The end of the affair
Gov. Cuomo and a slobbering press go their separate ways.
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America’s worst governor probably never thought he would miss America’s most obnoxious president.
But that is the situation that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo likely finds himself in now that Donald Trump is no longer around to take all the heat for mismanaging the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, now that the man who commanded nearly every minute of the media’s attention has shuffled off to Florida following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Cuomo is at long last experiencing widespread criticism and scrutiny in the press for his grossly incompetent handling of the COVID-19 outbreak in the Empire State.
The New York Times, for example, took the governor to task after he announced that indoor dining in the state can resume as soon as Feb. 14, arguing that the flip-flop makes no sense based on the available data and his past diktats. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York said on Friday that New York City could reopen indoor dining on Feb. 14,” the newspaper notes. “But by nearly every measure, the coronavirus outbreak in the city is worse than it was when he announced a ban on indoor dining in December.”
The New York Times adds, “As the governor spoke on Friday, citing the 'current trajectory' of cases as his reasoning for reopening, average per-capita case counts in New York City were 64% higher than when he announced the ban in December.” The paper even published an article titled “N.Y.C.’s Covid Metrics Are Dire. Cuomo Is Reopening Restaurants Anyway,” laying into the governor for his about-face on indoor dining.
Elsewhere, Cuomo is weathering blistering criticism over news reports that his administration dramatically undercounted the number of deaths connected to his order last year forcing infectious coronavirus patients into long-term care facilities. Criticism so bad, in fact, that the governor actually declined an invitation to appear on CNN, which has done more than any news network to boost his image amid the pandemic.
The bad press, by the way, appears to be having an adverse effect on the governor, whose increasingly frenetic decrees suggest a man who is spiraling. Recall that Cuomo claimed recently that the effort to vaccinate restaurant workers was a “cheap, insincere discussion.” Now, he has expanded vaccine eligibility in New York to include — you guessed it — restaurant workers. It's almost as if he has no idea what he is doing.
Then, there is the sudden bout of unflattering news reports regarding the growing number of high-level resignations by New York health officials, including nine top state executives who have stepped down since last summer. Cuomo is also suffering embarrassing news coverage for his recent statement in response to the reports that his administration undercounted nursing home deaths: "But who cares? ... Died in a hospital. Died in a nursing home. They died." Add to it all the fact that the governor is catching heat for saying that he doesn’t trust health experts, and it seems clear we are witnessing the end of the love affair between the news media and the man who won an Emmy recently for his supposedly savvy COVID-19 management.
It is good that the news industry as a whole is finally scrutinizing the Cuomo administration for its ineptitude, but where was this critical look last year? It's not as if Cuomo flipped a switch. He didn’t become an incompetent, callous, flailing bureaucrat overnight. This is who he is. This is how he has behaved for the entirety of the pandemic. Many newsrooms either did not notice or did not care. After all, there was a bad man in the White House.
The Cuomo who is getting badly beaten up today in the press is the same Cuomo who in April 2020 said glibly of out-of-work, anti-lockdown protesters that if they want to provide for themselves and their families, they should “take a job as an essential worker.”
This is the same man who targeted the state’s Jewish communities over social distancing violations, all while giving a free pass to the thousands of anti-police demonstrators and other political activists who clogged New York’s streets last year, gathering cheek to cheek in both protest and celebration. At a press conference in October of last year, Cuomo even dredged up a 14-year-old photo showing Jewish mourners gathered to mark the death of Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum, claiming falsely that it was proof of those people's refusal to follow his COVID-19 restrictions.
This is the same man whose administration flip-flopped constantly on the timeline for when COVID-19-positive front-line workers should return to work.
This is the same man who, during a press conference in September, attempted to absolve himself of responsibility for his state’s deadly mismanagement of the coronavirus by claiming, “Donald Trump caused the COVID outbreak in New York. That is a fact. It’s a fact that he admitted and the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] admitted and [Dr. Anthony Fauci] admitted.” No one “admitted” any such thing.
Cuomo actually wrote an entire book praising his response to the pandemic. He even hawked a stupid poster boasting of New York’s alleged victory over the outbreak. The poster, which bears more captions than a Herblock cartoon, is careful to highlight infection increases in Arizona, Texas, and Florida. Because nothing says responsible, caring leadership quite like cheering case increases in fellow states, which, by the way, likely got the virus from New York.
Yet, amid all of these missteps, many in the press claimed last year that New York’s governor led one of the best, if not the best, coronavirus responses in the country. The way certain journalists and commentators told it, Cuomo’s wisdom and steady hand safely guided the state through one of the most dangerous and deadly episodes in its history.
The public was sold a bogus bill of goods even as a small and exclusive group of news organizations, including the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, and ProPublica, revealed that Cuomo's governance had been anything but competent and effectual. These newsrooms unmasked a pattern of reckless ineptitude.
The Associated Press, for example, reported in August 2020 that as many as 11,000 people may have died as a result of the governor’s nursing home order. And remember: Cuomo claimed in October of last year that long-term care facilities in the state “never needed” to accept coronavirus-positive patients.
“It never happened,” he lied.
A Wall Street Journal investigation likewise found that Cuomo’s endless squabbling with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio resulted in an uncoordinated effort of patient transfers, including deathly ill COVID-19 victims being shuffled between various hospitals. The Wall Street Journal also discovered that insufficient isolation protocols had resulted in infected patients being mixed with uninfected patients, spreading the virus to non-COVID-19 units.
ProPublica, for its part, confirmed in its own coverage that the constant bickering, one-upmanship, and “childish” intrastate “cold war” between Cuomo and de Blasio is largely responsible for the state’s overall bungling of its pandemic response.
There is a reason why New York has more COVID-19 deaths than any other state in the union.
Now, compare what these outlets uncovered to how the broader media portrayed Cuomo last year as his state reeled from the virus. Compare their findings to the governor's near-nightly appearances on his little brother’s CNN show, Cuomo Prime Time, which, it's worth noting, represented a clear conflict of interest for CNN regardless of whether the elder Cuomo had botched New York’s coronavirus response. Compare what the Wall Street Journal and others uncovered to ABC News’s cloying June 2020 interview with the governor. Unsurprisingly, Cuomo’s many leadership failures were not the focus of his appearance on the news network. Rather, ABC's Amy Robach concentrated on the important things, such as the governor’s reaction to being sexualized by lonely wine moms.
We heard comparatively little about Cuomo’s failures in 2020, back when the pandemic overtook the nation, crippling the economy and entire cities. Instead, members of the press divided their attention between focusing on the White House’s mishandling of the viral outbreak and the alleged failures of Republican governors, including Georgia’s Brian Kemp and Florida’s Ron DeSantis.
For the record, New York has the highest number of COVID-19 deaths of any state in the union, with more than 44,000 recorded as of this writing. More importantly, New York has the second-highest per capita death rate of any state, second only to New Jersey.
Yet, it is only now, after obsessing over Trump, Kemp, and DeSantis, that the broader news industry is putting Cuomo under a magnifying glass, taking a long, uncomfortable look at his failed attempt to steer his state through the viral outbreak. Unfortunately for Cuomo, he no longer has Trump to hide behind. He can no longer use America’s 45th president to distract from the reality of what is happening in New York. Cuomo is none of the things that he and his boosters in the press said he was last year, and that much is painfully obvious now that Trump is no longer around to serve as the poster child for lousy governance. And now that the most powerful media organizations in the country seem to realize Cuomo’s great failures as a leader, the entire country will, too.
But, hey, at least the governor can say he got an Emmy and a book deal out of it. And all he had to do was mismanage a pandemic that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of New Yorkers.