Note: NBC-Universal has disputed a central claim in this story. According to Mediaite, a full version of the NBC News interview featuring Dawn Best involved Best herself asking to restate her remarks. Even if Best’s claim is entirely false, that does not erase the legacy media’s other attempts to bury the story.
On Monday morning, Dawn Best, whose mother died in April after COVID-19 ravaged her nursing home, accused NBC News and other outlets of censoring her condemnations of Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.). Cuomo infamously directed nursing homes to accept patients who had tested positive for COVID-19, in contradiction of federal guidelines. NBC News allegedly told Best not to even mention Cuomo’s name in her interview. Meanwhile, other legacy media outlets ignored the story altogether.
The nursing home scandal gained new attention after Attorney General Letitia James (D-N.Y.) released a damning report last week, showing that the state government undercounted COVID-19 deaths connected to nursing homes. Legacy media outlets like ABC News and CBS News ignored the scandal completely on the night after the report dropped. CNN’s Chris Cuomo — the governor’s brother — completely ignored the scandal on his broadcast last Thursday. Anderson Cooper filled in for Chris Cuomo on Friday night, and he, too, ignored the scandal.
Yet Best’s story proved the most egregious. Appearing on Fox & Friends Monday morning, Best said that multiple news outlets coached her to leave Cuomo out of her criticism of New York’s COVID-19 nursing home policy.
“Well, I’d like to say, Governor Cuomo failed us now. Am I allowed to say it on your program?” Best asked. “Yes. All right, there we go. Well, I kind of got used to it because the media was never letting me say ‘Governor Cuomo’ all along, and it was being cut out of every interview that I was in.” [Emphasis added.]
“And then I started starting every sentence that they asked with ‘Governor Cuomo,’ so they couldn’t do that to me, so then they were forced to literally ask me to cut out Governor Cuomo’s name,” the woman added. “Lester Holt’s show wasn’t the only one to do it.” [Emphasis added.]
“So what happened specifically on that show was I was telling them that Governor Cuomo failed us, his books should be named, not Lessons in Leadership, it should be Lessons in Failure,” Best recalled. She added that an NBC News staffer “stopped me and she said to me, can you say that a different way without Governor Cuomo’s name and just say New York failed you? So I had no choice. I had to say New York failed me.”
According to Best, multiple media outlets not only censored her interviews to cut out criticism of Cuomo, but also directed her to avoid mentioning the governor’s name at all. Yet Best has a deeply personal reason to condemn Cuomo’s policy.
“My mom was in the best nursing home, getting the best care pre-March 24/7, fine, healthy and happy,” she explained. “Within three weeks of [Cuomo’s] deadly directive where he sent the COVID-positive patients into the nursing home, my mother was dead from neglect. That was because the nursing home was overrun with COVID patients.”
“I know this because the doctor told me when I called and asked what was wrong with my mother, she said, and this is a quote, she was frantic. She said, ‘The culprit is everywhere. It’s in every unit. The doctors have it, the nurses have it and your mother may have it.’ I had her tested she didn’t have it. It was dehydration,” Best recalled.
“My mother died of neglect because of Governor Cuomo,” the bereaved daughter concluded.
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