In a series of Tuesday afternoon tweets, the ABC News Twitter account informed readers of “breaking news”: New York City’s health commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot resigned her post with a letter chiding far-left Mayor Bill de Blasio’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. But when ABC’s World News Tonight aired six hours later, the critical news was nowhere to be seen. Similarly, CBS News spiked their story for Evening News even though they had put out a similiar tweet.
As for NBC, they didn’t write an online story and they also skipped the Barbot’s resignation during NBC Nightly News.
It was understandable why these liberal activists masquerading as journalists would keep this development from their millions of evening-time viewers: it goes against the narrative that New York was the COVID success story that defied President Trump.
“Dr. Oxiris Barbot resigned as New York City's health commissioner, saying in her resignation letter that ‘the Health Department's incomparable disease control expertise was not used to the degree it could have been,’” ABC’s Aaron Katersly, Erin Schumaker, and Mark Crudele wrote in their article.
While ABC noted that her resignation letter did have criticism of de Blasio, they used those quotes sparingly while doing damage control for the leader of their city (click “expand”):
"I leave my post today with deep disappointment," her resignation letter said, taking aim at Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration. "Our experts are world renowned for their epidemiology, surveillance and response work. The city would be well served by having them at the strategic center of the response not in the background."
Her replacement was immediately announced as Dr. Dave Chokshi, a Rhodes Scholar who served at the Louisiana Department of Health during Hurricane Katrina and was the principal health adviser to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs in the Obama administration.
"It was time for a change, it became clear it was time for a change," de Blasio said during a Tuesday news conference, in response to a question about Barbot's resignation. It was "not obviously about one thing," he added.
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n CBS’s article, reporter Audrey McNamara suggested: “Barbot did not provide a reason for her departure, but wrote that the department ‘must be better leveraged’ as the city prepares for a likely second wave of the pandemic.”
But it was a New York Times report from J. David Goodman that laid bare the “escalating tensions between City Hall and top city health department officials” that had been raging for months in the public eye. “Still, former city health officials said the mayor should have done more to listen to and support Dr. Barbot,” he wrote.
He added: “Current and former health officials said the departure of Dr. Barbot reflected Mr. de Blasio’s history of distrust in his health department. From early in the coronavirus outbreak, he has clashed with the department on testing, public messaging and how quickly to shutter schools.”
Instead of reporting on all of this, the CBS Evening News had White House correspondent Paula Reid mock President Trump for mispronouncing the name of Yosemite National Park.
CBS also had chief congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes run an entire report suggesting Senate Republicans were fine with workers dying of the virus. Here’s how anchor Norah O’Donnell pitched it to viewers:
Republicans insist that in order to fully reopen, businesses need to be protected from lawsuits if employees or customers are exposed to the virus. Workers say that puts them at risk, and our CBS News investigation found that at one company, the consequences have been deadly.
These two networks have been largely silent on New York’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus, especially Governor Andrew Cuomo’s decision to pack COVID patients into nursing homes. But somehow it was Republicans who didn’t care about people.
Their silence on the resignation was made possible because of lucrative sponsorships from Nutrisystem on ABC and Consumer Cellular on CBS. Their contact information is linked if you want to tell them about what they’re funding. CBS Evening News has also asked people to “text Norah” at this number: (202) 217-1107.
