@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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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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m launching something new, so naturally I figured the best explainer was a 🧵thread🧵.
Introducing Holden Court, my Substack about the media, what it gets wrong, and why it matters.
You probably know the drill, but more details & links to sign up in the tweets below. ⤵️
Holden Court aims to unpack media failures, particularly when the media misses in unison on important political topics. But I’ll also have one-off content, Q&A opportunities, a mailbag and maybe virtual (or even in person) happy hours, too.
That doesn’t mean the threads are going away. But the amount of context and nuance I can capture in a thread is limited. So the Substack will (hopefully) provide that more robust analysis, aiming ultimately at *why* the media misses the way that it does.