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

Mar 12
When it’s a D // When it’s an R Image
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Oh there are a lot of these.
@mcmurphy_pat Image
Read 5 tweets
Mar 5
🧵Thread🧵

If you missed Trump’s address to Congress last night, I wouldn’t rely on media stories to explain it.

Rather than report on a speech viewers found “inspiring,” the corporate press played PR for Democrats.

Wanna know why trust in the press is underwater? Look. ⤵️
A @CBSNews poll of viewers found “A large majority of viewers approve” of Trump’s message, overwhelmingly describing it as “inspiring,” rather than “divisive.”

The speech was certainly partisan - and viewers skewed right.

But the press’s own view appears to slant their takes. Image
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What leads me to claim that? Well, just look at how @CBSNews decided to report on the speech.

They tweeted out that “there was a horribly tense feeling,” and it was “filled with drama.”

Why focus on how their reporter felt, rather than viewers? Image
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Read 20 tweets
Feb 6
Having worked on the Hill I get the ubiquity of Politico Pro and its cost.

But I think it takes an enormous suspension of disbelief to call it a conspiracy theory to look askance at the millions of dollars the Biden admin paid the paper that ran this hatchet job on his opponent. Image
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Which, to be clear, is exactly what outlets like @CNN are doing. Image
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@CNN This from @axios seems particularly unreasonable.

It isn’t a “fake theory” to say that Politico is “funded by the government.” It is, to the tune of $8 million. That isn’t in dispute. Image
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Read 5 tweets
Jan 25
Quick 🧵 revisiting corporate media claims on the Covid lab leak theory then (a “conspiracy theory,” “misinformation,” etc.) vs. now (“okay the CIA even admits it”).

@nytimes then // @nytimes now Image
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@washingtonpost then // now Image
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@USATODAY then // now Image
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Read 14 tweets
Jan 25
Okay quick 🧵 on the bogus claims that ICE went into a school in Chicago to deport students. Starting with @GovPritzker

More ⤵️ Image
@RepMikeQuigley why are you promoting misinformation? Image
@chicagotribune why are you deceiving your readers? Image
Read 12 tweets
Jan 23
🧵Thread🧵

Trump’s return to the Oval Office has me reflecting on some of the worst “journalism” during his first term.

Of that long list, one in particular jumps out: the corporate press hype around the Steele dossier.

Do you *really* remember how bad it was? Follow along. ⤵️
Before I dive in, would really encourage you to read my full piece at @Holden_Court, because there’s too much to fit in a thread.

That said, surely you remember the dossier, a bunch of dramatic claims about Trump that even @nytimes now calls “discredited” open.substack.com/pub/drewholden…Image
But before that, there was the hype: the hero worship of Christopher Steele, the spy who was going to save American from Trump, the Russian puppet.

I mean, @washingtonpost put “hero” right in the title.

The rest of the piece is worse. WaPo repeats the claims — that the Russians had kompromat on him for engaging with prostitutes! Maybe Trump was compromised — verbatim without mentioning in the first instance that there’s no evidence these claims are true! Look at the highlights.

An unthinkable breach of journalistic ethics. There was plenty more.Image
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Read 23 tweets

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