See, I thought the point of news networks was to deliver news, not to give viewers “a sense of hope.”

Especially when doing so conveniently required providing softball interviews to a major politician secretly engaged in a cover-up who happens to be related to the 9 p.m. anchor.

WaPo reporter Jeremy Barr was listening to Chris Cuomo’s radio show this afternoon hoping he’d address last night’s controversy. The payoff:

The idea that the media had no problem at the time with Cuomo interviewing Cuomo is simply false. Scroll through this sampler of reaction from last June, following an interview in which Chris called Andrew the best politician in the country. What Cuomo presumably means is that media he cares about didn’t have a big problem with it, which is truer, if not completely true. The press was still experimenting with Cuomosexuality at the time, after all, lionizing Andrew as the pandemic’s anti-Trump. They were more inclined to let him slide than they are now, when he’s no longer of any political use to them.

But never mind that. What on earth does Cuomo mean he says his interviews with Andrew were conducted “before there were any real accountability questions during COVID”? The last Cuomo/Cuomo interview of which I’m aware happened on June 25, 2020. A week before that, Pro Publica published this piece: “‘Fire Through Dry Grass’: Andrew Cuomo Saw COVID-19’s Threat to Nursing Homes. Then He Risked Adding to It.” Our archives contain more than half a dozen posts about the nursing-home fiasco dated before late June, including early hints of Cuomo trying to hide his culpability. The now-famous Pro Publica story about how Cuomo and Bill de Blasio botched New York’s early response to the virus relative to California’s was published on May 16, 2020, five days before the notorious interview in which Chris resorted to prop comedy with his brother.

There was “real accountability” for Cuomo’s pandemic mistakes during the entire period that he was doing his interviews with Chris last summer — in print media. It’s just that that accountability never made it into the 9 p.m. hour on CNN. And so the network should ask itself a question: In its own small way, did it enable Cuomo’s subsequent attempt to cover up his nursing-home fiasco? By fueling the myth of Cuomo as COVID hero and by framing his interviews with Chris as we’re-all-on-the-same-team morale boosters for the public instead of news segments, maybe they inadvertently helped convince Andrew that he was doing some sort of public good by concealing the truth about the scope of nursing-home deaths in New York.

As for his sexual-harassment scandal, Donald Trump Jr asked a fair question about it yesterday. Is Cuomo going to face the same sort of hurdles in the private sector going forward that less powerful people accused of the same transgression have faced?

“With everything that is coming to light, when will @CrownPublishing be cancelling @andrewcuomo ’s contract?” Trump Jr. tweeted alongside a screenshot of a press release that stated: “Crown to Publish NY Governor Andrew Cuomo’s AMERICAN CRISIS: Leadership Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic.”…

“Cancel culture is awful, but all I’m saying is that the rules should be applied equally,” Trump Jr. told The Daily Wire in a statement. “Simon & Schuster cancelled their contract with Josh Hawley, but Crown is going to stick by a credibly accused serial sexual harasser just because he’s a Democrat? What kind of message does that send? What are the rules? That’s all I’m asking.”

What Hawley did and what Cuomo did are apples and oranges but Trump’s certainly right that other men have lost business opportunities due to unproved suspicions that they’re #MeToo villains. Why not Cuomo? Exit question: Will the exciting sequel to his “How I Pwned The Pandemic” book be published after COVID is over or will we be left forever to wonder just how awesome his management of the crisis was in 2021?