In an interview that aired Friday night, Disgraced former CNN host Chris Cuomo went on to blame cable news viewers for the toxicity of the media, seven months after being fired by CNN. Cuomo defended himself and the network as apolitical organizations doing a public service during the difficult Trump years at great risk to themselves.
Cuomo opened up on how he and his brother Andrew are faring after their public departures from the network and the governorship of New York, respectively, last year, as he appeared on Friday’s edition of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
Cuomo claimed that after being fired from the network for getting too involved in his brother’s defense against allegations of sexual misconduct made by many women, he “lost a sense of purpose.”
“This is my brother, obviously I’m not objective. Obviously, I’m going to help him,” Cuomo told Maher.
“This has been hard, and you learn a lot about the people in your life when you watch them struggle. It’s true, when you struggle, you learn who your friends are. I’ve always known who my friends are; I’ve had them for a very long time. But he has been in a struggle, and I have watched it,” The former primetime CNN anchor added.
After talking about Cuomo’s termination for advising his brother through his sexual harassment allegations, Maher changed topics, “CNN said it violated their journalistic standards and I said ‘CNN has journalistic standards?’”
After the guffaws from the audience subsided, Maher continued, “What I meant is they made a conscious decision to move more toward opinion, than just giving the straight news. Which is sort of the Trump dilemma, you, sort of, had to do that. You couldn’t, like, pretend the things that Trump was doing were neutral.”
“So, I think that, just, you know, for the sake of counter position, I don’t see that as a move to opinion. I think that is addressing the need of serving people’s interests,” Cuomo replied, rejecting the premise.
Then, although recognizing that people do not trust the media, Cuomo claimed that it was powerless to change the situation:
“We were faced with something that the media has never seen in this country before. Where somebody weaponized the truth and won pretty much every fight he got into by ultimately blaming the system that people have rejected, including the media and unprecedented risk is going to require an unprecedented effort. I don’t think it was about moving to opinion, meaning not relying on facts and analysis, but they had to take it on. I felt very much that way, not everybody did it to the degree I did, it was risky to do what I did.”
“As for those who would “say ‘you’re playing it straight,’” Cuomo proudly declared, “I say that’s not why I do this job, that I’m not here for convenience. I’m not here to hide, I’m not here just to get the check and the stardom. You got to take the risk when it matters and it was rough.”
Cuomo added, “So, I don’t see CNN that way. I saw a lot of brave men and women deciding to take somebody on who had a tremendous amount of power and who had come at them by name too and that’s a scary thing,” returning back his former colleagues.
However, Cuomo may be trying to portray himself as just standing up for truth in the age of Trump, but there is more to his career at CNN than just Trump.
He was one of the biggest peddlers of the Rebekah Jones conspiracy theory while using his show to goof around with his brother, despite Andrew’s nursing home policies.
Watch it here: Youtube/Real Time with Bill Maher
Sources: Dailywire, Trendolizer, Freebeacon