It was just two months ago, in the aftermath of the U.S. Capitol riot, that an idea was floated that could help stop all the misinformation in our society: a “reality czar.”
It was a New York Times piece by tech columnist Kevin Roose (his new book “Futureproof” is a must read if you’re interested in automation replacing you at work) on Feb. 2 that quoted experts who floated ideas to stop what the paper called the “scourge of hoaxes and lies.”
Roose’s piece threw out some interesting solutions — although “reality czar” is Orwellian, a Soviet-style solution to misinformation.
The harsh reality is that news consumers will need to read a wider variety of news sources if they are interested in finding solid facts, on-the-record sources and some sense of balanced reporting. On issues linked to religion, culture and politics, that will mean paying more attention to independent religious publications — including Catholic websites — that are now punching way above their weight. Hold that thought, because we will come back to it.
The truth is reality used to be what journalism purported to report on.
That’s no longer true given how polarized the news media has become over the past decade, a progression that sped up during the Donald Trump years and following the proliferation of partisan news sources during the internet age.
From a political standpoint, this brand of one-sided journalism has allowed politicians to earn cover from many mainstream newsrooms for alleged wrongdoings. On the left, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, embroiled in dual scandals regarding nursing home deaths during COVID-19 and growing claims of sexual harassment, is a prime example of this phenomena.
Cuomo scandal: sexual harassment rife in New York state capitol, female reporters say https://t.co/r8MOVyk9k9
— Guardian news (@guardiannews) March 18, 2021
At this time last year, professionals at news organizations were fawning all over his press conferences as the country plunged into the pandemic. Many journalists considered Cuomo the coronavirus reality czar.
Why? Cuomo, a Democrat, served as the counterweight to then-President Trump. Cuomo was calm, collected and exuded control. Trump, meanwhile, served up misinformation, anti-masking and injecting bleach into your veins to stop the virus. Reminds me of when the media trumpeted then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York for his response to 9/11 to draw contrast to President George W. Bush, who had been viewed largely as inept and absent in the hours following the terror attacks.
Trump made it easy for Cuomo to be a hero. Nonetheless, the press was quick to fall for Cuomo because they wanted to. He fit their simple narrative that Trump was bad, while Cuomo was good. It had nothing to do with reality. We wouldn’t be in the mess that we’re in now if the press had done its job — that is, report the news objectively and not choose sides. Let the editorial pages do that, not the news section. In a world where people live in separate news realities, New York Times readers saw Cuomo as a savior. Being anti-Trump — and not objective — was the moral position, but at what cost?
Alas, not everyone fell for Cuomo. The man who would garner an Emmy and also pen a book on leadership in the COVID-19 age made several major blunders.
An executive order he issued is alleged to have led to the deaths of thousands of senior citizens, the most vulnerable among the population. He and his staff allegedly covered the data up and instead counted them as hospital deaths, not nursing home ones. Add to that that the eight women (a number that could rise further once by the time you read this) have accused Cuomo of sexual harassment and you have an embattled governor who now refuses to resign.
Who didn’t fall for Cuomo? Well, news organizations with conservative editorial boards (like the New York Post) and many in the Catholic press did not.
Why? Cuomo became a villain to them years ago. In 2019, when Cuomo, a Catholic, expanded abortion rights in New York state, many in the Catholic world had called for his excommunication.
That brings me back to the big idea of this post. The Cuomo scandals — a new one emerged this week after it was reported that he gave his family special treatments in getting COVID-19 tests last year — have been put into context by Catholic writers and thinkers, most of them not writing for mainstream news outlets, like no others over the past month. These writers have brought up Cuomo’s past in a way that many newsrooms have failed to do in their news coverage.
To his credit, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, a conservative Catholic, wrote a piece framing the post-Trump era — at least President Joe Biden’s first few weeks in office. Cuomo is part of that reality:
You may have noticed, for instance, the long-overdue collapse of the heroic story around Andrew Cuomo, the Tough Blue State Governor par excellence, whose pandemic news conferences inspired such fawning media coverage — from late-night hosts who declared themselves admiring “cuomosexuals,” from his own CNN-host brother — that the governor wrote a book about “leadership lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic” while the pandemic was still going on.
For the sake of the heroic story, the fact that Cuomo and Bill de Blasio jointly botched New York’s initial response to the coronavirus was airbrushed out of the televised hagiography. The fact that the governor shipped potentially contagious patients back to nursing homes was reported on but didn’t dent Cuomo’s reputation, becoming a cause célèbre mostly in the right-wing press. And the bullying, berating side of Cuomo that’s suddenly front-and-center in stories about his alleged cover-up of nursing-home death numbers — well, that was portrayed as the seriousness a reeling country needed.
Only now is the more complete Cuomo story taking hold.
Douthat’s piece did not focus strictly on Cuomo. Instead, his column had a larger thesis:
I wrote last week, at Rush Limbaugh’s passing, about how the success of the conservative media has often been bad news for conservatism. One can also say, though, that the conservative media’s retreat into a dream palace has made portions of the mainstream-cum-liberal media stupider — slow to scrutinize their own narratives, question their own icons, or acknowledge the importance of stories that might vindicate the right.
But the other thing to recognize here is that the press was not wrong to desire heroic leaders or institutions that Got the Pandemic Right. The attempt to wish those leaders and institutions into being is a media failure, but the fact that the media looked for them is not.
