According to former South Carolina Congressman Trey Gowdy (R), mainstream journalists’ handling of recent sexual harassment allegations against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) clearly demonstrates why those in “the media aren’t taken seriously anymore.”
Gowdy’s diagnosis of the mainstream media’s fatal flaw came during Friday’s edition of Fox News Primetime.
“Why didn’t you know?”
According to Fox News, Gowdy said Friday that he recently went back and read “what the media and other Democrats were saying about Andrew Cuomo eight to ten months ago,” when the coronavirus was hammering New York, and it was an “eye-opening” experience.
“They were giving him awards, they wanted him to be president, they wanted him to be vice president, they wanted him to be the attorney general for the United States,” Gowdy noted.
Now, however, in light of claims of sexual misconduct by Cuomo, that all has changed. What Gowdy wants to know is: Why did the media take so long to pick up on the allegations?
“Why didn’t you know?” Gowdy pressed, according to Fox. “I thought your job was to tell us what we don’t already know. I thought you were investigative journalists. I thought democracy died in darkness and you were the light. I thought you were all the news that’s fit to print.”
“Well, that was fit to print then, too,” the former congressman charged. “And that is why the media aren’t taken seriously anymore.”
“Truth took a vacation”
Gowdy concluded his monologue by arguing that the mainstream media’s “investigative journalism is only in high gear when it comes to Republicans or people they don’t like.”
“Their dogged pursuit of the truth took a vacation so they could swoon over their preferred political candidates,” he said, according to Fox.
Cuomo, for his part, is currently facing sexual misconduct allegations from seven separate women, including many who were former staffers of the governor. But the Democrat has remained defiant and refused to resign amid the claims, despite growing and bipartisan calls for him to do so.
Most recently, both of New York’s senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, joined the chorus of members of Cuomo’s own party who want him out.
“Due to the multiple, credible sexual harassment and misconduct allegations, it is clear that Governor Cuomo has lost the confidence of his governing partners and the people of New York,” they said in a joint statement, according to CNBC. But as was true with Gowdy and the media, it seems to many that the senators’ pushback against Cuomo has come too little, too late.