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      The changes at CNN look politically motivated. That should concern us all | Robert Reich

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      The changes at CNN look politically motivated. That should concern us allRobert ReichBrian Stelter’s very popular and commerically successful show was axed. The reason? Follow the money For several years, Brian Stelter’s Sunday show on CNN, Reliable Sources, has been a reliable source of intelligent criticism of Fox News, rightwing media in general, Trumpism, and the increasingly authoritarian lurch of the Republican party.Last week, CNN abruptly canceled the show and effectively fired Stelter and his staff.Why? The show was commercially successful. Its ratings have suffered somewhat lately but it was doing better than several of CNN’s primetime shows.It was cancelled by Chris Licht, CNN’s new chairman and CEO, who reportedly was not a fan of Stelter’s opinionated style.But there appears to be more to it than Stelter’s style. Licht has told CNN staff they should stop referring to Donald Trump’s “big lie” because the phrase sounds like a Democratic party talking point. Licht also wants more “straight news reporting”, along with more conservative guests.What’s motivating Licht? Follow the money.CNN’s new corporate overseer is Warner Brothers Discovery Inc, which now owns what used to be Time Warner, including CNN. The CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery is David Zaslav.Zaslav has been prodding Licht to reposition CNN to the center, and be a network preferred by “everybody … Republicans, Democrats”.But CNN is never going to be the network preferred by Republicans. Fox News has that sewn up.As Republicans move further rightward into the netherworld of authoritarianism, there’s even less possibility that CNN’s news coverage will be able to satisfy them, nor should CNN even try. If we’ve learned anything from Trump and his lapdogs at Fox News, it’s that facts, data and logic are no longer relevant to the Republican base.Even “straight news reporting” depends on what stories are featured, which facts are highlighted and the context surrounding the news. This necessitates judgment and values.The anti-democracy movement in America (as elsewhere) is among the biggest issues confronting us today. Is reporting on it considered “straight news” or “opinion”? Wouldn’t failing to report on it in a way that sounded alarms be a gross dereliction of duty?Besides, how is it possible to report on Trump or Rudy Giuliani or any number of today’s Republican leaders and not speak of the big lie, or say they’ve broken norms if not laws?So what’s motivating Zaslav? Keep following the money.The leading shareholder in Warner Brothers Discovery is John Malone, a multibillionaire cable magnate. (Malone was a chief architect in the merger of Discovery and CNN.)Malone describes himself as a “libertarian” although he travels in rightwing Republican circles. In 2005, he held 32% of the shares of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. He is on the board of directors of the Cato Institute. In 2017, he donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration.Malone has said he wants CNN to be more like Fox News because, in his view, Fox News has “actual journalism”. Malone also wants the “news” portion of CNN to be “more centrist”.It’s unlikely that Malone instructed Zaslav to tell Licht to fire Stelter. Power isn’t exercised that directly or clumsily in large corporate media bureaucracies.It’s more likely that Licht knew what Zaslav wanted, and Zaslav knew what Malone wanted. A source told Deadline’s Dominic Patten and Ted Johnson that even if Malone didn’t order Stelter’s ouster, “it sure represents his thinking”.Early last spring, Stelter wrote in his newsletter that Malone’s comments about CNN “stoked fears that Discovery might stifle CNN journalists and steer away from calling out indecency and injustice”.When you follow the money behind deeply irresponsible decisions at the power centers of America today, the road often leads to rightwing billionaires.Last Sunday, on his last show, Stelter said:“It’s not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy and dialogue. It’s not partisan to stand up to demagogues. It’s required. It’s patriotic. We must make sure we don’t give platforms to those who are lying to our faces.”Precisely.Sadly, there are still many in America – and not just billionaires like Malone – who believe that holding Trump accountable for what he has done (and continues to do) to this country is a form of partisanship, and that such partisanship has no place in so-called “balanced journalism”.This view is itself dangerous.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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      Brian Stelter rebukes CNN on final show: ‘It’s not partisan to stand up to demagogues’

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      Brian Stelter rebukes CNN on final show: ‘It’s not partisan to stand up to demagogues’ Host says, ‘It is not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy and dialogue,’ after CNN cancels media show Reliable Sources Brian Stelter, host of CNN’s media affairs show Reliable Sources which was cancelled last week after 30 years on air, used his final episode Sunday to make a pointed rebuke of the network’s new bosses and their intention to pursue a more “neutral voice” to its coverage.