The Media Research Center has published dozens of articles referencing allegations of sexual harassment against Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo., with the usual whining that news networks that aren’t Fox News aren’t covering it enough (which, as far as the MRC is concerned, should be the lead story every single day). Many of these articles are written by Nicholas Fondacaro, who has a pathological hatred of the entire Cuomo family (he constantly denigrates Cuomo’s brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo, with the childish nickname “Fredo”). But non-right-wing channels covering the story still wasn’t sufficient for the MRC; it managed to complain that the non-Fox nets devoted too much time to harassment claims relative to claims that Cuomo allegedly caused coronavirus deaths in New York nursing homes by moving COVID patients out of hospitals to nursing homes during the initial surge of pandemic cases (even though it’s hard to nail down a direct cause and effect). Sheesh, make up your minds, guys.
But as with the MRC’s obsession with linking nursing home deaths to Cuomo, its obsession with Cuomo’s sexual harassment accusations has a double standard.
More than 20 women have accused Donald Trump of sexual harassment — and as we’ve documented, not only has the MRC largely ignored them, the women they didn’t ignore were mocked and denigrated. E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her, was dismissed by the MRC as “weird,” “bizarre” and “scatterbrained.”
Back to Cuomo: A March 13 post by Tim Graham highlighted a claim that the first woman who accused Cuomo of sexual harassment faced a “smear campaign.” This is hypocrisy, of course; in addition to its smears of Carroll, the MRC ran a campaign of denigration against the women who accused Brett Kavanugh of sexual misconduct after his nomination to the Supreme Court — even bizarrely portraying the women as part of some vast conspiracy (literally; a column by Graham and Brent Bozell was actually headlined “The Vast Anti-Kavanaugh Conspiracy”).
The MRC doesn’t really have the high moral ground here, and we know that holding Republicans accountable for their sexual harassment scandals is simply in its DNA.