CNN anchor Chris Cuomo’s suspension from his 6 p.m. prime-time show “New Day” is both yet another poor development for the news network and yet another chapter in a long story of management problems and missteps.
Cuomo was handed a four-day suspension without pay on Thursday after a “Social Justice” segment on his show that included a picture of a Confederate soldier and drew condemnation from Twitter, among others. CNN announced that Cuomo’s show, which replaced the old show, would start “with an additional hour of politics,” with Chris Cuomo, Poppy Harlow and other personalities. However, nothing in CNN’s announcement mentioned “New Day.”
“The message of my story wasn’t about Confederate statues, it was about the idea that statues can feel divisive and mean different things to different people,” Cuomo told New York’s Daily News in an interview Friday. “That’s really what my story was about.”
Cuomo’s suspension follows last week’s resignation of CNN contributor Jeffrey Lord, who resigned after he went on Twitter to call Democrats “enemies of the American people.” This prompted numerous tweets from members of CNN’s staff, including Henry Schleiff, the president and CEO of Discovery Communications, which owns the network. The network has many critics in the Black community for hiring a racist to moderate events in D.C. and appearing on CNN, which is perceived as White-dominated and potentially deceptive.
Other controversies have recently swirled around CNN, too. The network and its executives would, months ago, be held up as a shining example of ethical and moral leadership in cable news. Only last year, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that CNN was the best-run news network in the country, all because of Carol Browner, a CNN president in the past. At the time, Dowd noted, the network had Barbara Starr, who is African-American, on CNN as a host of the Sunday morning show “State of the Union.” Yet, when Woodruff and her colleagues on the station, particularly White reporters, decided to report falsely on the Saturday massacre in Sutherland Springs, Texas, of 26 people, those same journalists were attacked with the same cynical and unforgivable portrayal of journalism in CNN newsroom emails leaked to the right-wing websites New York Daily News and the Daily Caller.
This continuing, seemingly inexorable bad news from CNN – its worst crisis in decades, if not ever – calls to mind a sermon by Harry Belafonte: “If you have to ask what’s wrong with this picture, the picture’s wrong.”