Drew Holden Profile picture
Mar 2, 2021 27 tweets 23 min read Read on X
🧵Thread🧵

You want bad @NYGovCuomo takes? Then you’ve come to the right place.

It’s good to see folks recognize his failure. But apologies are in order from those who built him into a pandemic hero while he played a villain

Here’s a top-10🧵of the worst culprits (+bonuses)⤵️
10. @Amy_Siskind

I was never holding my breath for Siskind to be a good faith actor but the sheer depravity of her content (this is only a sampling) makes it impossible to keep her off the thread. ImageImageImageImage
9. @voguemagazine (and @chelseahandler and @MollyJongFast)

Listen, my expectations for Vogue weren’t high, but just look at these headlines and ask yourself “is it any wonder @NYGovCuomo got away with what he did?” ImageImageImage
Honorable mention. @BuzzFeed

There were too many great ones to limit this to ten. Adding Buzzfeed to the thread simply because they forced me to read these words.

(Also, given some non-coronavirus headlines, it may be time to retire that survey.) ImageImage
8. @ananavarro

An often overlooked member of the Cuomo News Network team, Ana gets bonus points because she often pretends to be a conservative.

My favorite tweet, though, is from 2013. ImageImageImageImage
7. @MSNBC

There’s only so much you can expect from an openly partisan media outlet, so the bar here was already low.

But giving @NYGovCuomo an unchallenged opportunity to come on and defend his nursing home death scheme? Well. That makes the countdown. ImageImageImageImage
Honorable mention. @CheriJacobus

A thread favorite, Jacobus misses the top ten but certainly managed to keep it weird. ImageImage
6. @washingtonpost (@sarahellison and @bterris)

This article may be the worst of the Cuomo coverage from a mainstream outlet not named CNN, and that’s really saying something. google.com/amp/s/www.wash… ImageImageImageImage
A brief aside here to point out that, with only a couple of exceptions, all of the people in this thread bill themselves as critics and/or objective.

If DCCC says this kind of stuff, well, that isn’t news.

But these folks ARE the news.
5. @neeratanden

Back to the program. Pretty incredible to me that Tanden, famous for being a mean person on the internet, had nothing but incredibly complimentary things to say about Cuomo. ImageImageImageImage
4. @CNN

It takes a lot to have so much badness that, even spread across an entire network, it’s still damning. But from their nightly Cuomo Bros saga to their ridiculous coverage, CNN has earned this spot. ImageImageImageImage
Honorable mention. @SethAbramson, a man who needs no introduction.

I will point out, though, that each of these tweets were within two weeks of Cuomo’s having signed a decree requiring nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients. ImageImageImageImage
3. @JRubinBlogger

It is a testament to the outrageous level of Cuomo fangirling that Rubin barely cracks the top three. Here’s just a sampling of some of her remarkable tweets about Cuomo that have aged...imperfectly ImageImageImageImage
(This will always be my favorite tweet of all time) Image
Honorable mention. @SteveSchmidtSES

Where stupid goes, Schmidt and company are never far behind. The Cuomo situation was unsurprisingly no different. And this from a man who still pretends to be conservative about a liberal Governor. ImageImage
2. @JoyAnnReid

I’ll let the tweets speak for themselves. Just barely missed the top spot on the countdown. ImageImageImageImage
1. @ChrisCillizza

Even above his network, Cillizza’s fangirlish coverage stands alone as the most egregious.

We can leave it to history whether @NYGovCuomo was a “terrific bureaucrat” who “benefited from radical transparency” but let’s just say that I’m skeptical. ImageImageImageImage
There you have it, folks. The worst of the worst, in my eyes, accounting for both content and reach.

There are a lot of takeaways here, but I think one of them is pretty simple: stop worshipping politicians.

Lots of them are just bad people, and eventually the truth will out.
Perhaps the best takeaway is that, when a fawning mainstream media & blue check environment tells you a Democratic leader is without blemish, it probably just means that there are no blemishes that those folks are interested in talking about, even if many might exist.
It’s important to call out that, interspersed with these awful examples, there was a lot of reporting - particularly from local outlets - that was really, really good.

Here are a few examples from @NewYorker, @propublica, @NY1 and @ABC7 ImageImageImageImage
And this was also true among lots of conservative outlets and individuals, like @WSJ, @FoxNews (especially @JaniceDean) and the NY Post. ImageImageImage
But in a lot of ways, this just makes it even more intellectually & morally bankrupt that so many people talked about @NYGovCuomo the way they did.

So many of his faults and failures were already on the record.