“It is not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy and dialogue,” Stelter said in his final monologue, which he stressed was unvetted by CNN management before he delivered it live. “It is not partisan to stand up to demagogues – it’s required, it’s patriotic.”He added: “We must make sure we do not give a platform to those who are lying to our faces.”CNN gave Stelter his marching orders last Wednesday, just four months after the network came under new leadership appointed by its owners, Warner Brothers Discovery. CNN head Chris Licht, who took over after the February departure of Jeff Zucker, has indicated that he wants to tone down the opinion quotient of its shows and “return” to an older, straighter and in his view less overtly leftwing style of reporting.It is perhaps predictable that Stelter was to become one of the first casualties among CNN’s stars under the new leadership. As NPR’s media correspondent David Folkenflik explained, Stelter was a thorn in the side of the Donald Trump White House, regularly exposing its lies and misinformation.As a result, he was “targeted for frequent criticism from conservatives for his coverage of the media during the Trump years”.Since Stelter’s booting, New York’s medialand has been rife with speculation about its causation. Some have pointed the finger at John Malone, a powerful Discovery investor who has led the charge that CNN is too partisan.Malone has criticized the network for broadcasting too much commentary and not enough on-the-ground reporting. Last November, Malone told CNBC that he would like to see CNN “evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing”.Other speculation has focused on Stelter’s CNN salary – reported to be almost $1m a year – amid intense pressure to cut the network’s budget given heavy debts within the new media conglomerate.So far the number of star scalps has been relatively small. A week before Stelter was axed, CNN’s chief legal analyst for 20 years, Jeffrey Toobin, announced that he was leaving.Toobin had previously been suspended from the network for eight months after he exposed his genitals during a Zoom call with colleagues of his then-other media outlet, the New Yorker.With Stelter’s departure, the focus at CNN is now likely to shift to whether further casualties of the new “neutral” reporting policy lie ahead. Speculation rippled through social media that Don Lemon and Jim Acosta, two of the more outspoken hosts, might be vulnerable, but according to the entertainment news website The Wrap they are safe for now.Part of Stelter’s argument as host of Reliable Sources, CNN’s longest-running show until its demise, was that it is the role of the media to hold power to account. That function was especially critical in the febrile age of Trump.With Trump hinting at another presidential run in 2024, Stelter appealed on Sunday to the bosses who had just fired him to remain resolute. “The watchword here is accountability,” he said. “CNN needs to be strong. I believe America needs CNN to be strong.”In his at times emotional last address on Reliable Sources, the largely bald-headed Stelter recalled his astonishment at becoming a TV star. “I never thought I’d actually be on TV – I just liked writing about TV,” he said. “I know this is going to sound like BS, but I thought I didn’t have enough hair to be on TV.”TopicsCNNTV newsTelevision industryUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      As Jan. 6 Panel’s Evidence Piled Up, Conservative Media Doubled Down

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      Many of Donald J. Trump’s allies in the media believe the reports about violence and criminal conduct committed by Trump supporters have been exaggerated.After the Jan. 6 committee’s final summer hearing last week, the talk on the sets of CNN and MSNBC turned to an intriguing if familiar possibility about what might result from the panel’s finding. The case for a criminal prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump, many pundits said, was not only justified but seemed more than likely given the evidence of his inaction as rioters sacked the Capitol.If that felt like déjà vu — more predictions of Mr. Trump’s looming downfall — the response to the hearings from the pro-Trump platforms felt like something new, reflecting the lengths to which his Praetorian Guard of friendly media have gone to rewrite the violent history of that day.Even as the committee’s vivid depiction of Mr. Trump’s failure to intervene led two influential outlets on the right, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, to denounce him over the weekend, many top conservative media personalities have continued to push a more sanitized narrative of Jan. 6, 2021. They have turned the Capitol Police into villains and alleged the existence of a government plot to criminalize political dissent.Mark Levin, the talk radio host, scoffed at the notion that Mr. Trump had tried to overturn the election or instigate an insurrection. If he had, Mr. Levin explained during an appearance on Fox News as other networks aired the hearings live, the former president would have taken more direct steps, such as ordering the arrest of Vice President Mike Pence or firing the attorney general.“You’d think with all the talk of criminality, they would show us,” Mr. Levin said, speaking on Fox News on Thursday night. “There’s nothing,” he added. “Absolutely zero evidence that Donald Trump was involved in an effort to violently overthrow our elections or our government. Literally nothing.”And to put a finer point on exactly what he meant, Mr. Levin read from a section of the 14th Amendment that says anyone who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” is barred from holding federal office.That was why the media kept calling Jan. 6 “an insurrection,” Mr. Levin explained.(The writer of this article is an MSNBC contributor.)Part of the right’s message to Trump supporters is, in effect: You may have initially recoiled in horror at what you thought happened at the Capitol, but you were misled by the mainstream media. “What’s weird is that when I talk to these people, their disgust with the media over Jan. 6 is stronger now than it was a year ago,” said Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman and talk radio host who left the party because of its unwavering support for Mr. Trump. By the time the committee presented its evidence, Mr. Walsh added, “half the country didn’t give a damn or thought it was a hoax.”The dissonance can be perplexing. The same Fox News hosts who were imploring the president’s chief of staff to intercede with the president or risk “destroying his legacy,” as Laura Ingraham put it in a text to Mark Meadows on Jan. 6, now accuse the mainstream media of exaggerating the events at the Capitol.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

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      What happens when a group of Fox News viewers watch CNN for a month?

