{"id":49365,"date":"2021-02-22T15:12:33","date_gmt":"2021-02-22T15:12:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2021\/02\/andrew-cuomo-covid-republicans-nursing-homes\/"},"modified":"2021-02-22T17:13:44","modified_gmt":"2021-02-22T17:13:44","slug":"andrew-cuomo-isnt-the-only-one-who-needs-to-answer-for-covid-19-mismanagement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/22\/andrew-cuomo-isnt-the-only-one-who-needs-to-answer-for-covid-19-mismanagement\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrew Cuomo Isn\u2019t the Only One Who Needs to Answer for COVID-19 Mismanagement"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Our press corps is wielded as a partisan and corporate weapon, making journalists averse to covering corruption and avarice if leaders from both parties are implicated in shilling for corporate power. Which is why the press is unable to handle a scandal like Gov. Andrew Cuomo's alleged mismanagement of nursing home policy during the pandemic.<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n \n
\n New York governor Andrew Cuomo speaks during his daily news conference amid the coronavirus outbreak. (Bennett Raglin \/ Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

A group of Republican senators are pressing President Joe Biden\u2019s Justice Department to investigate Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo\u2019s mismanagement of nursing home policy during the pandemic \u2014 and conservative<\/a>\u00a0media outlets<\/a>\u00a0are excitedly touting those lawmakers\u2019 plans to spotlight the issue at this week\u2019s confirmation hearing for Biden\u2019s attorney general nominee.<\/p>\n

Cuomo deserves the criticism. However, there is some serious hypocrisy at play here. Amid an outcry about nursing home deaths, these same Republican critics copied and pasted Cuomo\u2019s infamous nursing home immunity law into their own legislation.<\/p>\n

That fact has not been spotlighted by the same conservative media machine hyping the Cuomo scandal, even though it is out in the open for all to see.<\/p>\n

The situation not only illustrates Republicans\u2019 inauthenticity, but also a broken media ecosystem so devoted to partisan storytelling, it no longer consistently covers the bipartisan corruption that does not neatly fit a Red Team\/Blue Team narrative.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

Cuomo\u2019s Republican Critics Copied and Pasted His Law Into Their Bills<\/h2>\n \n

At its core, the scandal engulfing Cuomo is really about liability shields for nursing home corporations and their executives.<\/p>\n

Early in 2020, a powerful health care industry group that delivered large donations to Cuomo\u2019s political machine\u00a0drafted<\/a>\u00a0legislative language to shield those executives from legal consequences if their cost-cutting, profit-maximizing decisions endangered nursing home residents\u2019 lives. Cuomo slipped that language into\u00a0New York\u2019s state budget<\/a>\u00a0and then did not support repealing it when critics warned that removing a lawsuit deterrent to corporate misbehavior was jeopardizing lives. Instead, his administration\u00a0withheld<\/a>\u00a0data about how many nursing home residents were dying under the immunity regime.<\/p>\n

Despite the warnings about the immunity law\u2019s effects in New York \u2014 which were later\u00a0buttressed<\/a> by a report from New York\u2019s attorney general \u2014 US Senate Republicans lifted New York\u2019s language and dropped it into their own legislation last year. Indeed, as the Daily Poster <\/em>first<\/a>\u00a0reported<\/a>,\u00a0those<\/a>\u00a0Republican\u00a0legislative<\/a>\u00a0proposals<\/a>\u00a0included word-for-word passages from Cuomo\u2019s corporate immunity law.<\/p>\n

The specific New York legislative passages spliced into the GOP bill were the most egregious ones of all \u2014 they were the provisions that took liability shields given to frontline medical workers and expanded them to protect powerful corporate executives making the big decisions.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Five of the Republican senators who cosponsored those bills \u2014 Ted Cruz, John Cornyn, Tom Cotton, Thom Tillis, and Marsha Blackburn \u2014 are now touting<\/a>\u00a0a letter they sent to Senate Democrats demanding a full probe of Cuomo\u2019s nursing home scandal.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, their indignant letter includes no mention of their own support for Cuomo\u2019s law shielding nursing home executives from lawsuits, which was part of their larger effort to provide\u00a0sweeping liability shields<\/a>\u00a0for businesses during the pandemic. Nor does their letter mention the money they received from health care industry donors that stood to benefit from the immunity proposal.<\/p>\n

And for all their letter\u2019s rhetoric expressing anger about misinformation, the Republican senators also do not ask for a Justice Department probe of Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose \u201cadministration engaged in a pattern of spin and concealment that misled the public on the gravest health threat the state has ever faced,\u201d according to an investigation by the\u00a0South Florida Sun Sentinel<\/a>.<\/em> That report found that \u201cstate officials withheld information about infections in schools, prisons, hospitals and nursing homes\u201d \u2014 and yet Republican senators somehow have nothing to say about it.<\/p>\n

