When the media make a mistake, they are supposed to issue a correction.
So, here we go.
We of the Washington Examiner opinion page regret not having criticized disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo nearly as harshly as he deserved during the coronavirus pandemic.
Cuomo is not merely, as we put it, “an incompetent, self-promoting sleaze.”
It was not enough for us to say that Cuomo divided his time as governor between the only two things he knows how to do — sexually harassing women and driving a net 1.5 million residents out of his state.
We should have said so much more and so much worse, and we regret this error of omission.
It is insufficient to note, as we have, that Cuomo is a disgraced, dog-abandoning ex-governor who was all over the media promoting his book on his success fighting COVID-19, even as people were dying from his worst-in-America handling of the pandemic.
It was not enough to point out that he behaved like so many other hypocrites in power, giving his family special access to COVID-19 testing. We should have known that more was afoot when he disinvited his 89-year-old mother for Thanksgiving solely in order to avoid charges of political hypocrisy after weeks of lecturing New Yorkers about avoiding holiday gatherings. We failed to say enough about how Cuomo only follows the rules if he’s worried about getting caught or called out for breaking them.
Cuomo, who jammed patients who tested positive for COVID-19 into long-term healthcare facilities, tried to blame former President Donald Trump for a spike in his state’s coronavirus cases. We wish we had said more about this and about how Cuomo lied and said “it never happened” that COVID-positive patients were put into nursing homes.
Cuomo, when asked by a reporter how he expects working-class New Yorkers to cope with losing their jobs to state COVID-19 lockdowns, snapped, “You want to go to work? Go take a job as an essential worker. Do it tomorrow.” We regret our failure to throw these words directly back in his face, given that his own job throughout this pandemic was done so badly that it might as well not have been done at all.
Cuomo is much more than just a malicious, arrogant governor whose signed order doomed as many as 11,000 nursing home patients to die of COVID-19. He is more than just the lying governor who then tried to cover up his role in that matter by “disappearing” the key document from the internet.
Cuomo is all of those things, of course. But he is so much more, and we regret our failure to denounce and disparage him sufficiently.
Because we now know that Cuomo is a liar and a fraud on a scale far grander than anything we understood. Perhaps this is unsurprising for someone who thinks he can make public documents disappear from the internet, but Cuomo also knowingly falsified information about New York’s overall coronavirus death toll, concealing 12,000 deaths out of 55,000.
So, yes, Cuomo hid more than 20% of his state’s coronavirus victims’ bodies in an effort to avoid federal investigations and personal accountability.
Cuomo’s successor, Gov. Kathy Hochul, released the damning new data this week.
Cuomo had received so much praise and adulation from so many quarters. It is to President Joe Biden’s deep and abiding shame that he praised Cuomo, even as he was resigning in disgrace for his appalling treatment of women. And out of pure partisanship, Biden’s Justice Department dropped its investigation into the nursing home deaths that Cuomo and a handful of other Democratic governors had directly brought about through their ill-advised policies. Biden, who refrained from calling for Cuomo to resign until it was far too late to matter, was just another enabler among so many others.
Speaking of enablers, so many in the media owe corrections perhaps considerably longer and more apologetic than our own. So many of them went out of their way to make this chump seem like a god, all the while desperately searching for some way, any way at all, to besmirch the reputations of honest, decent people in elected office who genuinely struggled to deal with the pandemic, but perhaps belonged to the wrong political party.
Cuomo’s decisions killed thousands needlessly, but anyone who approached the coronavirus in ways that did not line up with leftists’ authoritarian instincts had to be made an example of.
It is specifically worth noting, because of the precise parallel with what we now know Cuomo did, how many news outlets promoted and hyped an allegation by a kooky conspiracy theorist that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration was undercounting Florida COVID-19 deaths by a few dozen out of thousands. That allegation wasn’t even true, but in the context of what Cuomo actually did and got away with for more than a year under the media’s noses, that shameful journalistic atrocity is astounding in hindsight.
In the end, we regret that we did not sufficiently savage Andrew Cuomo and his utter unworthiness of public office as he deserved. We did not sufficiently highlight his callous, insouciant, and arrogant approach to government. We confess to our failure to accuse him of lies, crimes, and incompetence fully commensurate with what justice demanded at the time.
And we look forward to seeing others issue corrections about their coverage of Cuomo.