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      What happens when a group of Fox News viewers watch CNN for a month?A study that paid viewers of the rightwing cable network to switch shed light on the media’s influence on people’s views Watching Fox News can be like entering an alternative universe. It’s a world where Vladimir Putin isn’t actually that bad, but vaccines may be, and where some unhinged rightwing figures are celebrated as heroes, but Anthony Fauci, America’s top public health official, is an unrivaled villain.Given the steady stream of misinformation an avid Fox News consumer is subjected to, the viewers – predominantly elderly, white and Donald Trump-supporting – are sometimes written off as lost causes by Democrats and progressives, but according to a new study, there is still hope.Biden finds Murdoch ‘most dangerous man in the world’, new book saysRead moreIn an unusual, and labor intensive, project, two political scientists paid a group of regular Fox News viewers to instead watch CNN for a month. At the end of the period, the researchers found surprising results; some of the Fox News watchers had changed their minds on a range of key issues, including the US response to coronavirus and Democrats’ attitude to police.The findings suggest that political perspectives can be changed – but also reveals the influence partisan media has on viewers’ ideology.Polls have previously shown that viewers of Fox News, the most-watched cable news channel in the US, are far more likely to believe the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen than the average American, and are more likely to believe falsehoods about Covid-19.The extent of the network’s influence on American politics was highlighted this week, with a report that Joe Biden has privately referred to Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, as “the most dangerous man in the world” and “one of the most destructive forces in the United States”.David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, political scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale university, respectively, paid 304 regular Fox News viewers $15 an hour to instead watch up to seven hours of CNN a week during the month of September 2020. The switchers were given regular news quizzes to make sure they were indeed watching CNN, while a control group of Fox News viewers continued with their regular media diet.Much of the news cycle in September 2020 focused on policing and protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which began after Jacob Blake, a Black man, was shot and seriously injured by police in late August. During the protests Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager from Illinois, shot and killed two men and wounded another. The events became a political tool for Republicans, including Donald Trump, who later announced he would send federal law enforcement agents to Kenosha.By the end of September, the CNN watchers were less likely to agree that: “It is an overreaction to go out and protest in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin” and less likely to believe that: “If Joe Biden is elected President, we’ll see many police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists”, when compared with their peers who continued watching Fox News.The CNN switchers were also, as Bloomberg’s Matthew Yglesias reported, 10 points less likely to believe that Joe Biden supporters were happy when police officers get shot, and 11 points less likely to believe that it is “more important for the President to focus on violent protests than the coronavirus pandemic”.In addition the CNN viewers were 13 points less likely than the Fox News viewers to agree that: “If Joe Biden is elected President, we’ll see many more police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists.”In an email interview, Kalla said he and Broockman had not necessarily expected people’s opinions to change.“I think the most surprising finding is that shifting people’s media diets from Fox News to CNN for a month had any effect,” Kalla said. “People who watch cable news tend to be very politically engaged and have strong opinions about politics, limiting the impact of the media. Similarly, they also tend to be strong partisans who might not trust any source not associated with their party.”The people in the experiment, Kalla said, were “overwhelmingly pro-Trump Republicans”. Given Trump had spent much of his presidency bashing CNN – a regular chant at his rallies was “CNN sucks!” – the results are particularly surprising.“A lot of people might expect this audience to completely resist what CNN had to say, but we see people learning what CNN was reporting and changing their attitudes, too. It is therefore surprising that watching CNN had any impact at all in this experiment,” Kalla said.Fox News, and liberal networks, can influence their viewers through “agenda-setting” – covering a certain topic relentlessly – and “framing”, Kalla said – by emphasizing certain aspects of an issue.Kalla and Broockman were particularly interested in a third method of influencing: “partisan coverage filtering” – which they defined in the study as the process where “partisan outlets selectively report information, leading viewers to learn a biased set of facts”.They gave a hypothetical example of how news channels might cover a war. In the example, CNN might cover the cost of the war and the number of military personnel and civilians who died. Fox News, on the other hand, could focus on the severity of the threat that Trump’s military campaign had countered, and feature stories of liberated civilians welcoming American soldiers.