20 August 2021: Analysis - The Media's Role in the Cuomo Myth

The media’s role in the Cuomo myth

This analysis piece by Ross Barkan appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review on 18 August 2021. What we find fascinating is how many problems the major news organizations were willing to overlook in the Cuomo administration's handling of 2020's coronavirus pandemic as they chose to put blinders on and to promote Cuomo's interests instead.

The first excerpt acknowledging the clear signs of failures in Cuomo's handling of the pandemic picks up after Barkan discusses Cuomo's news media-boosted popularity:

... Cuomo’s response to the coronavirus pandemic was objectively a failure. New York, to date, still has the second highest death rate in America, despite successive waves and the emergence of the Delta variant now ravaging many southern states. COVID-19 tore through nursing homes and healthcare facilities, with Cuomo’s administration masking the true death toll there until the state attorney general, in 2021, forced him to revise it greatly upward.

Two other early COVID-19 hotbeds, Seattle and San Francisco, suffered far fewer losses, thanks to their fast-acting executives and strong coordination between governors and local leaders. Jay Inslee and London Breed, however, never became household names. They never graced the covers of Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. They never won an Emmy.

Cuomo’s enormous popularity in the early stages of the pandemic granted him enough residual goodwill to survive the first wave of scandal in February and March, to not resign when senators and representatives like Chuck Schumer and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told him to leave. And this was possible because the media, at every turn, fueled the Cuomo myth.

It must be made clear what is meant here by media: almost all of it, including cable TV and prestige newspapers and magazines. The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC all helped inflate Cuomo’s reputation, along with other mainstream publications. CNN, most notoriously, allowed Chris Cuomo, the governor’s brother, to interview him repeatedly in prime-time.

That's a problem, because each of these organizations hires journalists who received degrees from the Columbia School of Journalism. They're doing what they were taught, advancing predetermined narratives to advance the interests of partisan advocates, which might explain Barkan's next two sentences attacking one of the few news media outlets that didn't fall into a Columbia School of Journalism-style narrative promotion lockstep:

Since Cuomo is a Democrat, conservative media, by virtue of political polarization, didn’t play along. The New York Post would’ve probably done less accountability journalism and scathing headlines if Donald Trump Jr. governed New York.

Keep in mind that Barkan has already described the media's failure to hold Cuomo accountable for pandemic policies that were "objectively a failure". In Barkan's mind, editorial page opposition to Cuomo is the only explanation that accounts for the NYP's apparent supernatural ability to call attention to the Cuomo administration's objective policy failures in their news section.

In doing so, Barkan all but confirms the pro-Democrat biases of the New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC fully compromised the quality of their news coverage, rendering them incapable of reporting the Cuomo administration's objective failures. That's not a surprise to us, because these organizations were participants in what we've described as the Cuomo Influence Network, with former Cuomo administration staffers and loyalists given management roles within them where they continued to promote Cuomo's interests over their new employers.

That led to their giving Cuomo a free pass on saying similar things to what they attacked President Donald Trump for saying. That led to their giving Cuomo a free pass on his objective policy failures, such as the deadly 25 March 2020 directive that forced nursing homes to blindly admit patients being dumped out of hospital to free up hospital bed space, which contributed to the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, more New Yorkers than would have happened without the policy.