The Cuomo Hits Keep Coming

The latest allegation against Governor Andy Cuomo is not one of sexual harassment. It comes from a woman named Lindsay Nielsen, a former television news reporter in Albany. Nielsen complained on Twitter of abusive and bullying conduct by Cuomo’s staff:


Nielsen talked to the New York Post:

Lindsay Nielsen, in a post to Twitter Sunday, said she left Albany-based News10 ABC following the alleged “threatening” tactics and “incessant bullying” she endured from the governor’s office.

Nielsen, who left News10 in 2017 after joining the news outlet in 2012, told The Post Monday that the alleged harassment was “one of the reasons” she quit her job.

“I didn’t want to deal with it anymore,” she said.
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Nielsen explained that when she’d reach out to Cuomo’s office for comment on a story, she often would not get a response — only to then get a barrage of phone calls demanding changes after the story was published.

“They would make it personal, claiming I have this personal vendetta against the governor, which is absolutely bogus. I was doing my job as a journalist,” she said. “All I was ever trying to do was report the story, report the facts.”

Nielsen’s charges relate to Cuomo’s office, not to personal relations with the governor, and therefore are quite different from, and arguably not as serious as, the first two that have surfaced. Still, her story is interesting.

My sense is that the kind of bullying of reporters by Democrats that she describes goes on a lot. I have heard about it a number of times, usually off the record. Democrat Party politicians generally assume that reporters and editors belong to their party–with good reason, as almost all do. They therefore are often offended when news outlets venture to report actual news, independent of partisan spin, which they regard as dirty pool. This is the usual source of conflict between Democrat politicians or their staffs, and reporters. Ms. Nielsen’s case is, I think, typical.

Given the storm clouds gathering around Andy Cuomo, Lindsay Nielsen’s testimony will add to the pressure on him to resign. Truthfully, though, if similar behavior were a cause for resignation, there would not be a lot of Democratic politicians left in office.

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