You may have heard by now that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is receiving an Emmy on Monday for his coronavirus press briefings. According to the judges, Cuomo successfully turned his pressers into informative TV shows. So here's an award.
Fox News meteorologist Janice Dean is among the critics who are appalled that the governor is receiving the statue, considering there has been so much death this year in the Empire State. Thousands of people have died in nursing homes alone. In March, Cuomo enforced a rule that made those facilities accept recovering COVID patients.
"I heard that to get an Emmy Award, you have to send videotape of yourself to the board members," Dean reacted on Fox News on Monday. "And so to think that the governor was going through some of his TV appearances talking about deaths in New York and submitting those videos to the Emmy folks really makes me physically sick. He could start his award winning speech by saying, I'm really sorry for your loss. That's something we have never heard from this governor at any of his meetings or his PowerPoint presentations.”
Dean's friend and former Fox colleague Megyn Kelly praised Dean for her outspokenness, but wondered why the press wasn't doing their job holding Cuomo accountable.
Why is this up to ?@JaniceDean?? Where is the media? Gov’t watchdogs? The victims’ advocates hammering him for a fraudulent victory lap? JD w/a sober reminder: “While he accepts his award, “many of us just accepted caskets & urns of our loved ones.”
— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) November 23, 2020
https://t.co/l9N0j4X34G
An exception may have been NBC's Willie Geist, who confronted Cuomo about going on a book tour while the pandemic is still causing damage in New York.
"Can you see why a lot of people think if you say we're in the halftime of this, that writing a book, a retrospective in the middle of it sort of celebrating the things that you did right, feels off and strange given what might be ahead?" Geist wondered.
"It's not a celebration at all," Cuomo responded.
Dean lost both of her in-laws in New York nursing homes. So the governor's self-congratulatory campaign is painfully personal to her.
"This is a hard interview to do because we're going into Thanksgiving, and this is the first Thanksgiving we will have without his parents going into the holiday season," she shared. "So to hear the governor going on a sort of another self-congratulatory award show after his self-congratulatory book tour to accept an award for his, quote, unquote, leadership, where over 34,000 New Yorkers died, including my husband's parents. It's just more grief every time we see this governor celebrating himself on television. It's just a reminder of the people that we lost, partly because of his leadership."