NEW YORK (AP) – On Fox News Channel’s Janice Dean, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is a liar and a criminal. Blame others for their “disastrous decisions.” He must resign: no, it is not enough.
“He has to go to jail!” thundered “Fox & Friends.”
Dean is not a political commentator, she is Fox’s senior meteorologist. In the last year, however, a serious personal loss has made her a fighter for families who believe that a policy backed by Cuomo that encourages the transfer of positive COVID-19 patients to nursing homes was a fatal mistake.
“He really hates people being screwed and … he’s always fought for the little one,” Meghan McCain of “The View,” who worked with Dean on Fox News, said.
McCain knows politics and suggests his friend may have a future there.
Cuomo has defended his directives, saying they followed scientific guidelines. His office did not send messages asking for comments on Dean.
Still, Dean has made some dubious public statements about the impact of Cuomo’s residency order and the coverage of another news organization. His new role raises ethical questions for Fox.
“She is certainly a passionate and articulate spokesperson on this topic,” said Jeffrey McCall, a professor of media ethics at DePauw University. “But it’s also clear that Janice uses her profile as a Fox News Channel personality to devote herself to advocacy.”
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March and April 2020 was a nightmare in New York, with the new coronavirus spreading wildly. The moment was particularly cruel for Michael and Dolores Newman, the parents of Dean’s husband, Sean, known to family and friends as Mickey and Dee. In Brooklyn, they were married three days before Valentine’s Day 1961.
Mickey, 83, a former firefighter, was at the Grandell Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Brooklyn with dementia and other problems. Dee lived assisted at the Long Island Living Center and hoped Mickey would join her when her health improved.
But he died on March 29, just hours after Sean received a call saying he was not feeling well. Dee, 79, died April 13.
Analyzing the deaths, the family was baffled to learn of Cuomo’s March 25 government directive that nursing homes could not deny admission to someone just because they had COVID-19. On April 7, the policy was expanded to cover assisted living facilities.
New York was desperately worried about running out of hospital space at the time. Cuomo insisted that care was taken and he was wrong to discriminate against people because they had COVID.
In May, the order was revoked. Stories emerged about the periods until the governor and his staff went into hiding the number of virus deaths among New York nursing home residents.. Dean could not believe that the vulnerable were in danger.
At first he did not speak publicly. That changed after watching CNN last May when Chris Cuomo brandished a giant cotton to joke about the big nose of his brother, the governor.
“He was so deaf,” he said. “It was disgusting.”
He shared his anger in a text exchange with his friend Tucker Carlson and, at his urging, went to his show the next night to tell him the story.
She has not stopped.
Dean was swimming against a powerful tide. Cuomo was popular, his televised briefings on the coronavirus were praised by people who found President Donald Trump’s performance desirable. He even wrote a book on leadership.
Now, with a sexual harassment scandal around her, things have changed. Dean’s disgust with Cuomo showed up last month when he maintained a comment on Twitter during one of his press conferences.
“She has a dry mouth. He is nervous. And he lies ”.
“It’s just a disgrace.”
“You’re a criminal.”
Bill Hammond, a senior health policy member at the Empire Center for State Policy, said Dean was key to keeping the problem alive.
“Because he has a certain kind of celebrity, he gets attention and he has access to the Fox News megaphone, and that’s a powerful force,” Hammond said.
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Dean has been working at Fox since 2004 and is the weather forecast for “Fox & Friends.” She has told her family story on the air to the show’s hosts, Carlson, Sean Hannity, Martha MacCallum, Harris Faulkner and others.
The story touched Fox’s bad spot. For an audience dominated by conservatives tired of hearing Trump criticized for his response to the pandemic, here was a topic that raised serious questions about a politician lionized by many liberals.
Many news organizations have effectively used employees ’personal experiences to tell stories about the pandemic, said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Journalism Ethics.
It was problematic when the staff became political, he said. Journalists are generally prohibited from practicing politics.
Dean has spoken with young Republicans on Staten Island, in a virtual town hall sponsored by the state president, at a rally organized by Democratic Assembly Ron Kim, another critic of Cuomo.
Fox would not make an executive available to talk about Dean. A spokeswoman points out that Dean is not a journalist and talks about an issue that deeply affected his family. Fox compared him to Katie Couric who urged people to get tested for colon cancer or with Al Roker campaigns to raise awareness about diabetes.
Bartzen Culver said these situations are not remotely comparable.
“It might be right to take this out of the context of Fox News and ask ourselves if the weather personality at our local station should ask for the arrest of our mayor,” he said. “I think that would make people deeply uncomfortable and justified.”
Dean said his Fox bosses have been totally supportive.
“Viously, obviously, it’s a position that they’re probably a little uncomfortable with because I’m a meteorologist and all of a sudden I’m in that role as a defender,” she said. “But in the end, my family was affected. And I think it’s an important role to play if there are no people who have a voice in that. “
Three days before Valentine’s Day last month, he wrote a story for the Fox News website titled, “Cuomo’s COVID Homes for the Elderly policies robbed my in-laws of their 60th wedding anniversary.”
Making the connection explicit, he wrote that “his death sentence was signed as an executive order by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to put infected patients in the places where our most vulnerable resided.”
Mickey Newman died in Grandell four days after Cuomo’s order was given. The CDC says the average period between exposure to the virus and the onset of symptoms is five days. While it’s not impossible for a person to get sick enough to die within four days of exposure, it’s very unlikely, said Dr. David Boulware, a professor of infectious disease and international medicine at the University of Minnesota.
Similarly, Dee died six days after the state directive went into effect for assisted living facilities.
No one knows for sure how Dean’s in-laws caught the virus and his deaths are tragedies. However, there is other evidence to suggest that the transmission came from someone other than a patient who was transferred to their facility at the request of the state, such as staff or visitors.
“We don’t know the story,” said Donna Johnson, Dean’s sister-in-law. “Try to ask. No one really answers you. “
The facilities would not talk about Newmans to The Associated Press.
Meanwhile, the Cuomo administration’s efforts to keep the data secret, divert any blame for the outbreaks to the nursing home, and resolve questions about whether state policies worsened the outbreaks have made families suspicious.
Cuomo recently said the retained data created a “vacuum” that left angry and confused New Yorkers vulnerable to “conspiracy theories” and misinformation. “People get confused and people who lost family members in nursing homes start saying,‘ I wonder if that’s true. I wonder if my father died because someone made a mistake, ”he said.
Turned on. On Jan. 30, Dean attacked NBC News and introduced Lester Holt to Twitter, saying they had “censored” a friend interviewed on the subject by telling her that New York had failed the families of the casals, rather than Cuomo. But NBC provided The Associated Press with a tape of interview with journalist Kristen Dahlgren that belies the notion. Dean said the tape was analyzed, but offers no evidence to back it up.
History does not respond to the idea that NBC was trying to protect Cuomo. Dahlgren quotes Dean’s friend Dawn Best, who says a “third-grade student” should know not to put COVID-19 patients in a nursing home, and of course he was referring to Cuomo. Best is also seen with a sign that says, “Cuomo killed my mother.”
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Dean answers the ideas of a political future, but not others.
“The best people who are involved in politics are involved organically, like the people who weren’t running for office all their lives,” McCain said. Dean “has this way of speaking only to the average American that I find really compelling. I’m one of the people behind the scenes that encouraged him to run for office. “
Dean said: “I don’t enjoy being part of this political mess right now with the governor. But I think it’s a call. I do.”