Gov Cuomo Attacked NY’s Largest Cable Company. Its Channels Ignored the News.

It would have seemed to be the perfect made-for-local-TV moment: a reporter’s hard-nosed questions about potential corruption allegations eliciting an angry rebuke from Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY). Full coverage to follow, right? But things quickly got complicated when Gov Cuomo veered sharply away from a question about hundreds of thousands of dollars from possible straw donors, and began to attack the parent company of the veteran reporter who had asked it, Zack Fink of NY1. “Speaking of fraud, Charter Spectrum has been executing fraud on the people of this state,” Gov Cuomo said. He attacked the company for not building out as much broadband in rural communities as it had promised, and for television ads it was running to promote its record. “You are defrauding the people of the state,” Gov Cuomo told Fink. “That’s a fraud.” But the confrontation — a classic of the local news genre — was nowhere to be found on the NY1. The governor had later called into the NY1 newsroom to explain himself — on the record. That too, never made it on television.