On Thursday, news broke that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and his family flew to Cancun for vacation as millions of Texans lost power during a historic freeze and snowstorm. On Wednesday, news broke that the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn and the FBI are investigating Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D-N.Y.) COVID-19 nursing home scandal.
One of these scandals involves a senator skipping town amid a crisis — before flying back to Texas the next day — while the other involves a governor having ordered nursing homes to admit COVID-19-positive patients, exposing the population most vulnerable to the virus, and then covering up the scandal — and then threatening to “destroy” a fellow Democrat who spoke up about it.
Cruz later said he was just dropping off his daughter and her friends for a trip to Canun because their school had been canceled. Even if Cruz had intended to spend a week in Mexico, there would be no comparison between these two scandals. Cruz’s “scandal” doesn’t have a body count.
Even so, the ABC News show World News Tonight spent four times — four times — as much airtime discussing Cruz’s scandal as the show did discussing Cuomo’s.
As Newsbusters’ Nicholas Fondacaro pointed out, World News Tonight covered Cuomo’s nursing home scandal for a total of 54 seconds following the news of the federal probe — after two days of refusing to mention the scandal at all. Yet the show found a full three minutes and 28 seconds to discuss Ted Cruz’s horrible optics.
Yes, a legacy media news outlet gave the Ted Cruz “scandal” nearly four times the coverage (3.85 times, to be precise) that it gave to Cuomo’s career-destroying scandal.
This kind of thing makes me very appreciative of you wonderful PJ Media VIP subscribers. You keep us in business and enable us to cover the stories the legacy media wants to ignore.
Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
