Cuomo And The Lincoln Project Are Media-Created Monsters

 
By David Sirota and Andrew Perez

In the chaos of 2020, the national press corps used all of its magical mythmaking and storytelling powers to conjure two towering political heroes for a country in crisis. From the maw of the media machine, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Lincoln Project emerged as our alleged sentinels bravely battling a deadly pandemic and an authoritarian president — and supposedly leading us with principles and morality into a new era of accountability and integrity.

For millions of credulous liberals already binging on West Wing reruns, the twin tales conjured some more of that good old-fashioned hope-and-change nostalgia, and seemed to serve as a cheeky reminder that not all heroes wear capes. But in the last 24 hours, the entire façade has collapsed, revealing that those bravely trying to sound the alarm for months were right all along — and those benefiting from the media-driven fraud were attempting to evade accountability and self-servingly cover up a grotesquerie of mismanagement, corruption, and abuse.

Will the wrongdoers face any consequences or accountability? Or will they be treated like the purveyors of previous frauds, like the Iraq War and the financial crisis, and continue to be platformed and valorized by the press corps? And will our media overlords engage in any self-reflection about the monsters they manufactured?

The details of the two tales vary, but the narrative arcs are eerily similar. That they crescendoed in the same single news cycle makes their cautionary tales all the more poignant.

Casualties Were Hidden As Cuomo Helped Donors Get A Liability Shield

In Cuomo’s case, the Democratic governor’s aides were caught on tape effectively admitting that they “froze” and did not release the details of thousands of nursing home deaths from COVID-19 because they feared consequences from federal law enforcement officials.

“We were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, and what we start saying, was going to be used against us,” Cuomo’s top aide told New York legislators on Wednesday. The comments were first reported by the New York Post.

No doubt, Trump’s Justice Department was as highly politicized as Cuomo advisers feared — but that is hardly a legitimate justification for hiding details of thousands of deaths. And the framing of it as some innocent, unplanned, deer-in-the-headlights slip-up is absurd, considering the context.

Cuomo’s administration hid the nursing home casualty data after his administration slipped provisions into the state budget that helped the governor’s largest health care industry donors obtain legal immunity for nursing home executives.

At the time, New York legislators like Assemblyman Ron Kim were arguing that such liability shields were endangering nursing home residents by removing the threat of lawsuits against nursing home companies that tried to maximize profits by cutting corners. Kim and his allies were successful in repealing and limiting some aspects of those liability shields in August, but later that month it became clear the Cuomo administration had not been adequately disclosing details of the ongoing decimation occurring in nursing homes.

In effect, burying the casualty information constructed two liability shields: one for a health care industry that dumped millions into New York Democratic Party coffers, and another for Cuomo himself. It deprived Kim and other legislators of real-time data buttressing their arguments to halt the corporate immunity law (which was being replicated by other states and by Republicans in Congress). It also shielded the governor from political blowback for both his mismanagement of the crisis and his fealty to donors.

That said, Cuomo’s political liability shield could only exist because the media built it for him. As the death toll mounted in New York, whistleblowers like Kim were all but ignored by a press corps giving Cuomo largely uncritical wall-to-wall coverage, depicting him as a swashbuckling lionheart saving his state from certain doom.

CNN granted Cuomo a recurring prime-time segment with his own brother, which was predictably used to pump up the governor. In one particularly noxious segment weeks after Cuomo helped his hospital-industry donors insert the corporate immunity provisions into the state budget, his brother remarked on all of the governor’s fawning press coverage, declaring: “You’re feeling pretty good about yourself these days, aren’t you?”

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