Disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been stripped of the International Emmy award he won for his coronavirus pandemic press conferences.
That’s great — in fact, maybe this is also a good time for the television Academy to rethink the Emmy it gave former Vice President Al Gore in 2007.
“In light of the New York Attorney General’s report, and Andrew Cuomo’s subsequent resignation as Governor, it is rescinding his special 2020 International Emmy Award,” the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences announced Tuesday in a statement. “His name and any reference to his receiving the award will be eliminated from International Academy materials going forward.”
But wait — hold your applause. The committee deserves no praise for reversing course after the state’s attorney general concluded the former governor had, in fact, sexually harassed at least 11 women, including state employees. The award was indisputably stupid from the get-go, even before those allegations. The Academy shouldn’t be allowed to forget this embarrassment.
Last year, the Academy chose to award Cuomo for his supposed leadership, even as his disastrous stewardship in New York helped cause the second-highest per capita COVID-19 death rate in the country, beaten only by New Jersey.
Cuomo’s award came “in recognition of his leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic and his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world,” the Academy explained last year. “The Governor’s 111 daily briefings worked so well because he effectively created television shows, with characters, plot lines, and stories of success and failure,” International Academy President and CEO Bruce Paisner said of the group’s decision to reward Cuomo’s failures.
Paisner added, “People around the world tuned in to find out what was going on, and ‘New York tough’ became a symbol of the determination to fight back.”
The academy last year made the case for why Cuomo deserved the Emmy:
As I noted at the time, this award was insulting for at least three reasons. First, it was offensive to the victims of the governor’s disastrous order forcing infectious coronavirus patients into long-term care facilities, which may have killed more than 11,000 people. Second, it was offensive because it denied the reality of Cuomo’s mishandling of the pandemic. His leadership was toxic, capricious, misguided, confused, dishonest, self-aggrandizing, and, worst of all, ineffectual.
Finally, the Emmy was offensive because it assumed we were all too dimwitted to know any better. It was as if to say, “Ignore your eyes and ears. Cuomo is actually great! Look at those press conferences!”
Let’s just call this what it is: Cuomo won an Emmy because he was not Donald Trump, and several liberals looked in all the wrong places for someone to praise and honor in the COVID era.
Good on the Academy for revoking the award, but it’s not nearly enough. Even before Cuomo was a harassing, aide-groping sleaze, he was an incompetent, self-promoting sleaze who oversaw his state’s net loss of nearly 1.5 million residents to other states in the last decade. It’s no accident Cuomo’s New York lost the equivalent of Manhattan’s population to other states between 2010 and 2020.
He should have never received the Emmy in the first place, and it’s a disgrace the Academy should never be allowed to live down.
