WaPo's Bacon Jr: 'Going to be hard' for CNN to criticize Chris Cuomo now after allowing interviews

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CNN anchor Chris Cuomo criticized for advising governor brother

Fox News analyst Howard Kurtz reports on the latest.

Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. told "Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter on Sunday that CNN is going to have "a hard time" criticizing or suspending host Chris Cuomo after allowing him to interview his brother, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, without grilling him on his nursing home scandal.

Recent reports have revealed that the CNN host also gave the embattled governor off-air advice on how to handle his string of sexual harassment allegations.

CNN admitted Friday that Chris Cuomo participated in strategy sessions for his brother on how to handle the allegations against him. In a statement, the network said, "It was inappropriate to engage in conversations that included members of the Governor's staff, which Chris acknowledges. He will not participate in such conversations going forward."

The network said no disciplinary action had been taken.

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Stelter asked his Sunday panel to react to the latest chapter in the Chris Cuomo scandal. 

Nicole Hemmer, a historian and CNN columnist, suggested that a better course of action would have been for Cuomo to take a "leave of absence" from the network "to acknowledge the conflicts of interest there."

The host instead made an on-air apology.

Some viewers "loved" when Cuomo interviewed his brother, while other viewers found it inappropriate, Stelter said. 

Bacon sided with the latter group, calling the pandemic interviews the "original sin." 

"I found those interviews good, engaging; they were informal, they were humorous at times," Bacon said. "That said, at the time I had the same thoughts: ‘Is this the right way to go?’ And now we’ve seen how the governor handled COVID and how there were some real problems there in terms of disclosure and honesty. 

"I don’t think his brother was the right person to probe that. It’s going to be hard to criticize or suspend Chris Cuomo now after you’ve allowed a kind of un-journalistic, or bad journalistic practice." 

CNN has a lot of other anchors and they "should have" been the ones to interview the governor, Bacon continued.

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Fox News asked Bacon Jr. about his concerns, if he flagged them to anyone, and whether or not he reported on this story.

Stelter then moved on to a discussion of conservative CNN contributor Rick Santorum’s departure from the network amid controversy over his remarks about Native Americans.

Andrew Cuomo has ignored calls for his resignation, including from some top Democratic lawmakers, after several women, including former aides, came forward to accuse him of sexual harassment. 

Grieving New Yorkers have also blasted the Democratic governor for enacting an order last March to force recovering COVID patients back into nursing homes, as well as his administration's cover-up of the true death toll. 

A recent New York Times report revealed that Cuomo officials knew the actual number of nursing home deaths since last spring, yet "engaged in a sustained effort to prevent the state’s own health officials, including the commissioner, Howard Zucker, from releasing the true death toll to the public or sharing it with state lawmakers."

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Meanwhile, some outraged observers, including the Boston Herald editorial board, are calling on CNN to fire Chris Cuomo.

"CNN needs to do the right thing and can Cuomo," the editorial board wrote. "They’ve already waited too long."