As a New Yorker, watching Cuomo come up through the system was disturbing. He seemed like a master of the dark media arts, planting stories about his rivals in the press and destroying them from a distance, without anyone in the media acknowledging the wizard behind the curtain

During the pandemic, Cuomo’s mastery of the media’s dark arts turned from a shadowy wizard behind the curtain to a star turn on the bright stage.

The media not only sang his praises, ignoring the body count, turning him into the ideal model for coping with the pandemic, but it was happy to follow his lead in blaming Orthodox Jews for the pandemic.

But a weapon like the media, like scorpions and snakes, tends to turn on its wielder. 

Cuomo is being brought down by planted stories in a campaign pushed by his potential rivals who want him out and want a shot at the big job themselves.

The question is can the media that helped make Cuomo also destroy him. The stories in the media now tout his potential rivals, like AG Letitia James, and insist that he probably can’t win reelection. That sort of material has an effect on potential donors and supporters. The media is trying to trigger an avalanche of defections that will help seal the deal. 

But I’m not convinced that the media can destroy Cuomo. Especially since it quickly ran away from the explosive question of nursing home deaths and shifted to Sanders supporters complaining about sexual harassment. 

New York is not New York City. And the Cuomo family has roots here. Back in the day, the Clintons and the Cuomos fought before allying, and the Clintons came under fire for comparing Cuomo’s dad to a mafioso. And while the campaign may have choked off Cuomo’s path to the White House, his real ambition, he’s not just going to walk away from his current job without a vicious street fight. That’s where things will get interesting.