What Would You Do for Your Family?
THE TELEVISION PERSONALITY Chris Cuomo got in trouble with his employer, CNN, yesterday. It had long since been established and re-established that Cuomo, while performing the role of a journalist on television, had been serving as a behind-the-scenes crisis manager for his older brother, Andrew Cuomo, while Andrew Cuomo's governorship of New York was collapsing into scandal. For more than six months, this had not prevented Chris Cuomo from holding his job.
This week, though, state investigators released a collection of evidence to support the report they had already released about Andrew Cuomo's behavior—including texts and emails in which Chris Cuomo acted exactly the way one might expect the crisis manager for a doomed and guilty politician to act: helping draft statements, concocting spin, offering to trawl his journalistic sources for information about what new damaging stories of sexual misconduct were on their way. With the specifics available in black and white (and after the first day of hubbub failed to subside), CNN finally suspended the younger Cuomo.
Not everyone agreed with this decision! Or, at least, there were people who wanted to be seen holding a nuanced opinion about it. "I confess to some ambivalence about Chris Cuomo’s suspension," the former New York Times writer Clyde Haberman, father of Times Trump reporter Maggie Haberman, tweeted. "It’s deserved on many levels. But wouldn’t you help your brother if he fell into trouble, even of his own making?
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