These people just willfully ignored them. Which is unconscionable.
Post script honorable mention - if you can make it through anymore cringe, please watch and listen to this whole video from @TheDailyShow.
And let’s just say that the coverage of @GovRonDeSantis was...a little different. Previous 🧵 for your reference/those mentioning it.
This may finally be the time some of these folks block me.
Folks will ask on occasion if they can support the work that goes into these. I’m flattered, but your local food bank needs that money a lot more. For those in DC, Capital Area Food Bank does great work. capitalareafoodbank.org
Special shout out to @MollyJongFast for finding a way to concede she was wrong while seemingly blaming everything and everyone but herself. thedailybeast.com/my-cuomo-crush…

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More from @DrewHolden360

May 16
🧵Thread🧵

The day after my 30th birthday I was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor.

Two years later, I’m in remission. I don’t talk much about what happened, but I wanted to write it down, both for myself, and in case it could help others.

If interested, follow along. ⤵️
This is admittedly uncomfortable for me. I’m trying to learn how to talk about the experience, because it’s obviously become a big part of my life.

If you aren’t interested in the details, I totally understand. But I want to get this story in one place.
In early 2022, I started getting headaches and dizzy spells. I thought they were just part of getting older.

But one morning I woke up and couldn’t get out of bed. My head was splitting. I started to get dizzy pretty often.
Read 22 tweets
May 8
🧵Thread🧵

I’m sure you’ve all seen the protests and attendant anti-Semitism at many elite American universities. What you may not be aware of is the hypocrisy in how schools have handled them.

Do you remember what these places said about protests in 2020? I’ve got receipts. ⤵️
We’ve gotta start with @Columbia, given their central role in this drama.

In 2020, the university pledged to change how campus police operated, and said protests were part of a “heightened state of consciousness” on race & were driving the “revitalization of American democracy.”


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That, unsurprisingly, led @Columbia to embrace defunding the police on their website, citing a professor.

It’s hard to square that sentiment with calling in police in riot gear to rough up students on campus, @Columbia.
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Read 19 tweets
May 2
🧵Thread🧵

Want to see a media conspiracy, based on Biden admin propaganda to smear a GOP governor, come into existence?

If so, follow along. Let’s revisit the media claim that Texas “physically barred” drowning migrants from entering the country.

Another long one ⤵️
Back in mid-January, three people trying to enter the country illegally drowned in the Rio Grande. It happened while Texas & the Biden admin were fighting about security measures.

The Biden admin told the press a lie. The media ran with it, and most never corrected the stories.
The fraudulent story was advanced first by @CBSNews. On January 14, they claimed that the crossers had drowned b/c Texas “physically barred” rescuers trying to help.

The takeaway from CBS was clear: Texas had deliberately killed people, rather than allowing them to be rescued.
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Read 28 tweets
Apr 24
🧵THREAD🧵

Do you remember how bad the media’s “Covid lab leak” - the hypothesis that the virus came from a lab - coverage was?

I thought I did. But it was a more dramatic example of uniform media malpractice than even I remembered.

So I revisited it. Buckle in, it’s long. ⤵️
It started in Feb 2020 when @SenTomCotton suggested looking into the CCP lab studying bats near the initial cases in Wuhan.

The media were outraged. In a since-updated piece, @washingtonpost said the idea was a “conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts.”
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It wasn’t just WaPo. Shortly thereafter, @nytimes trotted out a similar allegation, calling the lab leak hypothesis a “fringe theory” and a “tale” designed to inflame social media.

@CNN’s @ChrisCillizza said Cotton was “playing a dangerous game” with his suggestions.

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Read 28 tweets
Apr 22
It's always interesting to me, the tweets outlets never bother to delete.
The reason I take screenshots is that I'm always paranoid that an outlet or journalist will scrap the evidence of a bad take. Maybe I should be giving folks more credit for standing by their inaccuracies.
Every so often I check back in on this, perhaps my all-time favorite headline from @NPR, only to see that it still exists in its original form, from April 2020. Image
Read 10 tweets
Apr 17
🧵Thread🧵

I launched a newsletter, called Holden Court, about the media, what they get wrong & why it matters. The goal is to reach beyond what my 🧵s have on Twitter & to build a better recent history of media & media criticism.

You can sign up at the link in my bio. More ⤵️
At that link you can read my launch piece and get a better idea of what it is that I’m trying to do.

The piece also walks through a recent example of bad media coverage that I worry we’re already forgetting about: the start of Covid. Image
My general premise for the newsletter is that media criticism could be a lot better; more driven by what the media actually does and says and more set in recent context, rather than an impressionistic sense that the media is hopelessly off-track.
Read 8 tweets

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