Current and former employees have scrutinized the host of “Cuomo Prime Time” for the transgression, though a retired CNN ethics executive says the lack of clear cut policies are mainly to blame.
“You won't see any rules that are etched in stone so that a violation could be a firing offense,” explained Steve Holmes, who retired from CNN in 2019 after working at the network for over a decade.
“And I think you see sort of the results. I mean the Chris Cuomo thing, they can't say that he's violated any written policies because there aren't any, period,” remarked Holmes, who reported to the executive vice president of news standards and practices when he was at CNN.
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Last week, CNN staffers started weighing in on Cuomo suggesting to his brother.
“I cannot imagine a world in which anybody in journalism thinks that that was appropriate,” Jake Tapper announced in an interview last week with Kara Swisher of The New York Times.
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That same week, Brian Stelter, host of CNN’s show “Reliable Sources,” proposed leave of absence might be in order.
“If Chris Cuomo wants to call into strategy sessions with his brother's aides, shouldn't he take a leave of absence from CNN?” Stelter asked.
Other employees raised their anxieties throughout a town hall last week by asking CNN President Jeff Zucker why the network hadn’t sanctioned Cuomo even though he confessed to crossing an ethical line.
Temporarily suspending Cuomo would be pointless, Zucker responded, and would only be “punishment for the sake of punishing.”
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A slap on the wrist is better than nothing, Holmes said, and would work as an acknowledgement of ethics concerns to the network.
Holmes, who was an editor at The Washington Post and part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at The New York Times before entering CNN, announced the inaction on Cuomo sends the wrong message.
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“For them to sort of just shrug their shoulders and slough it off is just to me like, ‘Hold on people, don't you see how this looks?’” Holmes said.
“They could do that and take the criticism that it’s too lenient,” he said. “But what do they do when they don't do anything? What kind of signals does it send that you don't do anything?”
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Cuomo first came under criticism last year when he came to his brother’s defense and defended the governor for his answer to the coronavirus.
Earlier this year, Cuomo faced accusations that he and other family members had got special treatment from New York state health officials early on through the pandemic.
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