CNN should fire prime-time host Chris Cuomo — not just for its own ethical hygiene, but to uphold journalistic standards writ large and to avoid further eroding public trust in the media.
Documents recently released by New York Attorney General Letitia James lay bare Cuomo’s transgressions. They show that the CNN host flagrantly violated basic standards against journalistic conflicts of interest and then lied about his actions while helping his older brother, then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, handle allegations of serious sexual misconduct.
It was already known that the younger Cuomo helped “advise” his brother in some ways about how to handle the crisis that eventually drove the governor from office. The new documents show that Chris Cuomo traded on his status as a journalist to funnel information from other reporters and “sources” to the governor’s chief of staff and actively participated in strategizing how to “discredit” (or, more bluntly, “smear”) the women accusing the governor.
One such report notes that Cuomo sent an email to his brother’s advisers “containing information about [accuser Charlotte] Bennett, including tweets, from her time in college.” He acquired those documents through his status as a journalist, but rather than reporting them to the public, he sent them to the governor’s “handlers.” Yet, under oath, he told investigators that, as described by the nonprofit journal The City, “he did not reach out to sources to get information about the complainants or do opposition research on them.”
That certainly doesn’t square with his text message to the governor’s top aide — “I have a lead on the wedding girl”— about a woman who said the governor tried to kiss her at a wedding.
Depending on how definitive his denials were under oath, Cuomo could face not just employment trouble but legal problems, too.
Prosecutors can examine any legal ramifications, but the journalistic ethical breaches are obvious. Even though Cuomo did no reporting for CNN about his brother’s scandal, it was an important national news story that merited a complete firewall between his journalistic job and his informal role “advising” his brother.
Even young reporters know this. Three decades ago, when the Louisiana Republican Party was regularly making national news in back-to-back humdingers of races for the U.S. Senate and for governor, I was the managing editor of the centrist, alternative Gambit New Orleans Weekly while my father was the Republican national committeeman for Louisiana. We had a strict rule whereby I absolutely could not use my father as a source and could not “advise” my father on anything political, along with several other studiously observed safeguards against journalistic conflicts of interest. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Cuomo to take any such precautions.
My father was a behind-the-scenes guy, not a big newsmaker and certainly not involved in any scandal. Because of Andrew Cuomo’s prominence, Chris Cuomo should have been even more determined to set higher firewalls than I was. Plenty of people in journalism have unavoidable familial conflicts of interest, but most, unlike Cuomo, successfully avoid using journalistic tools and status to help their relative’s political careers.
Major journalistic organizations owe it to their fellow tradesmen and to the public to uphold basic ethical norms. Otherwise, public trust in all real news withers while dangerous conspiracy theories easily take root. CNN should recognize, with abundant clarity, that the newly released documents make Cuomo utterly untenable as a legitimate professional purveyor of news.