“This leaves viewers of each network with different factual understandings of the conflict, and subsequently different levels of support for the conflict and the president,” Broockman and Kalla wrote.Most of the CNN switchers stuck to the length of the task, according to the study. But once it was over, and the $15 an hour was taken away, “viewers returned to watching Fox News”, Kalla said.While the study proved that people are susceptible – at least under the right conditions – to different political opinions, in the longer-term the skewing of media has had a broader, and negative, impact on the way the US functions, Kalla said.“When politicians do something bad, we hope that voters will punish them, irregardless of their party – otherwise, politicians won’t have to work hard to make our lives better in order to keep their jobs,” Kalla said.“However, this type of behavior becomes less possible if the media engages in partisan coverage filtering. If CNN doesn’t cover bad things Democrats do or good things Republicans do, and if Fox News doesn’t cover bad things Republicans do or good things Democrats do, then voters become less likely to learn this information and less able to hold their elected officials accountable.“This is troubling for the functioning of a healthy democracy.”TopicsMediaFox NewsCNNUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Chris Wallace: working at Fox News became ‘unsustainable’ after election

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      Chris Wallace: working at Fox News became ‘unsustainable’ after electionJournalist’s new show begins on archrival CNN’s streaming service after nearly 20 years with the right-leaning cable channel Chris Wallace has said working at Fox News became “increasingly unsustainable” before he jumped ship to CNN last December after almost 20 years with the right-leaning cable channel.His departure dealt a blow to Fox’s news operation at a time when its opinion side had become preeminent. The veteran journalist’s new show begins on archrival CNN’s streaming service this week and the 74-year-old spoke to the New York Times.‘Tucker the Untouchable’ goes soft on Putin but remains Fox News’s biggest powerRead more“I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion. But when people start to question the truth – ‘Who won the 2020 election? Was January 6 an insurrection?’ – I found that unsustainable,” he told the newspaper.He added: “Before, I found it was an environment in which I could do my job and feel good about my involvement at Fox. And since November of 2020, that just became unsustainable, increasingly unsustainable as time went on.”When asked why he didn’t leave Fox News earlier, he said: “I spent a lot of 2021 looking to see if there was a different place for me to do my job.”And he acknowledged: “Some people might have drawn the line earlier, or at a different point…I think Fox has changed over the course of the last year and a half. But I can certainly understand where somebody would say, ‘Gee, you were a slow learner, Chris’.”After Donald Trump lost the November 2020 election to Joe Biden, Fox skewed further from news to comment, ending its 7pm nightly broadcast, firing the political editor who had been part of Fox accurately projecting on election night that Trump had lost the crucial state of Arizona and promoting Tucker Carlson, the populist commentator and host who has consistently downplayed the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, by extremist Trump supporters, the New York Times noted.Carlson and other voices aired by Fox have spent the past four weeks playing down Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, going soft on Putin, and undermining the messages of the invaded country’s sovereignty and the Biden administration and Nato in supporting Ukraine.“One of the reasons that I left Fox was because I wanted to put all of that behind me,” Wallace said, adding that: “There has not been a moment when I have second-guessed myself about that decision.”Fox has won praise from the Kremlin earlier this month.TopicsFox NewsTV newsTelevision industryCNNDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      I’ll Bet on Susan Collins Over the Resistance

