(Media Research Center) The scandal surrounding New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s mishandling of nursing home patients during the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic was never a secret.
Yet in their zeal last year to promote Cuomo as a counter to President Trump, broadcast news, cable news, daytime talk shows and late night comics all preferred to tout Cuomo as a pandemic hero, instead of telling the truth about his actions. Watch:
Even though New Yorkers learned about the scandal in April 2020, the Cuomo-boosters in the national media refused to touch it. The broadcast evening newscasts made the Governor a star of their pandemic coverage, yet devoted a scant 51 seconds to it in all of 2020.
This year, as the depths of Cuomo’s duplicity have become apparent, those same newscasts have delivered a scant 10 minutes, 56 seconds during the past four weeks (January 28 to February 25) — nearly as much airtime as they devoted over just four days (February 18-21) to Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz’s ill-advised trip to Cancun (eight minutes, 51 seconds)…
A Nexis search found ABC’s World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News discussed Cuomo in at least 401 evening news stories between March 1 and December 31, 2020, including weekends. Yet only two of those stories, both on Nightly News, made any reference to Cuomo’s nursing home order. Total airtime: a mere 51 seconds.
ABC’s World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News were completely silent on the matter throughout 2020. Indeed, weeks after the story broke, on the May 5 Evening News, CBS’s Mola Lenghi ran a soundbite from Cuomo talking about the dangers of nursing homes — “All it takes is one person to bring that virus in there. And you do everything you can, but at the same time, you can’t do everything” — without giving the slightest hint of the Governor’s true record on the subject…
During the past month, investigative digging by the Associated Press and New York Post, as well as a scathing report from a fellow Democrat, New York’s Attorney General Letitia James, revealed the truth: Cuomo’s administration concealed the true number of infected patients sent to nursing homes, and significantly under-reported the number of deaths among nursing home residents.
A top aide to Cuomo, Melissa DeRosa, told state Democrats that the true numbers were withheld from state legislators — out of fear, she claimed, of what the Trump administration might do with the truth. Federal prosecutors are now investigating whether the misconduct was criminal.
