Katie Couric: CNN shouldn’t have let Chris Cuomo ‘yuk it up’ with brother Andrew during pandemic

Veteran journalist Katie Couric is criticizing CNN for allowing prime-time anchor Chris Cuomo to joke with his brother Andrew Cuomo, then the governor of New York, on air during the coronavirus pandemic. 

“CNN should be able to say ‘we shouldn’t allow Chris Cuomo to yuk it up with his brother, the governor of New York, with a giant Q-tip in the middle of the pandemic because it’s good TV,'” Couric said Tuesday during an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” “They should say, ‘We made a bad decision; that was wrong.’ And I think it’s important for people to acknowledge when they probably have erred the wrong way. ” 

Couric has been doing a series of media interviews in recent days to promote her new memoir “Going There,” which was published this week. 

Chris Cuomo took criticism for the segments with his brother during the pandemic, during which he and the then-governor poked fun at one another, including one point when Andrew Cuomo held up a giant Q-tip during a discussion about coronavirus testing. 

The relationship between the two came under further scrutiny months later after it was revealed Chris Cuomo had been advising the governor on how to handle allegations of sexual harassment that ultimately forced his resignation earlier this year.   

In her book, Couric is open about mistakes she says she made during a decades-long career in journalism, most notably the way she edited an interview with late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2016 during which the justice made controversial comments about racial justice demonstrations. 

“I mentioned that it was a conundrum that I asked Justice Ginsburg about Colin Kaepernick and taking a knee and how she felt about that,” Couric said of the episode. “And I did include the fact that she said it was dumb and disrespectful, it was stupid and arrogant and quite a bit of what she said.”

On Tuesday, Couric said leading news organizations in the United States showing more willingness to admit mistakes will be key to rebuilding the public’s confidence in the mainstream media, which opinion polling shows has reached new lows in recent years. 

“The way to restore faith in media is we need to be able to say we made a mistake,” she told Colbert.