CNN host Chris Cuomo opened his show Monday night with a recusal. The crisis surrounding his brother, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, has deepened amid another accusation of sexual harassment—the third account in a span of days, this time corroborated with a photo. As such, Chris Cuomo felt the need to address the unfolding scandal on-air. “Obviously I am aware of what is going on with my brother. And obviously I cannot cover it because he is my brother,” the Cuomo Prime Time host said, noting that “of course, CNN has to cover it,” has done so “extensively,” and will maintain that pace as the situation develops—one pertaining to issues that Cuomo said he has “always cared very deeply about.” But, the host continued, “there’s a lot of news going on that matters also, so let’s get after that.”

Cuomo recusing himself from covering sexual harassment allegations against his brother is technically the responsible thing to do, given his obvious conflict of interest. But the statement came after Cuomo had covered his brother for months starting in the early days of New York’s battle with COVID-19, and without a shred of purported objectivity. Last spring, viewers were drawn to the act that was the Cuomo brothers, boosting New York’s governor to celebrity status for his relatively sane handling of the pandemic. The pairing was such a conflict of interest that, as the New York Times’ Ben Smith previously reported, it required CNN to roll back a rule they’d instituted in late 2013 when an interview between the Cuomos raised similar questions about ethics. At the time, the network told the host he could no longer interview his brother on television. 

While the reversal was a questionable decision—and one CNN quickly came under fire for—allowing the brothers their recurring shtick, complete with familial banter and praise for the governor’s leadership, packed an emotional punch that some, including Chris Cuomo himself, argued audiences craved in the early days of the pandemic. “I wanted people to see that he’s not just super-intense on this all the time—that he’s living it with you,” the host said on his SiriusXM radio show at the end of March, noting his brother is “not a general” but “a man in full” while also acknowledging “there will come a time when there’s an accountability measure where it will no longer make sense for it to be me” interviewing him. 

At the time, especially in the absence of federal leadership, many saw Governor Cuomo as a much-needed steady hand, which CNN president Jeffrey Zucker told Smith in April was buoyed by the “authenticity and reliability and vulnerability” that “the brothers Cuomo are giving us right now.” Not to mention the ratings boost: according to Nielsen ratings, Cuomo Prime Time’s audience rose 118 percent between March 9 and April 2, Smith reported. CNN allowed the duo’s interviews to continue for months. Following one particularly gushing interview in June, a host of commentators decried the segment, as well as the ethics of Cuomo-on-Cuomo interviews more broadly, as a kind of propaganda for the governor whose state had more deaths from the coronavirus than any other.

The harassment claims against Cuomo are not the first damning headlines about the governor of late. He’s also come under increased scrutiny over his handling of the pandemic, notably his administration withholding data on nursing home deaths caused by the coronavirus. But the undercount scandal had been curiously absent from Cuomo Prime Time in recent weeks, as the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple noted last month—silence that would not have been particularly surprising if CNN hadn’t made an exception to the 2013 rule in the first place. The network told the Post that they made the decision in “an extraordinary time” and that the rule has since been reinstated, a comment that Wemple notes is “an expression of the problem itself: You can’t nullify a rule when your star anchor’s brother is flying high, only to invoke it during times of scandal.” So too Cuomo’s sudden assertion that he “obviously” can’t cover what’s going on with his brother, the governor—despite months of doing just that.

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