In the failure to find them, and in the substitution of figures who ended up exposed as corrupt or just incompetent, we can see once again the importance of thinking about how we got Trump in the first place.
That search for heroes, even ones who turned out to be villains, is exactly what dominated news coverage last year.
Reality often took a backseat to myth. But, clearly, Catholic writers are aware of the perils of trying to turn Cuomo into a savior.
Ratings for @ChrisCuomo nosedive as @NYGovCuomo scandals escalate https://t.co/rW1l96aR0K
— Fox News (@FoxNews) March 19, 2021
Writing in The Pillar on March 5, Ed Condon, a canon lawyer and former Washington bureau chief for Catholic News Agency, made the following observation about Cuomo:
Before his much-praised “leadership” during the pandemic, Cuomo’s signature achievement was, in 2019, signing into law one of the most expansive abortion laws in the nation, protecting the right to kill an unborn child up to the moment of birth for, essentially, any reason or none at all. Cuomo, a Catholic, ordered the New York City skyline lit up in pink as a celebration of his achievement.
It is not surprising, to me at least, that the kind of person who would celebrate such contempt for unborn life, and who would stack his reputation for “leadership” by suppressing the number of lives lost through his pandemic policies, might also be the sort of person who didn’t have all that much respect for the dignity of young women.
Politics is full of men who are, some tacitly, some explicitly, willing and able to suborn the humanity of others to pursue their own ends. In the culture of death, the only life that counts is your own. It is, to borrow a phrase, a seamless garment: unborn children, young women, or the elderly infirm, none of them matter next to the pursuit of power and its exercise.
It has been this type of analysis and context that has been sorely lacking in mainstream pieces. Whether you agree with Condon’s take or not, this piece dares to explore Cuomo’s past attitudes and actions and then to consider how they may have influenced more recent decisions.
Four days later, Kathryn Jean Lopez, a Catholic who writes on politics and faith for National Review, called Cuomo “the poster governor for our throwaway society.” This was how she opened her essay:
There was a moment last year when I listened to Andrew Cuomo talk about how every life has value – as he was shutting down the Empire State — when I thought: Goodness — after he expanded abortion in New York the previous year and celebrated with lights on the bridge named after his father and on the Freedom Tour, which should be a symbol of Resurrection, not of death — could he by some miracle really mean it? Could he consider every vulnerable life worthy of protection? It would take a miracle, but, hey, we all know the story of St. Paul.
Well, then there was the nursing-home order that unnecessarily made elderly men and women in nursing homes even more vulnerable to COVID-19 than they would have otherwise been. And then there were the lies and cover-up, halving the numbers so he wouldn’t have to be accountable. And now we are only beginning to learn that there’s been a similar order in homes for the disabled in the state that’s still in effect.
The fact of the matter is that this is all ideologically consistent with where the Democratic Party and our culture to a pernicious extent is: We value those who have voices — and money and power. But the elderly who are no longer productive members of society? We cast them aside. We warehouse them. Those with disabilities? We honestly seem to prefer to eliminate them rather than deal with the challenges of love that stretch our hearts.
MeToo may be what does Andrew Cuomo in, but he is so much of what Pope Francis has been talking about in naming our society the throwaway society. I often think Manhattan demonstrates it in the most obvious ways as one moves from the abortion clinic, to the piles of trash, to the addicted mentally ill men walking the streets and other lost souls afraid of the city shelters, to reading about people in Albany lobbying for assisted suicide. Somehow the LuvGov managed to expedite a government-insisted involuntary death for — we don’t even know how many. Faceless, nameless people, unless we are talking about your mother or father — or mother-in-law and father-in-law for the indefatigable Janice Dean — or brother or sister or friend.
For broader context about Cuomo, his ambitions and his father, you can go back to 2019.
The Catholic Thing, a conservative blog, had featured a piece in 2019 by George Marlin, a former candidate for mayor on the Conservative Party line in New York City. In his piece, he asked whether Cuomo should be excommunicated by the church. The column came in response to Cuomo expanding abortion rights across the state.
Governor Andrew Cuomo is very different than his father, Governor Mario Cuomo. The elder Cuomo tried to be St. Thomas More and Machiavelli at one and the same time.
In his famous 1984 Notre Dame speech on “Religious Belief and Public Morality,” the More-Cuomo said “The Catholic Church is my spiritual home. My head is there and my hope. . . . [and] I accept the Church’s teaching on abortion.” But the Machiavelli-Cuomo gave himself an “out” by claiming that as a public official, he could not impose his private religious views on the rest of society.
Mario Cuomo demonstrated the absurdity of his position every time he vetoed death penalty legislation that was approved overwhelmingly by the Legislature and was supported by over 60 percent of New Yorkers. Cuomo imposed his personal moral objections even though there was public opinion against him.
Andrew Cuomo is vastly different from his father. There is no duality; he prefers to be a Machiavellian and he promotes whatever works to advance his political ambitions.
It’s advancing those political ambitions that has gotten Cuomo into the problems he faces these days.
News coverage may, sadly, be increasingly slanted, but seeking out Catholic journalists and news sites can provide the broader context readers will need to understand Cuomo. And that’s the reality of the media ecosystem of the present. There’s no need for a czar to rule on this one.
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