CNN's Andrew Cuomo coverage turns after weeks of pressure

After weeks of pressure, CNN has been aggressively covering New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D., as he faces accusations of covering up nursing home deaths in his state and threatening a member of his own party.

It's a stark reversal in tone for the left-leaning network after hosts like Brian Stelter and Cuomo's brother Chris Cuomo gushed over his leadership abilities throughout 2020, despite the state leading the country in COVID deaths. Stelter at one point said Cuomo was providing "hope, but not false hope" and said he would pass on some of the governor's truisms to his own children.

Now, Cuomo is in political peril after an investigation from state Attorney General Letitia James, D., found he dramatically underreported coronavirus nursing home deaths, and Cuomo's secretary Melissa DeRosa said he had hidden the scope of the fatalities for fear of a federal investigation by the Trump administration.

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CNN reported Wednesday on New York assemblyman Ron Kim claiming Cuomo had called him at home and threatened his career if he didn't cover up for DeRosa. Kim has been one of Cuomo's strongest critics on the matter from within his own party, and Republicans have called for Cuomo to be investigated and even resign.

"No man has ever spoken to me like that in my entire life," Kim said. "At some point he tried to humiliate me, asking: 'Are you a lawyer? I didn't think so. You're not a lawyer.' It almost felt like in retrospect he was trying to bait me and anger me and say something inappropriate. I'm glad I didn't."

CNN anchor Jake Tapper has referred to the nursing home matter as a "'scandal" and ripped Cuomo during his closing monologue on his Sunday show "State of the Union." Cuomo has protested that where people died of coronavirus is irrelevant, but critics note that the nursing home deaths were tied to his directive, which he eventually reversed, that they accept COVID-positive patients.

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"Where those people died and why they died and if they died because of Cuomo’s March directive, that is information in the public interest," Tapper said. "And fear of political enemies using the data against you, that’s not an excuse for covering it up from the public."

Also, after facing sharp criticism for allowing Chris Cuomo to converse on the air with his older brother last year, CNN announced this week it reinstated a ban on Cuomo brother interviews.

The network said it lifted the original ban last year due to the extraordinary nature of the pandemic. Chris Cuomo interviewed the governor at least 10 times, where they discussed battling the coronavirus but also made jokes, talked about their mother, and even did prop comedy. Despite the conflict of interest, their routines were well-received by much of the media at the time, and the elder Cuomo enjoyed favorable mainstream press coverage throughout 2020.

CNN political writer Chris Cillizza admitted the reversal in fortune last month, writing a column headlined, "Andrew Cuomo's Covid-19 performance may have been less stellar than it seemed," followed by one last week headlined, "The story keeps getting worse for Andrew Cuomo on Covid-19."

Last May, Cillizza warmly praised Cuomo for his work on the virus.

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"Cuomo often came under criticism for being, essentially, a terrific bureaucrat but it's that intimate knowledge of the state and its government apparatus that has served him extremely well in this moment," he wrote at the time.