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      Here are two anecdotes from the still-unspooling saga of Jeff Zucker, no longer the head of CNN. First, from the aftermath: According to The Los Angeles Times, in a meeting between some of the network’s staffers and its corporate leadership, the CNN correspondent Jamie Gangel shared that four members of the congressional committee investigating Jan. 6 had called to say that Zucker’s exit left them “devastated for our democracy.”Second, from the background to Zucker’s departure: We already knew that he blessed the wild prime-time lovefest between the brothers Cuomo, the CNN anchor and the New York governor. But now it’s being reported by The New York Post that Zucker helped arrange the absurd interviews, sometimes through the influence of his paramour, a former Andrew Cuomo communications director, and even allegedly gave the New York governor advice on how to swat at Donald Trump during his famous Covid-19 briefings.You can put these anecdotes together and get a decent understanding of what went wrong in important parts of American media during the Trump presidency. The powerful belief that only CNN — indeed, only Jeff Zucker — stood between democracy and authoritarianism encouraged the abandonment of normal journalistic standards, the sacrifice of sobriety and neutrality to what Armin Rosen, writing for UnHerd, dubs the “centrist-branded panic industry.”Undergirding this shift, at CNN and elsewhere, was a theory that the way to blunt Trump’s demagogic power was to assemble the broadest possible coalition of elites in media and politics, to establish moral clarity and create an effective cordon sanitaire.In 2016, I believed in this strategy, urged it on Republicans during the primaries and participated in it — along with most conservative commentators I respected — by opposing Trump’s election in the fall.But then Trump won — with a minority of the vote, yes, but all that elite opposition couldn’t even get Hillary Clinton to 49 percent, and the Republicans won more votes nationally than Democrats in House elections, paying no obvious price for having nominated Trump. The American people listened to the Never Trump alliance, fanned out across our newspapers and magazines and networks, and delivered their verdict: For every Republican we persuaded, a different sort of swing voter seemed to discover that maybe there were good reasons to take a chance on Trump.What followed in Trump’s presidency was a doubling down on the elite-opposition strategy — but increasingly I doubted its approach. In its most sincere form the anti-Trump front became paranoid and credulous, addled by the Steele dossier and lost in Twitter doomscrolling. In its more careerist form, it became a racket for former Republican consultants. And in general it became its own ideological echo chamber, a circle of clarity closed to anyone with doubts.In detaching somewhat, I remained an anti-Trump conservative; after the 2020 election’s aftermath, it’s safe to say that I’m forever Never Trump. But I decided that fundamentally the elite-consolidation strategy was a failure — that it succeeded in 2020 only because of the pandemic and that it may fail in 2024 — and that if Trump were to be permanently defeated, one of two things needed to happen: Either some adaptation from Republicans, one that might seem ugly or compromised in its own way (as you see now, say, in Ron DeSantis’s winks and nods to anti-vaxxers), or some shift that made the leftward-lurching Democrats seem less dangerous to cross-pressured Americans.So those are the two questions that this column takes up regularly: Can there be Trumpism without Trump, and what’s so unappealing or frightening about progressivism and the Democratic Party? And the consistency of those themes clearly sometimes exasperates people who think they amount to moral equivalence or denial about how awful the Republican Party has become.I don’t mind those critiques, but I will close this exercise in navel-gazing with a concrete example of where I think that they go wrong. For the united front of Never Trump, there’s no greater heroine at the moment than Liz Cheney, and no clearer embodiment of Republican cowardice than Susan Collins, the Maine moderate who even now won’t say definitively that she’ll oppose Trump if he’s the 2024 nominee.I also admire Cheney’s direct anti-Trumpism, as I’ve admired it from Mitt Romney, and now even a little from Mike Pence. (Yes, it’s a low bar.) But if you believe, reasonably, that the immediate danger posed by Trump’s demagogy involves an attempted Electoral College theft in 2024, then Cheney’s work is a lot less important than the bipartisan effort underway in the Senate to reform the Electoral Count Act. And that effort is being steered, with some success so far, by Collins.Maybe the effort will ultimately fail. But it’s quite possible that the most important response to the events of Jan. 6 will be shepherded by Republicans playing a careful inside game, with the cautious navigation of the senior senator from Maine more essential than a thousand essays about never giving Trumpism an inch.That’s not a heroic view of how democracies are stabilized and demagogues finally retired. But if the choice is between this unheroism and the mentality that gave us Jeff Zucker and the brothers Cuomo, for now I’m inclined to bet on Susan Collins.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Chris Cuomo accused of sexual harassment days before CNN fired him

