Are you shocked that Governor Cuomo, our current popular governor, has been keeping tabs on negative reporters? According to Buzzfeed, appears that Andrew Cuomo has had his Communications team collect a political reporter's non-positive postings into a "GENERALLY SNARKY" file (in this case, the writings of Albany political reporter Elizabeth Benjamin of Capital Tonight)... which also sounds like what Communications teams do? At least they weren't taking reporter's DNA!
That this is nothing out of the ordinary is certainly what Communications Director Richard Bamberger—who cops to making up the document—says is the case. "The only 'news' here is how my discarded papers, garbage literally, wound up in the possession of Ben Smith [who is Buzzfeed's editor]. In my 17 years as a journalist, I never condoned stealing personal documents. These are meaningless documents but they could have been important papers and it is a dangerous precedent," he said to Buzzfeed of the 44-page document, which also includes notes like "Example of poor reporting/inadequate fact-checking before distribution."
To be fair to those crying foul and saying the leak reveals a "scary dark side" to the second Governor Cuomo, it is a little disheartening to find out a pol is keeping tabs on their critics. But not surprising. Especially when that pol clearly has obvious political aspirations beyond Albany. And to that end, how about that report that Cuomo doesn't want a high-profile part of the Democratic convention this year for fear of getting too big too soon? Pretty fun, what with nobody even asking him to participate yet.
Now, the real question we have is: does Mayor Bloomberg have a "disgrace" file?
