Pot, meet Kettle, Part 1
CNN's action against Chris Cuomo is like China calling the U.S. out for human-rights abuses.
I teach college journalism, nowadays focusing chiefly on the oxymoronic field of media ethics. Over the years I have also written on newsmedia practices and the ethics of same for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, USAToday, Washington Times, New York Daily News, Skeptic and a number of high-visibility online journals.
I'll cut to the chase: CNN suspending Chris Cuomo for ethical breaches is one of the most tragicomic and hypocritical developments I've seen in my 40-year career as writer and educator.
The back-story: In a nutshell, sans nuance, Cuomo is accused of feeding inside info to his brother Andrew, who happens to be the (now-deposed) Governor of New York. So two siblings who find themselves at or near the top of their respective food chains talk to each other, as brothers will, especially in a political family—and perhaps Chris, who knows the inner workings of media, gave his brother some advice on how best to run the gauntlet. Chris denies that he overstepped in this area; indeed, he denies any wrongdoing. Let us also not forget that CNN's Cuomo recused himself from coverage of the scandal, so it's not as if he's then going on-air and putting his thumb on the scale of public opinion in the matter.
But folks, regardless of what Chris Cuomo may or may not have done in this one episode amid the most awkward of all possible family circumstances, we need to talk perspective and scale.
Because even if Chris gave Andrew the names of all women in the Executive Branch who'd had affairs or secret abortions, along with their preferred sexual positions and last known method of birth control, such a breach wouldn't be within light-years of the cosmos of ethical violations perpetrated by his employer on an organizational basis. Daily. Hourly.
The first item in the SPJ code is “seek and report truth.”
Day in, day out, CNN not only falls short of this objective, but is guilty of willfully perverting truth. Sabotaging it. In journalism, there is no more serious ethical violation than that. It bears noting here that although I've called Cuomo out on various occasions, he is by far the least-worst offender among CNN's marquee properties. (Michael Smerconish is tops, but has nowhere near Cuomo's gravitas.)
Remember how CNN played Covington Catholic? Painting the poor kid as the (smug) face of white privilege? Unfiltered host S. E. Cupp spent nearly seven minutes lammbasting the ‟mob of MAGA hat-wearing high-school students who were accosting the Indian elder with chants of ‘build the wall' ”—even though no video evidence ever surfaced of any such thing.
That same year CNN jumped on the Smollett story, so badly wanting it to be true. How about the ethics of CNN's embargo of the Hunter Biden scandals late in last year's presidential campaign? It’s now clear there was at least enough smoke to merit scouting about for a fire. CNN not only pointedly declared it a non-story...but labeled it disinformation. Talk about thumbs on scales.
Speaking of fire, one still smiles mordantly at those “mostly peaceful” BLM “protests” occurring against the backdrop of a neighborhood in flames.
What of the ethics of Anderson Cooper declaring in his anchorperson’s voice, after the presser that closed the Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, “You have been watching perhaps one the most disgraceful performances by an American president…that I have ever seen.” This on the heels of the habitual and intentional mischaracterization of Trump's “good people on both sides” quote.
Or the network’s unrelenting message that there is only one valid position in this COVID mess, and that any informational challenges to lockdowns or masking or vaccines are as subversive as what occurred on Jan. 6. (A topic all its own, for another day.) Such reporting shouldn’t just be laughed off as an instance of “liberal bias”; it is a patent breach of multiple tenets in the SPJ code of ethics.
One also has to love the way the network bought in fully on “kids in cages,” a trope that mysteriously disappeared from airwaves on January 20 of this year, though the enclosures continued to exist.
Or there's CNN's inflammatory and one-sided coverage of Black Live Matter, with Don Lemon notably transforming into a civil-rights activist before our very eyes in Ferguson. (Lemon at one point set aside nine minutes of his show to spew a jeremiad on Trump’s “racism.”) Anyone remember that table of female CNN celebs paying homage to “hands up, don't shoot”—which, if one wants to split hairs, never happened?
To repeat: These are deliberate derelictions of the network’s duty to “seek and report truth.” No higher breach of ethics exists. Period.
Though I could go on for as long as some of the transcripts in the Andrew Cuomo sex case, I'll wrap for now with the fact that Brian Stelter pilots an ironically named show, Reliable Sources, whose sole raison d'être appears to be to savage a competitor, Fox News. Sounds pretty above-board to me. By the way, why has Stelter never excoriated Lemon for venturing too far into editorial excess the way he excoriates Tucker Carlson? The two are equivalent in their venom and their offenses against neutrality.
At the last, the problem may be that in an everyday sense, Chris Cuomo is a bit too ethical for CNN's tastes, treating issues as if they do indeed have more than one side, and giving a platform to guests (Kellyanne Conway comes to mind) who are anathema to much of CNN's viewership and an embarrassment to the channel's left-tilting brass.
In textbook ethical terms, the CNN news organization is a quagmire, if not a Freddy Krueger-level nightmare. In a big-picture sense, Cuomo may be one of their best hopes for restoring credibility.