Caught in the barrage of well-deserved opprobrium directed at New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is his television-star brother Chris Cuomo. Chris, a liberal host at CNN, was advising his brother on how to handle the charges of sexual harassment.
This clearly raises some questions of ethics and propriety. The line taken by many reporters is that it is always inappropriate for a journalist to advise a politician.
Basic rule of journalism that should not have to be repeated: If you are in the news business, you have no business strategizing for, coordinating with or ghostwriting anything for *any* political figure.
— Eamon Javers (@EamonJavers) August 3, 2021
There’s a lot of sense behind this rule, and generally it’s true. Also, CNN personnel were clearly on to something when they suggested maybe Cuomo take leave from his anchor chair while he was advising his brother.
But I think most people, including Javers, a venerable reporter and the author of the tweet above, are seeing this in a way that’s slightly off. It seems to me that advising his brother wasn’t Chris Cuomo’s grave moral error in the past couple of years. The moral error was repeatedly having the governor on the air in order to lionize him — while he disastrously mishandled the coronavirus outbreak in his state.
Think about it in terms of duty. Chris Cuomo has a duty to his viewers and a duty to his family.
If your brother is in trouble, you generally have a duty to help him out. We can debate how Andrew’s culpability plays into Chris’s duty here. Obviously, Chris can’t morally aid and abet Andrew’s predations. If Chris believes Andrew is guilty, that obviously changes how Chris ought to advise his brother.
But it’s far too broad a claim to assert that because Chris is a journalist, he cannot help his brother on anything touching politics. What makes this hard-and-fast rule less apt is that Chris is a liberal opinion journalist whose politics and partisanship are obvious to everyone.
How should we consider Chris Cuomo’s duty to his viewers? The key here is that a TV show host owes it to his viewers (and his employer) not to use his perch for personal causes. People are tuning in to get what you, a professional, believe is the most important news and commentary. If you instead use it to pump up your friends or family, you are abusing your privileged position.
That’s clearly what Chris Cuomo did in 2020 when he had a series of puff segments with his brother, a governor whose incompetence helped kill thousands of people.
Chris Cuomo maybe should have gone further and avoided covering anything that touched on his brother’s problems — that is, lay off of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and don’t cover other politicians’ sexual harassment accusations. At some point, the viewers or the CNN brass might say, “your list of recusals makes you unable to host a whole show, so we’re going to make you a reporter on an issue you can cover without conflict.”
None of this is simple. Ethics can be complex. But what’s not complicated is this: A man’s duty to his brother comes ahead of his duty to his employer or his customers.
