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 29
🧵Thread🧵

The new book “Original Sin” from Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson recounts the effort to cover up Biden’s cognitive decline ahead of the election. The authors point to many guilty parties.

The one glaring omission? Their colleagues in the corporate press. Follow along ⤵️ Image
There are numerous dramatic reveals. The Biden team considered condoning him to a wheelchair? Maybe in his fog he forgot about the border?

But as I worked on a review for @commonplc, the one thought that I kept coming back to was that you can’t tell this story without the press.
Perhaps no one was more vital to the continued fiction that Biden had it together than the media.

Tapper and Thompson even highlight some of the telling moments.

Did they forget what the media reported?
Read 21 tweets
May 20
🧵THREAD🧵

Biden’s cancer diagnosis is a tragedy I know first-hand.

But our sympathy can’t silence questions about Biden’s cognitive decline, clarified just days ago by the Hur tape.

The media tried to bury the story then. They’re trying again now.

I’ve got the receipts. ⤵️
When the report first came out in 2024, outlets rushed to demean Hur, accusing him of serving as a Republican hatchet man.

Just look at this take from @USATODAY, who assembled sympathetic voices to make the case that Hur “crossed the line.” They found an expert to call it a “disgrace” and then featured the obviously unbiased Eric Holder to lead a section titled “Way too many gratuitous remarks.”

The audio makes clear that Hur, if anything, played down how alarming the claims were.Image
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(If you haven’t listened to the Hur audio yet, you should.)
Read 26 tweets
May 15
It should go without saying, but the media cultivating this type of baseless hysteria about an admin for partisan reasons is much more of a threat to the underpinnings of our democracy than anything Trump has actually done.

Quick 🧵⤵️ Image
A couple quotes:

“If you think that there’s this thing out there called America, and it’s exceptional, that means you don’t have to do anything” to stop fascism.

What? What does that even mean??

That if you, like millions of Americans!, believe in American exceptionalism…you’re a fascist?

Really?
“The powers that be can do whatever they want to you”

Trump can’t even deport people who have deportation orders against them without a federal judge stepping in.

This is firmly out of touch with reality.
Read 13 tweets
May 13
Wow what a potentially valuable insight worth sharing with the American people when it mattered rather than saving for your book!
This conversation started in June *2023* so if you believe the media wasn’t aware of it before the election I have a bridge to sell you.
I’m going to write a book about this book.
Read 5 tweets
Apr 29
🧵Thread🧵

Many in the media are trying to claim that the press was merely duped by Biden’s White House about the former president’s cognitive decline.

That simply isn’t true. The media actively took part in the coverup.

Don’t let them forget. I’ve got screenshots. ⤵️
I’ve done a number of threads on this but putting some of the most egregious stuff in one place.

Perhaps the most damming: Two weeks before the debate made Biden’s cognitive decline inescapable, @washingtonpost gave “Four Pinocchio’s” to allegedly edited videos showing Biden clearly displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype” while quoting the White House to say the videos were “cheap fakes” — all to defend Biden against criticisms about his age and well-being.Image
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That story came four days after a previous effort from @washingtonpost to write off these videos as Republican efforts to mislead voters: proof, the Post claimed, that “the politics of misinformation and conspiracy theories do not stop at the waters edge.” Image
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Read 24 tweets
Apr 15
🧵Thread🧵

I’m not sure people realize just how egregious some of NPR’s “journalism” has been. Amid the debate about defunding the network, I wanted to walk down memory lane to revisit some of its worst coverage.

There’s a lot. ⤵️
First, perhaps the most egregious display of activist journalism: their response to the Hunter Biden laptop story of corruption involving a major party candidate on the eve of the election.

Not only did @NPR not cover it, they bragged about refusing to do so. Image
Insofar as @NPR did cover the Hunter Biden scandal, they actively tried to cover it up.

They applauded Facebook & Twitter strangling the story as part of a push against “misinformation and conspiracy theories.”

The story, of course, turned out to be far from invented. Image
Read 23 tweets

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