Andrew Cuomo called out by local reporters for shutting them out: 'Closed press vaccination tour continues'
'The press doesn't work for him,' one reporter tweeted
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s "closed press vaccination tour continues," Jesse McKinley, the Albany bureau chief for the New York Times, regretted on Twitter on Tuesday, as local reporters continue to grumble at their lack of access.
This time Cuomo’s team used COVID restrictions as an excuse, as once again no questions were allowed at the Javits Convention Center.
Yet why, reporters wondered, has Cuomo continued to allow his supporters into these events if safety is the issue?
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}CUOMO GRILLED ABOUT REPORTS OF FAMILY GETTING COVID TESTING PRIORITY
"The substance of that event is to get the local community involved in getting the vaccines," Cuomo has said in defense.
Republican Marc Molinaro, who ran against Cuomo for governor in 2018, called that answer "utter nonsense."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Cuomo was chummy with reporters in Albany at the beginning of the pandemic, but he's now facing more difficult questions concerning dueling scandals about his nursing home policy and accusations of sexual harassment.
NY1 reporter Zack Fink noted when Cuomo’s office does take questions, they are pre-selected inquiries that don’t touch on his many controversies. Derrick Waller of ABC7 concurred.
CUOMO SIGNS BILL REPEALING NURSING HOME COVID-19 LIABILITY PROTECTIONS
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Mainstream outlets have also begun more aggressively reporting on Cuomo since the investigation of his administration’s suspected cover-up of the state’s nursing home deaths. A January report from New York Attorney General Letitia James revealed the Cuomo administration may have undercounted those deaths by as much as 50 percent.
Other negative headlines revealed Cuomo provided COVID tests for family members like CNN's Chris Cuomo when the public couldn’t get their hands on them.
Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center concluded media members simply do not need Cuomo anymore. He says they were only bolstering him in case then-presidential candidate Joe Biden didn’t make it to the finish line in 2020.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"He’s now excess baggage," Gainor told Fox. "They mostly want him to go away for the sexual harassment stuff and that in effect hides the press’s culpability."
Now that the Democrats won the election, Cuomo is "an appendix," he said.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"The man won an Emmy last year because the press promoted him so much for his coverage ... Because they built him up so much, it’s hard to take him down from where they put him," Gainor said.
"When local and national adulation comes your way on a daily basis, as it did in the Spring of 2020 for Andrew Cuomo, you’re happy to meet the press to soak it all in," Fox News contributor and Hill columnist Joe Concha said. "But now things are hard and uncomfortable for the man dubbed as the ‘Luv Gov.’"
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Members of both parties, including New York's Democratic Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, have called on Cuomo to resign, but he has ignored them.