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      Chris Cuomo accused of sexual harassment days before CNN fired himLawyer says accuser came forward after New York’s AG office showed Cuomo took much more active role in helping brother Chris Cuomo was hit with a new allegation of sexual harassment days before CNN announced it was firing him amid an investigation into work he did defending his brother from similar harassment allegations.Chris Cuomo fired by CNN for helping brother Andrew fight sexual misconduct chargesRead moreAn attorney, Debra Katz, said on Sunday her client alleged “serious sexual misconduct” by Cuomo and had contacted CNN about the allegation on Wednesday.CNN suspended Cuomo earlier this week after details emerged about how he assisted his brother, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, as he faced sexual harassment allegations.CNN officials said “additional information has come to light” when it announced Chris Cuomo’s firing, but did not elaborate.Katz said the accuser decided to come forward after the New York attorney general’s office released evidence showing Cuomo had taken a much more active role than previously thought in strategizing and helping to craft a response to the allegations his brother was facing.When the initial allegations surfaced against Andrew Cuomo, Chris Cuomo told viewers he had “always cared very deeply about these issues”, Katz said.“Hearing the hypocrisy of Chris Cuomo’s on-air words and disgusted by his efforts to try to discredit these women, my client retained counsel to report his serious sexual misconduct against her to CNN,” Katz said in the statement.CNN was reviewing Chris Cuomo’s conduct following the new information. A law firm recommended his firing.“It goes without saying that these decisions are not easy, and there are a lot of complex factors involved,” CNN chief Jeff Zucker wrote in an email to CNN staff on Saturday.Cuomo issued a statement on Twitter, calling the decision disappointing.“This is not how I want my time at CNN to end but I have already told you why and how I helped my brother. So let me now say as disappointing as this is, I could not be more proud of the team at Cuomo Prime Time and the work we did,” he said.The new misconduct allegation comes after a veteran TV executive, Shelley Ross, wrote a column for the New York Times in September saying Chris Cuomo groped her at a party 16 years ago, when they both worked for ABC News.Cuomo told the newspaper: “I apologized to her then, and I meant it.”TopicsAndrew CuomoUS politicsNew YorkCNNnewsReuse this content More

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      Chris Cuomo fired by CNN for helping brother Andrew fight sexual misconduct charges

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      Chris Cuomo fired by CNN for helping brother Andrew fight sexual misconduct chargesPrimetime anchor was suspended on TuesdayNetwork says ‘additional information’ has come to light CNN has fired the primetime anchor Chris Cuomo for trying to help his brother, the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, fight accusations of sexual misconduct which resulted in his resignation.How Chris and Andrew Cuomo’s on-air comedy routines compromised CNNRead moreAnnouncing the firing on Saturday, CNN said “additional information” had come to light. “Chris Cuomo was suspended earlier this week,” a statement said, “pending further evaluation of new information that came to light about his involvement with his brother’s defense.“We retained a respected law firm to conduct the review and have terminated him effective immediately. While in the process of that review additional information has come to light. Despite the termination, we will investigate as appropriate.”In a statement reported by the New York Times, Cuomo, 51, said: “This is not how I want my time at CNN to end but I have already told you why and how I helped my brother.“So let me now say as disappointing as this is, I could not be more proud of the team at Cuomo Prime Time and the work we did … I owe them all and will miss that group of special people who did really important work.”The CNN anchor tested a policy of not covering his brother in early 2020 when, during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic and with New York hard-hit, the two regularly spoke and joked on air.The scandal which engulfed Andrew Cuomo spread to his younger brother, who acknowledged offering advice when the governor faced the harassment charges that he denied but that ultimately led to his resignation in August.Chris Cuomo was then suspended on Tuesday, after the release of documentation collected during an investigation of Andrew Cuomo by the New York state attorney general, Letitia James.The information released by James showed how Chris Cuomo pressed sources for information on his brother’s accusers, reported to the governor’s staff and was active in helping shape responses to the charges.That information prompted loud calls for CNN to fire Cuomo.Marissa Hoechstetter, a victims’ rights advocate, tweeted: “As a survivor who has trusted CNN with my story, it is deeply disturbing that Chris Cuomo remains employed. “His unethical behavior – plus that of anyone giving him any info in the first place – should be disqualifying for a journalist. If they keep him on, they can’t be trusted.”Charlotte Bennett, an alleged victim of sexual misconduct by Andrew Cuomo, said: “Just like his older brother, Chris Cuomo used his time, network and resources to help smear victims, dig up opposition research, and belittle our credible allegations.“Anything short of firing Chris Cuomo reflects a network lacking both morals and backbone. Does CNN stand by journalistic integrity, or will it simply excuse his actions because Chris Cuomo drives ratings?”On Saturday, CNN took action.TopicsCNNAndrew CuomoUS politicsNew YorkUS televisionTelevision industrynewsReuse this content More