until 2018, when the network gave him his own show in the more opinionated prime-time hours and let him run wild. As he began gleefully skewering both Democrats and Republicans, network management put one key restriction on him: that he not cover his governor brother because of the inherent conflict of interest.
But CNN dropped the policy during the early weeks of the pandemic, arguing that his conversations with Gov. Cuomo were “of significant human interest.”
So when Cuomo explained a year later that he couldn’t interview his brother about the allegations lobbed against him, some network critics saw a double standard at play. “Why is this different from spring/summer of last year?” Mary Katharine Ham, a right-leaning CNN contributor, asked on Twitter.
Cuomo, meanwhile, also has drawn criticism for his other way of personalizing the pandemic. Some raised questions about the timeline of his covid-19 recovery, which the host commemorated with a live-TV emergence from the basement where he had been in quarantine. And after The Washington Post and other news organizations reported that his brother’s administration arranged for the newsman to get preferential diagnostic treatment, critics accused CNN of dismissing or downplaying the story.
Andrew Cuomo remains governor of New York, despite myriad calls for his resignation, which means that CNN will probably continue facing criticism for ignoring the controversy during a key evening hour. But viewers don’t seem to mind: During the first three months of this year, “Cuomo Primetime” was the most-watched show on cable news among the 25-to-54 demographic coveted by advertisers.
- Brian Stelter boasts CNN's coverage of Cuomo despite network's history of skipping, downplaying scandals
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This second article comes from another broadcast news outlet, Fox News, which has been reporting on the major news stories involving Governor Cuomo and his multiple scandals that CNN is choosing to avoid presenting in its on-air broadcasts.
CNN's leftwing media guru Brian Stelter made the bold argument that his network's coverage of Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is something to be proud of.
Speaking at PolitiFact's "virtual festival of fact-checking" on Monday, Stelter was asked about how networks like CNN can improve on being "objective" and seek a "balance in fairness" in its coverage.
Stelter responded in part by boasting CNN's reporting on the embattled governor.
"When the New York governor is embroiled in multiple scandals, CNN can't ignore it. And thankfully we haven't of course," Stelter said. "And there's been great work by [Jake] Tapper and Brianna [Keilar] and by New York Bureau correspondents work over there, you know, but that kind of news coverage, I think, is seen by viewers as a sign that we are playing it straight, and that we are being fair. And I would like to believe that every day, when we wake up, when we work in these newsrooms we work for these organizations, we can either win a little bit of trust or we can lose a little bit of trust.
He continued, "I do believe that in lots of small ways every day, journalists are winning trust back. It’s hard to measure, and it’s never going to be as newsworthy as big screw-ups or anonymous source failures, but I do think it’s happening every day in small ways."
That boast doesn't jibe with the actual content of CNN's news coverage in recent months:
What Stelter didn't mention at PolitiFact's "virtual festival of fact-checking" is the fact that CNN's coverage of Cuomo's scandals ranges from minimal to non-existent.
For example, CNN has avoided the latest developments of the governor's political woes after the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that the New York Attorney General's investigation has expanded to include allegations that the Cuomo administration was threatening to withhold the coronavirus vaccine from various counties if the governor didn't receive their support amid calls for his resignation.
CNN's poorly-watched morning show "New Day" was the only program on the entire network to acknowledge a damning report from The New York Times that detailed the Cuomo administration's effort to deliberately block the release of data on COVID nursing home deaths, which the paper tied to the release of the governor's memoir "American Crisis." The book, which came out in October 2020, prematurely touted the Democrat's "leadership" during the early months of the pandemic.
Last month, CNN went an entire week avoiding three separate controversies that emerged within days of one another, including a ninth woman who accused the governor of sexual misconduct, allegations that the Cuomo administration misappropriated government resources including his staff to work on his memoir, and how he prioritized COVID testing in the early months of the pandemic for members of his family, including his brother, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo.
Chris Cuomo, host of "Cuomo Prime Time," told his viewers that he "obviously" cannot cover his brother's scandals as they emerged earlier this year despite how he famously invited the Democratic governor onto his show nearly a dozen times for chummy interviews and even to perform prop comedy.
However, even if "Cuomo Prime Time" isn't supposed to cover the governor, CNN's other primetime shows "Anderson Cooper 360" and "CNN Tonight with Don Lemon" have offered little to no coverage of the various scandals.
CNN spent much of 2020 hailing Gov. Cuomo's response to the pandemic and offered minimal coverage of the brewing nursing home scandal that began last spring.
The ratings of its Cuomo Prime Time broadcast during the first three months of 2021 are a strange thing to highlight, because the period from 28 January 2021 through the end of March 2021 mark the period in which Governor Cuomo's attempted cover-up of the full extent of COVID nursing home deaths among New York nursing home residents collapsed, which coincides with the exposure of a number of other scandals involving Governor Cuomo alleged misconduct in office that have received high media attention.
By the end of April, CNN became notable for absence of coverage of Governor Cuomo's scandals, including those that involve CNN's Chris Cuomo.
Follow this link to find more of the timeline's coverage of CNN's collapse in credibility and trustworthiness.
