NO, BUT THEY SHOULD: Media won’t pay a price for cheering Cuomo’s draconian COVID policies.
Andrew Cuomo is gone, resigning over his sexual-misconduct scandal. But will his departure lead to a reassessment of his draconian and irrational COVID-19 policies from a press that fawned over his performance? Don’t count on it.
The media coverage revealed that liberal America prefers the authoritarian style Cuomo presented. He knew better and wasn’t afraid to use his position to force others to comply. And the media ate it up. People who questioned the need for and effectiveness of restrictions and whether the government had authority to impose them were derided as right-wing reactionaries.
A New York Times headline blared: “Andrew Cuomo Is the Control Freak We Need Right Now.” Forbes praised Cuomo’s news conferences as “assertive and reassuring, calming and urgent” and gushed that Cuomo was “a truly inspiring leader who brings out the best in us.” The Washington Post, while acknowledging that Cuomo was and remains a power hungry “bully,” praised his assertive, supposedly truthful communications style. Rolling Stone’s cover approving proclaimed, “Andrew Cuomo Takes Charge.”
In what now seems eerily prescient and embarrassing, other papers reported on Cuomo’s sex appeal to women and a YouTuber coined the phrase “Cuomosexual.” Cuomo won a lucrative book contract and an Emmy.
Yet most of the mainstream media rarely questioned the substance of Cuomo’s policies. They barely raised a peep over his disastrous order that from March 25 to May 10, 2020, compelled nursing homes to readmit hospitalized COVID-19 patients without checking if they still had active infection. In fact, the facilities were instructed that they could not deny admission “based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19” and were “prohibited” from testing prospective admissions for COVID-19.
The Cuomo administration intentionally hid the cost of this blunder by falsifying Department of Health reports and stonewalling Freedom of Information Law requests for the number of nursing-home admissions and deaths that resulted from the policy for over eight months.
Embarrassing indeed. Why do the lefty media always have to puff people up into bogus heroes?