Fox News just made a personnel move that is leaving some longtime viewers asking what on earth the network is thinking.
The network has hired Melissa DeRosa, the former top aide to disgraced New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, as a contributor. She will also appear in the premiere of a new Fox News podcast called the Girls.
That announcement landed like a brick with Janice Dean, the former Fox meteorologist who became one of the most determined public critics of Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fox News put DeRosa in the official launch lineup alongside Rachel Campos-Duffy, Harris Faulkner, Kat Timpf and former ESPN host Samantha Ponder.
Fox News says the weekly program will debut Oct. 1 and feature a rotating group of women discussing politics, culture, money, marriage, parenting and careers.
New episodes are scheduled for Thursdays across Fox News Digital, YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. The network is billing the program as an unscripted, free-flowing format that moves beyond a traditional news roundtable.
Fox executives Porter Berry and Megan Albano presented the show as part of the company’s expanding podcast operation. The lineup can change from week to week, with the premiere built around DeRosa, three familiar Fox personalities and Ponder as an outside guest.
The network described DeRosa as a newly named contributor. That decision is drawing fire because she held one of the most powerful jobs in the Cuomo administration.
DeRosa served as secretary to the governor and stood at the center of his operation during its biggest scandals.
Dean’s objection was blunt. She accused DeRosa of helping smear the women who came forward against Cuomo, playing a role in the undercounting of nursing-home deaths and trying to silence Dean’s advocacy.
Dean lost both of her husband’s parents to COVID-19 while they were living in New York long-term care facilities. She spent years demanding answers from Cuomo’s administration and refusing to let the victims’ families be brushed aside.
The New York State Assembly released an investigation in 2021 that examined the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing-home death information along with the sexual-harassment allegations and the use of state resources on Cuomo’s pandemic memoir.
Investigators concluded that the administration had not been fully transparent about the total number of nursing-home residents who died from COVID-19. The report also found that Cuomo sexually harassed women and used state personnel and resources in connection with his book.
The Assembly inquiry said the state Health Department’s public report accurately disclosed the data it included but failed to present the full number of nursing-home residents who died after contracting COVID-19.
It also found that Cuomo’s Executive Chamber delayed information requested by state lawmakers, even after senior officials advised that the material should be provided.
New York’s public tally excluded residents who died after being transferred to hospitals, obscuring the full toll connected to the facilities.
A later House Committee on Oversight and Accountability record revisited the administration’s handling of those numbers and testimony concerning DeRosa’s role in decisions about out-of-facility death data.
Dean then resurfaced Fox News’ own reporting from the height of the scandal, when Cuomo aides were accused of trying to discredit her as she pressed for accountability.
Fox News is free to invite Democrats into the conversation. But viewers are also free to judge the choice, and many will see a vast difference between airing an opposing voice and rewarding a central player from the Cuomo operation with a contributor title.
For the families who fought to expose what happened in New York’s nursing homes, those decisions remain personal, painful and unresolved.
That is why this hire is producing such a fierce reaction. Fox News awarded DeRosa a contributor title and put her in the opening lineup.
Continue reading...
[ H/T WLT Report ]
