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.
@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.
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’
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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Biden’s pardoning of his son Hunter says an enormous amount about the president’s views of justice.
But it also says a lot about the willingness of the mainstream media—the nation’s noble fact checking corps—to repeat bogus claims that suit Democrats.
Remember? ⤵️
For starters, let’s revisit the coverage of how Biden wouldn’t do what he just did.
Biden said he wouldn’t pardon his son, no way. He would trust our legal system.
The media repeated it at every turn, without a shred of incredulity.
Here’s @washingtonpost
Seemingly every outlet did the same. @CNN had a couple of my favorites.
Look at the lede in on this first one.
The media’s job isn’t to simply repeat what politicians tell them. Whatever happened to “defenders of our democracy” and all that?
The news that MSNBC may soon have a new owner (and that it might be a certain X power user) compelled me to finally open my “MSNBC conspiracy theories” screenshot folder and, woo boy, there are a lot.
If you’d like to revisit them, buckle up, and follow along. ⤵️
There’s nowhere better to start than with Russiagate.
Do you remember the promotion from @chrislhayes, @MalcolmNance, @maddow and others at @MSNBC that perhaps Donald Trump was a Russian agent?
I, for one, will not be forgetting.
But there was plenty of other insanity from the gang at MSNBC about Russiagate.
Here are just a couple.
The first seems apropos with Trump again picking a cabinet.
Whatever happened to Harris and Biden’s “strongest economy ever” that the media spent so much time hyping up in the lead up to the election?
I revisit the claims, and explain why they were off the mark about the economy all along, in my latest @AmerCompass.
Quick🧵thread🧵⤵️
It can be easy, in the wake of an election, to forget just how dominant a media narrative was.
One that’s already fading from view was how “great” the economy was, and why it would benefit Harris on Election Day. americancompass.org/its-still-the-…
As a refresher, check out this headline from @axios about the data.
@YahooFinance upgraded Biden’s economic grade to an A. That captures the press sentiment at the time quite well.
In recent days, the mainstream media has taken nakedly ridiculous claims about the tattoos of @PeteHegseth, Trump’s SecDef nominee, to spin up a story alleging he’s an extremist.
It’s an egregious example of politically driven “journalism.” I unpack why. ⤵️
The story really started with @AP, who ran an article claiming that two tattoos that @PeteHegseth has have ties to extremism, citing an extremely thin (and downright suspect) report.
They used that to label him a potential “insider threat” in their headline.
It wasn’t until 3 paragraphs in that a reader was told what that claim rested on: a tattoo of a Latin phrase. They’d go on to mention “concerns” about a cross tattoo as well.
Would be great if Trump’s unconventional picks for his cabinet inspire the media to consider a nominee’s credentials.
They might want to look at the current HHS Secretary, Xavier Becerra, who brings to the table the medical experience of being in Congress for 12 terms.
Or perhaps Obama’s former HHS Secretary, Sylvia Matthews Burwell, who had just finished her stint lobbying for Walmart.
Or Donna Shalala, Clinton’s former head of HHS, whose credentials were as a university administrator and feminist.