Drew Holden Profile picture
Aug 10, 2021 26 tweets 15 min read Read on X
🧵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

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More from @DrewHolden360

Sep 3
🧵Thread🧵

I know there’s a lot going on but we just had a media conspiracy implode that I think captures something important about the corporate press.

Did you hear about how Trump was allegedly going after John Bolton as retribution for his criticism?

Well…follow along ⤵️
We saw a week straight of media suggestions that Trump was abusing the powers of the state to deal out “retribution” to John Bolton following the news that the FBI (“Trump’s DOJ!” headlines rang out) raided his house.

We were in “unsettling” times, to hear @nytimes tell it. Image
The *Editorial Board* at @nytimes put out an even more dramatic statement, asking who Trump’s next payback victim after Bolton would be.

They dubbed the raid “revenge.”

Democracy was in truly troubled waters. Image
Read 24 tweets
Aug 26
🧵Thread🧵

A single poll has bootstrapped a media narrative that DC residents are outraged by Trump’s takeover.

I poked around the cross tabs of the poll — of 600 or so of DC’s more comfortable residents — and I think it’s pretty suspect.

How come? Follow along: ⤵️
Let’s start with the poll. The @washingtonpost talked to 604 people, of whom 90% — 90%! — self-described as living in “very good” or “good” neighborhoods.

So, fine. 80% of people who like where they live in DC are upset. Image
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But even beyond that, it’s worth asking whether this poll really captures DC’s opinion.

In the poll, only 31% describe crime as a “serious” or “very serious” problem in DC.

When @washingtonpost asked this same question in May, *50%* said it was a serious problem.

What gives? Image
Image
Read 26 tweets
Jul 15
🧵Thread🧵

I feel like I’m losing my mind about the Biden autopen pardons.

The former president said he made every decision. His staff says that he didn’t actually make the final call on thousands of them.

We’re supposed to treat this as normal?

I try to unpack. ⤵️
This got new life from a Biden interview w/ @nytimes.

NYT leads by repeating Biden’s claim that he made the calls…burying the admissions that 1) he really didn’t & 2) where he allegedly did, the aids sending details to the autopen weren’t in the room when the call was made… Image
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…instead, they relied on what senior staff had allegedly heard, which was then passed along.

The piece ends with the revelation that Biden’s then-chief of staff gave the final sign off.

Given what the former admin has lied about, why should we trust this reporting of events? Image
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Read 20 tweets
Jun 11
🧵Thread🧵

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. Image
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As @MarkHalperin and @seanspicer discussed, the situation in LA is so tranquil that the mayor has instituted a curfew for the city.
Read 25 tweets
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

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