@NYGovCuomo thinks he can survive the bombshell report about his sexual misconduct from his own state AG because lots of corporate media outlets have worked hard to deceive the country into thinking Gov. Cuomo is a hero.
Don’t remember? Read on ⤵️
The only place to start is with @CNN, where Cuomo’s brother @ChrisCuomo works.
I’m sure you all remember what the love fest looked like back then. This is meant to be straight news coverage!
And of course it wasn’t just the network. There were plenty of their main voices who chimed in.
Perhaps the staunchest supporter proved to be @ananavarro, even after the sexual harassment allegations surfaced.
This quote from @ChrisCillizza always gets me, and I couldn’t not include it here.
Is it any wonder that one of @NYGovCuomo’s biggest cheerleaders throughout the process was his brother @ChrisCuomo?
The “Luv Guv dishing the real 24/7” quote didn’t quite hold up.
But CNN was far from alone among the broadcast networks. @MSNBC worked overtime to get Cuomo on and carried water for him even well after some of his scandals had started to come to light.
And like CNN, their leading voices were all-aboard the Cuomo train.
Here’s @JoyAnnReid providing a timely reminder that worshipping politicians is always bad but is particularly harmful when you’re meant to cover them.
It wasn’t just broadcast. Here’s a quote that’s always stuck with me from @washingtonpost writers @sarahellison and @bterris (straight news, not an opinion, mind you) that Cuomo is “the strongman who can admit he’s wrong.”
Some of the coverage from @nytimes about Cuomo was commendable and has held up well in retrospect.
Some of it has…well, not so much.
Here’s @NPR doing much of the same: applauding @NYGovCuomo’s personality traits.
NPR, do you still stand by Cuomo as someone “listening to the experts and sticking to the facts” as he rejects calls to step down?
A lot of what was written was too generous to even pass for PR. I mean it was just one long vanity project by Cuomo, with the press doing his bidding at seemingly every turn.
I’m running out of words to describe how over the top the media adulation of @NYGovCuomo was but I haven’t run out of outlets, unfortunately. @DEADLINE, @enews, @TODAYshow
Could anyone forget the evolution of the “Cuomosexuals” during all this? @latimes did a whole piece about it.
Is it any wonder that media outlets reporting on how the Governor had inspired a new sexuality were willing to look away from his scandals?
There are a bunch of others like this that I don’t have space to feature on their own or the mental strength remaining to analyze, including:
Some outlets didn’t take the bait. There was great coverage from a number of publications, including @NewYorker and @propublica, as well as both conservative outlets like NY Post and @WSJ, and local outlets (@NY1 and many others).
The real story was out there all along.
Despite that, plenty of opinion writers went to great lengths to make Cuomo into a hero that he wasn’t. Here’s thread favorite @JRubinBlogger.
I’m not sure that “empathy” is the word that comes to mind in all this, @maureendowd.
The entire Cuomo experience was a pretty good litmus test, though, of the outlets and voices who simply weren’t discriminating enough in their coverage of a public figure.
And speaking of, the funny people were, well, not exactly speaking truth to power. There were others but the worst of it was really led by @TheDailyShow.
I mean, based on what @NYGovCuomo has said about sexual harassment in the workplace, I don’t see how he can do anything but resign.
But what we can’t lose in all of this is that @NYGovCuomo is also responsible for the deaths of thousands of seniors across New York because of his disastrous handling of coronavirus. He’s escaped accountability to date.
Hopefully this development will bring attention to that.
The most important role of the press is to serve as a watchdog over people and institutions in power. The corporate press came down with a serious case of Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to @NYGovCuomo.
The results shouldn’t shock us.
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The coverage of the anti-ICE riots in LA is perhaps the clearest example of advocacy “journalism” in Trump’s second term.
Reading the reporting, you would never know the most significant fact: the American people support Trump’s deportations.
Follow along ⤵️
First, the facts about the riots.
You’ve seen the burning cars, looting & clashes between police & protestors.
Demonstrators blocked the freeway, attacked ICE agents, all in an effort to prevent the deportations of illegal aliens. Trump deployed troops to allow ICE to operate.
As @MarkHalperin and @seanspicer discussed, the situation in LA is so tranquil that the mayor has instituted a curfew for the city.
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 ⤵️
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.
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.
(If you haven’t listened to the Hur audio yet, you should.)
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 🧵⤵️
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.
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.
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.”