Of course, an investigation of Cuomo\u2019s administration is warranted. So are the queries those GOP senators may hurl at Biden attorney general nominee Merrick Garland about the debacle. The questions are valid even if the Republican inquisitors are acting in bad faith.<\/p>\n

However, will anyone bother to ask those same Republicans about their own records?<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t about scoring cheap political points on GOP senators. This is about something much bigger. It is about whether the political system can honestly evaluate and debate a destructive policy championed by players in both parties in\u00a0states<\/a>\u00a0and in Washington.<\/p>\n

To do that, we need to know both why Cuomo did what he did, and also why his Republican critics subsequently championed his policy at the center of the scandal.<\/p>\n

Will any reporters or lawmakers bother to ask Republicans about this?<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

The Story of Bipartisan Corruption Is Now in Media No-Man\u2019s-Land<\/h2>\n \n

In our media-driven politics, the answer may end up being no, because the press corps has for the most part refused to dig deep into the issue. Many news outlets have refused to cover how corporate immunity metastasized from a Cuomo policy into a bipartisan initiative designed to shield powerful corporate officials as they presided over a public health disaster.<\/p>\n

This lack of coverage is an important story unto itself. It shows how the media machine has fractured.<\/p>\n

The immunity story is about corporate power \u2014 and corporate power is a typically taboo subject among corporate-owned legacy news outlets.<\/p>\n

That leaves the more overtly political outlets to drive coverage. But those outlets are less ideological and more partisan, and this horrific tale \u2014 if recounted honestly \u2014 cannot be neatly transformed into cannon fodder for the red-versus-blue wars.<\/p>\n

On the Right, news outlets such as Fox News\u00a0and the\u00a0New York Post<\/em> have loudly and aggressively (and accurately) reported on Cuomo\u2019s cover-up of the nursing home data and the burgeoning death toll. And yet they have been largely silent about the immunity provisions in general and Republicans\u2019 support for those provisions in specific, because that part of this saga complicates \u2014 rather than fortifies \u2014 the purely anti-Democrat narrative they are trying to promote.<\/p>\n

Similarly, until the scandal exploded last week and became an unavoidable news topic, Democratic-adjacent news outlets such as MSNBC have displayed little interest in covering the sordid details of a story that revolves around a well-known Democratic politician. That reflects a larger attitude among liberals who seem to believe that \u201ccelebrating the idea of the competent blue-state governor is more important than reckoning with the reality of a serially underachieving chief executive playing three-card monte with dead bodies,\u201d as\u00a0Slate<\/em>\u2019s Ben Mathis-Lilley explains<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The result is that the very heart of this scandal \u2014 the corporate immunity law pushed by a powerful industry and championed by lawmakers in both parties \u2014 ends up either being downplayed, or the bipartisan nature of the corruption is depicted as proof that the corrupt policy has merit.<\/p>\n

This is a microcosmic example of a larger problem. A political press corps that has been transformed into partisan and corporate weaponry is now more averse to covering stories of corruption and avarice if those stories implicate figures in both parties shilling for corporate power. Such stories annoy advertisers and \u2014 just as important \u2014 do not satiate partisan audiences, which have now been conditioned not to judge news on its merits. Instead, they reward news with clicks, likes, and shares if it seems useful to their side.<\/p>\n

That reality allows for Republican senators at this week\u2019s Garland hearing to pretend to be offended by a Democratic governor, even as they touted his law at the center of the scandal.<\/p>\n

It potentially allows Democratic senators to try to avoid the corporate immunity issue, for fear of enraging one of\u00a0their biggest campaign donors<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 the same health care industry organization that bankrolled Cuomo and pushed New York\u2019s immunity law in the first place.<\/p>\n

In short, the dynamic leaves hugely important news about bipartisan corruption in a media no-man’s-land \u2014 left to be ignored or trampled in the latest impulsive bayonet charge by one party or the other.<\/p>\n

And so as you take in the Garland hearing and all the headlines it will generate, watch for the questions about the Cuomo scandal \u2014 but also watch for what is not said or reported. The silence is part of the cover-up.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n

You can subscribe to David Sirota\u2019s investigative journalism project, the\u00a0Daily Poster<\/em>,\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A group of Republican senators are pressing President Joe Biden\u2019s Justice Department to investigate Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo\u2019s mismanagement of nursing home policy during the pandemic \u2014 and conservative\u00a0media outlets\u00a0are excitedly touting those lawmakers\u2019 plans to spotlight the issue at this week\u2019s confirmation hearing for Biden\u2019s attorney general nominee. Cuomo deserves the criticism. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1777,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49365"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1777"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49365"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49578,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49365\/revisions\/49578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}