How Corrupt Is America? David Sirota Reports, But Will America's Media Stop Covering-Up?

-by Eric Zuesse

On February 19th, The Hill headlined “Sirota: It's up to Democrats to hold Cuomo accountable” and hid the bigger and still hidden story, which is that America’s ‘news’-media had been hiding this enormous corruption-story for as long as they possibly could. The scandal of the ‘news’-media hiding each others’ rottennesses-- the totalitarian reality of the nation’s press-- is the biggest of all U.S. scandals. And it is never being reported, since they cover for each other.

Here’s that story:

Though The Hill includes there the video of Sirota speaking, they don’t print that he also said in his 2-minute statement, the following, which really is the most important part of what he said there: “This is all unfolding while Andrew Cuomo was on a recurring CNN guest slot with his brother (Chris Cuomo). It was all happening when he was getting a six-figure book deal about his leadership during the Covid crisis. It was all happening when he was making the rounds on all sorts of national media getting an Emmy for his television briefings. This was all happening, and, to be clear, some of it was happening where you couldn’t see, the hiding of the data, the hiding of the death-count, but some of it was right out in the open, I mean it was concealed in[to] the fine print when it was first put in there, but there were legislators like Ron Kim and other progressives blowing the whistles on this for months, and they couldn’t break through because the media was busy valorizing Andrew Cuomo."

On February 20th, Sirota reported at Newsweek the following, under the headline “Andrew Cuomo Caved to Donors As He Shielded Nursing Home Bosses, Ron Kim Says”: He asked the progressive New York State Democrat Ron Kim, “New details have emerged about what was going on in New York's nursing homes last spring, as the pandemic was ravaging the state. What were you seeing and doing last spring?” Kim answered, “A month into it, the nursing home executive order comes out, the March 25 executive order, the infamous one that directs untested COVID patients [who were in hospitals] to nursing homes [to boost their owners’ incomes]. And we eventually found out there were 9,000 of these patients that were transferred. That happened, and right away, everyone said this is wrong [because the other residents there were the most vulnerable people in the state, to catching and dying from the virus].”

Those 9,000 spread it to others, who lived there; and they, in turn, spread it to the employees and to the general public, including to any family-members who visited those nursing-home residents.

As a consequence: when the definitive website that reports both cases and deaths from Covid-19, around the world, which is here, started, on 5 April 2020, to calculate both the “Tot cases/1M pop” (total case per 1 million population) and the “Deaths/1M pop” (in other words, to report the ratios which show how well or how poorly a given locality’s political leadership against Covid-19 is) the U.S. state that had the highest on both was the same state, and it was N.Y., where the figures were actually the worst in the world-- higher than that of any country in the entire world. This world-leading worst performance continued until at least May 31st, but by June 30th, N.Y. was the worst state on cases but only the second-worst state on deaths. By the time of July 31st, N.Y. wasn’t the worst on either. However, Andrew Cuomo’s corruption (if not also his general incompetency as a political leader) had made his state the world’s capital of Covid-19 infection, and of Covid-19 deaths, for several months running.

On 21 November 2020, NPR headlined “Andrew Cuomo To Receive International Emmy For ‘Masterful' COVID-19 Briefings”, and reported that, “The International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences announced Friday that it is breaking with tradition and awarding its International Emmy Founders Award to a real politician who is currently in office. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is being honored his daily coronavirus briefings earlier this year.”

At the very same time when he was killing tens of thousands of New Yorkers, he was giving those deceptive and evasive, but pretend-transparent, Emmy-Award-winning, press conferences.

This was like when in 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama had won a Nobel Peace Prize for nothing but his rhetoric, and then in 2011 he started planning the overthrow of Syria’s Government and replacement of it by one that would be selected by the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia, and also planning in 2011 the overthrow of Ukraine’s Government and replacement of it by one which would be selected by U.S. State Department official Victoria Nuland, whom Joe Biden has recently appointed to the #3 post at the State Department, under Antony Blinken, who had worked with Nuland to install a fascist regime in Ukraine.

Considering that the U.S. imprisons a higher percentage of its population than does any other country in the world, nothing that is being reported here should surprise anybody. But, because of the extreme media-censorship in the U.S. and in their allied (vassal) regimes, it does. The one thing that the ‘news’-media in a dictatorship absolutely ban to report on is the corruptness of the ‘news’-media themselves.