Thread by @DrewHolden360

🧵THREAD🧵

Okay, one last Cuomo thread.

Governor Cuomo has resigned. The same outlets & talking heads who fawned endlessly over him are, suddenly, cheering along to his undoing, without a whiff of self-awareness for their role in making him into an icon.

Look at these 180s⤵️

You can’t start with anyone but @CNN. Perhaps no one gave more free air time to Cuomo to build him into a hero as an antidote to Trump.

Perhaps they’ve since forgotten.

I mean. Does anyone think that this is journalism? Are we reporting on the news here @CNN?

@ChrisCillizza said in May 2020 that Cuomo had “benefited from radical transparency” and “came under criticism for being, essentially, a terrific bureaucrat” and I think about that a lot.

These from @ananavarro presented without comment.

@MSNBC - without a shred of self-awareness - went from “Cuomo’s conducting a symphony” to “his own flaws brought him down”

@JoyAnnReid has instantly pivoted from Cuomo’s PR department to GOP whataboutism.

The long tail of Cuomo’s departure is only possible because of the heights that people like Reid built him up to.

I’ll be honest. I think a lot of these don’t necessarily need a terrible amount of analysis. @washingtonpost

@NPR’s original piece and what’s come to light since reminds me about how Cuomo told a female reporter back in 2017 that her question about addressing sexual misconduct in the run up to #MeToo was a “disservice to women.”

Also entirely apropos of nothing, remember that Cuomo received over $110,000 in donations from Harvey Weinstein and his company and was the last high-profile Dem to give that money back after initially balking at doing so. google.com/amp/s/www.nyti…

Speaking of the Times, I won’t pretend this is necessarily indicative of everything that @nytimes reported but, man, live by the punchy headline, die by the punchy headline.

Life comes at you fast, @latimes

Has anyone checked on @HuffPost?

The cognitive dissonance here from @voguemagazine is just remarkable.

I’m not sure this is what @RollingStone had in mind when they had a cover feature last year asking Cuomo about what comes next.

Commentary writers are truly gifted in their ability to forget what they’ve said previously on a certain topic. @maureendowd provides a case study in that here.

But no one - no one - can outdo @JRubinBlogger, from bona fide Cuomo reply guy to ‘oh he’s just a distraction’

H/t to @SirajAHashmi for this gem from @TheDailyShow.

You know how we get more Cuomo’s moving forward? With this type of memoryholing.

He only held on this long because so many people were willing to turn a blind eye to one of the “good guys” all this time.

As I’ve said many times, some coverage was really good, as seen here. Some reporters/outlets didn’t fall for it. A lot of the press in Albany hounded Cuomo on his Covid response, sexual misconduct allegations and more, as they have for years.

But for the rest of them, I don’t want to hear about Cuomo unless it starts and ends with some accountability and introspection: what they got wrong, why, and how to do better next time.

As @neontaster pointed out, yes, everyone is within their right to change their opinions of a public person when new information comes to light.

But the corporate press needs to reckon with how they spent 18 months completely blinded to Cuomo’s failings, personal & professional.

The media is at its best when they speak truth to power. It’s at its worst when instead it seeks to uncritically glamorize the powerful.

We got a lot of the latter here, at a time where we desperately needed the former.

So I beg you, outlets and reporters who got this wrong: learn from this experience. Improve from it.

Be watchdogs, not lapdogs.

And for everyone else - most of whom I’m sure have no confidence that that’ll happen: stay vigilante. Don’t take stories at face value. Don’t worship politicians or people in power.

Be wary when the powers that be appear to be the least wary. Like, well, with things like this.

I know these threads usually focus on the bad, but it wouldn’t be right not to recognize the most dogged, determined journalist holding Cuomo accountable: @JaniceDean. She’s been raising hell since well before most people knew anything was amiss in New York