CNN Newsroom hosts Poppy Harlow and Jim Sciutto invited New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on their Monday show to discuss current events which naturally included the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of challenging Cuomo on the state's order that required nursing homes to take in recovering COVID patients, the hosts asked Cuomo how he could protect the state from travelers from Florida. In a nearly nine-minute interview, nothing about the nursing homes.
After Cuomo patted himself on the back for getting New York's infection rate to be the lowest in the country, Harlow asked about Florida, the media's favorite state to criticize. "Are you still considering a potential quarantine for people that may come to New York from states where they are seeing a dramatic spike like Florida?"
Harlow inquired how Cuomo could enforce such a quarantine given his previous opposition to some Rhode Island measures against New Yorkers.
For his part, Cuomo mostly dodged the Rhode Island question and joined in on the Florida bashing, "Florida did put in a quarantine which I think was more politic than anything else, but now we have a very real problem, Poppy."
He said that Florida's raise in cases, that mostly are among 20-40 year-olds (not elderly people cooped up in nursing homes that were forced to take COVID patients), will be "the greatest irony we they write the book in history" because:
New York had the highest infection rate and all these other states were saying, 'well, we're going to blockade New York.' The president was talking about blockading New York. You would have seen a civil war. We now have the lowest infection rate, and I'm getting calls all day long, people from Florida, Texas, saying we want to be in New York because we're afraid to be in Texas and Florida. That could actually increase our transmission rate.
Instead of calling Cuomo out for his "civil war" hyperbole or shameless lecturing others despite his own record, all Sciutto and Harlow could do was interject periodically with the approving "yeah" or "right." It would not have been that hard for Sciutto and Harlow to ask about the nursing homes, even MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle managed to do so in her own Monday interview with Cuomo.
When Fox's Janice Dean -- who lost her in-laws in a New York nursing home from COVID-19 -- challenged this obvious oversight, Jim Sciutto angrily tweeted back what they did ask about, insisting "As journalists, we press officials of both parties every day."
Here is a transcript for the June 22 show:
CNN
CNN Newsroom with Poppy Harlow and Jim Sciutto
9:53 AM ET
POPPY HARLOW. Are you still considering a potential quarantine for people that may come to New York from states where they are seeing a dramatic spike like Florida, for example, and if show how would you enforce it because I know if you go back to March you weren't happy with Rhode Island when they said that they were going to pull over every car with a New York license plate, right? You called unconstitutional, so where is your head on that, and how would it be enforced?
ANDREW CUOMO: Yeah. What they were talking about back then was Rhode Island targeting just New Yorkers, they pull you over by your license plate.
HARLOW: Yeah.
CUOMO: Which I thought was absurd. Florida did put in a quarantine which I think was more politic than anything else, but now we have a very real problem, Poppy. The greatest irony we they write the book in history, New York had the highest infection rate and all these other states were saying, well, “we're going to blockade New York.” The president was talking about blockading New York. You would have seen a civil war. We now have the lowest infection rate, and I'm getting calls all day long, people from Florida, Texas, saying we want to be in New York because we're afraid to be in Texas and Florida. That could actually increase our transmission rate.
HARLOW Right.CUOMO: So I'm talking to my neighbors, Governor Murphy in New Jersey, Governor Lamont in Connecticut about what we do about it. I wouldn’t target a specific state, but we know the transmission rate in every state in the United States.
JIM SCIUTTO: Right
CUOMO: It's a published piece of data. I would consider states with the highest transmission rate that if somebody comes from that state—
SCIUTTO: Yeah
CUOMO: to New York there’s a period of quarantine where they quarantine themselves to make sure they are not spreading it.
