I am thrilled that the media has finally started talking about New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s nursing home scandal. I really am. It’s great to see Cuomo getting rightfully called out. He’s not just getting called by the media, but from within his own party. Heck, even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is calling for an investigation. When you’ve lost AOC, you’ve got problems, and Andrew Cuomo has problems, make no mistake about that.
But the real issue here is why it took so long for the media to report on it, and why Democrats are suddenly pretending to care. Heck, there are even calls for impeachment from within his own party!
The media finally started talking about the scandal a few weeks ago, in the wake of the New York attorney general’s office releasing a report saying that New York’s nursing home death count from COVID-19 was undercounted by as much as 50 percent. Those of us in conservative media were scratching our heads thinking “This is news? We’ve been talking about this for months!” Suddenly, with the presidential election over, it became okay to point out that Andrew Cuomo, who’d been a darling of the mainstream media during the pandemic, was corrupt and sleazy, and had deliberately covered up nursing home death data in New York State.
But conservative media knew. We knew even as Cuomo landed a book deal about his “leadership” during the COVID-19 crisis. We knew when he won an Emmy award for his COVID briefings during the pandemic. At PJ Media, we’ve been calling out Cuomo’s deadly nursing home policy and his cover-up of the policy’s impact since May of last year. Back in July, I explained in detail how the cover-up was executed. Others on conservative television networks and talk radio, and print/online media were giving the scandal the coverage it deserved.
And yet there were crickets from the liberal mainstream media, and Cuomo’s favorability rating skyrocketed to 78 percent, even as hundreds and thousands of grandmas were dying because of his reckless policy. And it was his policy. By executive order, Cuomo mandated that nursing homes accept COVID-19 patients on March 25. Cuomo eventually had the executive order removed from the the state health department website, and then he tried to blame Trump for the policy.
But the mainstream media, desperate to make Trump take the fall for COVID-19, fawned over Cuomo, whose record on COVID was so bad it skewed America’s figures drastically. Dr. Fauci even praised New York’s response, saying, “New York got hit worse than any place in the world. And they did it correctly.”
The media’s fawning over Cuomo was so influential that party insiders were actually floating the idea of Cuomo replacing Joe Biden on the 2020 ballot. There was no excuse for this. The NY Attorney General’s report didn’t tell us anything that conservative media hadn’t been pointing out repeatedly for months. Yet, only now has the mainstream media seen fit to cover the scandal. Only now have Democrats seen fit to care. None of them deserve any credit for throwing Cuomo under the bus now because the scandal is not new. It’s old. They chose to ignore it. They chose to defend and lionize Cuomo instead of call him out. Cuomo’s policy is a huge scandal—that cannot be doubted. But, just as scandalous is the way the mainstream media ignored it for nearly a year.
_____
Matt Margolis is the author of Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter, Gab, Facebook, MeWe, Heroes, Rumble, and CloutHub.
Two Charts That Reveal How Bad New York’s Botched Coronavirus Response Was
COVER-UP: Cuomo Investigates Himself, Finds He’s Not at Fault for Deadly COVID-19 Nursing Home Policy
Investigation Reveals How Cuomo and De Blasio Made the Coronavirus Pandemic Worse
New York State Deliberately Covered Up Full Extent of Coronavirus Nursing Home Deaths
