What Use Is Chris Cuomo to CNN?

A t this point in the proceedings, one is tempted to conclude that Chris Cuomo must have laced CNN’s corporate offices with dynamite and informed the powers that be that, if he goes, they go, too. What else could explain the network’s eternal tolerance for being embarrassed and degraded by the man? Here, at the tail end of his long experiment in deficiency, Cuomo resembles nothing more keenly than the inadequate tee-baller who gets to stay in past eight or nine strikes because his uncle coaches the team. His ratings are poor. His insights are vacuous. His conduct is a permanent source of ignominy. All the perfumes of Albany could not sweeten this little man. “What’s in a name?” inquired Shakespeare. Little did he know.

It is unclear why Cuomo was selected by CNN to begin with. He’s a lawyer who knows nothing of the law; a journalist who knows nothing of journalism; an American who knows nothing of America. His temper is third-rate, his interests are bewilderingly narrow, he possesses no discernible sense of shame or self-knowledge, and the opinions he proffers are so ruthlessly subordinated to expedience that hypocrisy is his default mode. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” was meant as an extolment of the virtues of personal growth. Cuomo seems to have taken it literally.

On no single topic has the man’s unique set of professional and personal shortcomings been more obvious than COVID-19. In April of last year, Cuomo’s attempt to fake a two-week quarantine was ruined by his failure to remember that, just a week earlier, he had admitted on the radio that he had left the house to visit a property he owns in East Hampton and gotten into an argument with a stranger. And yet, rather than demote him for telling such a galling and obvious lie, CNN encouraged him to inject his peculiar brand of mendacity into a series of interviews with his own brother. Thus it was that while Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York was making the single worst mistake of the entire coronavirus crisis — herding the elderly into nursing homes and then covering up the death toll — Television Host Chris Cuomo of New York was using America’s most famous cable-news channel to portray him as a national hero. What America needed last year was a dispassionate examination of Andrew Cuomo’s official messaging. What America got was a smirking nepotist brandishing a comedy-sized nasal swab and tweeting obsequious fluff about his sibling. New York, Chris Cuomo concluded, was “doing way better than what we see elsewhere & no way that happens without the Luv Guv dishing the real 24/7.” In exchange, the “Luv Guv” dealt Chris in on a series of private, government-funded COVID tests that were unavailable to everybody else.

Watching Chris Cuomo work is a little like watching a man jump out of an airplane without a parachute and then become irrationally angry at those who tell him he’s going to die. In 2015, in response to a debate over the wisdom of cartoons depicting Mohammed, Cuomo submitted on Twitter that “hate speech is excluded from protection.” “Dont just say you love the constitution,” he added belligerently. “Read it.” Having been told by figures from across the political spectrum that this was nonsense from start to finish, Cuomo dug in his heels. “I will keep saying one word,” he contended: “chaplinsky.” Thus was a misdescription of American law transmuted into a misdescription of American history. Not only has the Chaplinsky ruling been effectively overturned; it did not deal with “hate speech” in the first place. Rarely have confidence and ability been so perfectly mismatched.

Despite his training as a lawyer, the nature of the First Amendment has proven utterly elusive to Cuomo. Commenting last summer on the spate of riots that swept the nation, he wondered aloud why people were objecting to the violence. “Please, show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful,” he asked on air. Before long, he was obliged in this request by a hilarious viral video in which an unkempt man eating noodles points nonchalantly at the part of the First Amendment’s text that reads, “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” The message of the spot: Don’t just say you love the Constitution. Read it.

As it happens, “Read it” is advice that Cuomo would do well to follow in general. Reading would have prevented him from claiming absurdly that “there was no individual right contemplated” by the Second Amendment “until Scalia read it in.” Reading would have prevented him from conflating Antifa, a bunch of black-clad street brawlers, with the men who stormed the beaches on D-Day. Reading would have informed him that calling an Italian American “Fredo” is not remotely equivalent to calling an African American the n-word, and that there is nobody with a functioning cerebrum who thinks otherwise. And — if he had gone to the right place, at least — reading might have informed him that his day-to-day behavior is not that of a professional journalist.

Alas, it is too late, for Cuomo and CNN have now dug themselves a hole from which they cannot escape. Their current position is that it was entirely acceptable for Chris Cuomo to cover his brother’s COVID response because that was a “human interest” story, but that it would be entirely unacceptable for Chris Cuomo to cover the sexual-harassment allegations against his brother because that would violate the longstanding rule against Chris Cuomo interviewing Andrew Cuomo, but that, despite this, Cuomo is still not allowed to help his brother in a private capacity, but that if he does do that it’s bad, but that it’s not bad enough to earn him a suspension, but that — oh good God, can’t they just find another anchor, already?