Howard Kurtz on Lincoln Project scandals, media coverage
Fox News media analyst discusses fallout from the Lincoln Project scandals on ‘America Reports.’
Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and The Lincoln Project have three things in common; they're both mired in major scandals, they were prominent adversaries of President Trump during the 2020 election, and they received glowing coverage from the mainstream media prior to their present troubles.
A piece published Tuesday by the left-wing Jacobin magazine declared in its headline, "The Lincoln Project and Andrew Cuomo Are Media-Created Monsters," explaining that the media made of them "into heroes of 2020" before the new year brought a rude awakening.
"In the chaos of 2020, the national press corps used all of its magical mythmaking and storytelling powers to conjure two towering political heroes for a country in crisis," writers David Sirota and Andrew Perez began. "From the maw of the media machine, New York governor Andrew Cuomo and the Lincoln Project emerged as our alleged sentinels bravely battling a deadly pandemic and an authoritarian president — and supposedly leading us with principles and morality into a new era of accountability and integrity."
"In the last twenty-four hours, the entire facade has collapsed, revealing that those bravely trying to sound the alarm for months were right all along — and those benefiting from the media-driven fraud were attempting to evade accountability and self-servingly cover up a grotesquerie of mismanagement, corruption, and abuse," they wrote.
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Sirota and Perez asked whether there will be a "moment of accountability" from the media or whether there will be "a moment when media organizations permanently establish that infrastructure of impunity, to the point where a governor can now get away with hiding a death toll and a GOP political group can retain its megaphone amid a sordid harassment scandal."
Cornell Law School professor and media critic William A. Jacobson told Fox News the promotion of Cuomo and The Lincoln Project "served the liberal media purpose of electing Joe Biden." He explained that anti-Trump Republicans were "useful" to the press while the Democratic New York governor served as a "foil" for the president during the coronavirus pandemic.
However, Jacobson added, the media praise of Cuomo was pure "fantasy."
"Cuomo's policies were a disaster enabled by media fawning," he said.
According to The Hill media columnist and Fox News contributor Joe Concha, the positive media coverage both Cuomo and The Lincoln Project received reminded him of the rise and fall of disgraced anti-Trump attorney Michael Avenatti, another former media darling whose "daily nasty soundbites" against Trump earned him hundreds of appearances on CNN and MSNBC until he in significant legal trouble.
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"The Cuomo nursing home disaster was something regularly discussed on Fox and in the pages of the New York Post last year while it was ignored elsewhere," Concha told Fox News. "The Lincoln Project was obviously full of grifters with little integrity taking advantage of donors even before the [John] Weaver [sexual harassment] story broke. But Cuomo provided a contrast to Trump — which turned out to be fiction, and The Lincoln Project was supposed to be principled Republicans standing up for democracy ... or something. That was also fiction."
Concha predicted that there would be "no self-reflection" on behalf of the mainstream media since "that takes both shame and integrity. And both are in short supply these days, while narcissism and ego are not."