Guest post by Mike LaChance at American Lookout:
What’s a governor to do when they want favorable media coverage? One dishonest way to get it is by trying to orchestrate the questions you get from the press. New York’s Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo just got busted doing that.
Politico reported:
Cuomo takes questions by phone as staff tries to plant queries
Gov. Andrew Cuomo decided to take questions from the Albany press corps by phone rather than in person on Thursday, even though he was in the capital city, and his aides contacted several reporters in hopes of planting questions with them.
It’s the second such conference call in three days for the Democratic governor, who is trying to rally opposition to the federal tax overhaul because it curtails the deductibility of state and local taxes.
While the issue has raised Cuomo’s profile with the national media — he was interviewed on National Public Radio earlier this week — he has not spoken in person with reporters at the Capitol since June.
To show their dissatisfaction with the arrangement, Albany reporters from several outlets, including POLITICO, phoned in to the conference from outside Cuomo’s Capitol suite. Gubernatorial press aides then contacted several reporters, three of them said, hoping to have them ask if the governor was inclined to give state lawmakers a pay raise this year. They refused and were not called on during the conference call.
What a fraud. Will the mainstream media report this?