CNN's Chris Cuomo will soon leave New Day for the network's 9 p.m. time slot. His new Cuomo Prime Time will compete with Fox News's Sean Hannity and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. In a Wednesday Variety piece, Cuomo said of his new competitors: "I don’t know where their partisan fights are getting us" — as if the CNN host himself isn't partisan.
Brian Steinberg's headline at Variety claimed Cuomo will "Will Shake Up Primetime" (h/t The Hill), and misled readers about the network's recent ratings performance with incomplete information:
CNN anchor Chris Cuomo ... (has) a new time slot and mission: adding spark to the network’s primetime lineup.
CNN is expected to launch “Cuomo Prime Time” this Spring. It will air at 9 p.m. weekdays, and marks the first recalibration of the network’s primetime schedule since Don Lemon joined it in 2014.
... More people are watching CNN overall – the network enjoyed its second-best February in a decade – but the Time Warner-owned network lags its opponents in primetime viewership.
The network also badly lagged its opponents 24-7. Fox's average all-day February audience was 1.548 million; MSNBC's was 989,000. CNN, at 700,000, was a dismal, distant third.
As to Cuomo's assessment of Hannity and Maddow:
“They have huge numbers. I have huge respect for their success, and I take nothing away from them,” said Cuomo in an interview. “But the point is, I don’t know where their partisan fights are getting us.” The anchor said he intends to highlight “debating with decency,” often in segments which will have him interviewing two people he feels aren’t espousing facts.
Cuomo tweeted about his ambitious mission Wednesday:
Unfortunately for CNN, Cuomo's body of work doesn't support his grandiose designs. Posts with his NewBusters tag also reveal that he is as partisan as anyone. In the past month alone:
- March 12 — Cuomo "ripped the White House's gun policy proposal while acting as an advocate for gun control."
- March 6 — In a discussion about the origins of the decade-ago housing and mortgage lending messes and proposed rollbacks of some Dodd-Frank regulations, Cuomo falsely claimed that Republican Congressman Jeb Hensarling didn't know what a derivative is until the crises hit. Hensarling's response: Frankly I knew at the time ... (as) a member of the House Financial Services Committee for 15 years."
- February 23 — Cuomo claimed, nine days after the Parkland, Florida massacre, that it was CNN's job to "call out" critics of relatively uninformed high-school students pushing for gun control and to prevent conservatives from taking "momentum out of these kids' efforts."
- February 21 — Cuomo was fooled by a 20 year-old's bogus "5 Minutes to Buy an AR-15" video (no purchase was attempted), and tried to excuse his ignorance by effectively claiming that you shouldn't even be able to shop for a gun until you show ID.
Anyone not expecting Cuomo to bring partisan blinders to his new show is destined for disappointment.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
