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 of New York.

Full coverage to follow, right?

But things quickly got complicated July 31 when 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,” 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,” Cuomo told Fink. “That’s a fraud.”

The outburst by the governor, who is seeking re-election to his third term in November, drew calls for an apology from Cynthia Nixon, Cuomo’s Democratic challenger whose campaign called it a “Trumpian tantrum,” and dual denunciations from the editorial pages of The New York Post and The Daily News.

But the confrontation — a classic of the local news genre — was nowhere to be found on NY1’s own 24/7 airwaves. The governor had later called into the NY1 newsroom to explain himself — on the record, according to several people familiar with the call. That too, never made it on television.

If anyone at NY1’s Chelsea Market headquarters knew why, they were not willing to say; most peoplecontacted for this story immediately referred questions to the station’s corporate public relations team.

Could Charter officials have quashed such coverage out of concern that it might anger Cuomo, and thus jeopardize its already tenuous relationship with the state?

Charter Spectrum and NY1 declined to answer any questions, including whether the company had issued an edict explicitly barring coverage of the exchange between Cuomo and Fink, or whether the governor had objected to news coverage of him to company officials.

“We stand fully behind Spectrum News and the journalists who make it a tremendous asset to our customers,” the company said in a statement.

There are reasons for Charter officials to be sensitive. Cuomo’s administration has threatened the company’s very existence in New York: The governor’s appointees at the state Public Service Commission, which oversees the telecom sector, voted at a hastily convened meeting in late July to force Charter to sell its operations in the state. Those who have tracked the Public Service Commission said its drastic step to revoke Charter’s merger with Time Warner in 2016 was extraordinarily unusual. It came in a special session called with less than 24 hours notice, while one of the commission’s most vocal members had told colleagues she would be out of town on vacation.

“I can’t speak as to why they would have a special session without me, but it is for the chair to determine why a special session was called,” said Commissioner Diane Burman. She had missed one previous regular session in her five years on the commission, she noted, when she was in the hospital. She declined to speculate about her colleagues’ motivations.

Without her, the meeting lasted less than 20 minutes and none of the three commissioners who attended asked any questions before voting to pull approval of Charter’s merger.

A commission spokesman, James Denn, did not return calls for comment and declined to answer specific questions about whether the governor’s office was involved in their decision. He said in a statement that the commission “appropriately moved forward to promptly protect the interests of New Yorkers.”

Marcus Molinaro, Republican candidate for governor, said Friday that he believes Cuomo “put his thumb on the scale of a major PSC decision” because of “his rage at NY1 News.”

“I think Andrew Cuomo got furious with NY1 News and effectively pulled the plug on an entire cable system as punishment to NY1, and as a warning to others he can affect who dare ask him tough questions,” Molinaro said.

Richard Azzopardi, a spokesman for the governor, said that “the facts clearly debunk any conspiracy theory and, in fact, everything has been played out in public.”

Cuomo has issued public warnings to Charter for months; in September, the governor warned that the company would be kicked “out of the state of New York” if it did not get its “act together and fulfill that agreement,” referring to the broadband coverage. Azzopardi added that the governor was unaware of the Public Service Commission’s meeting and actions “until after it happened.”

Cuomo, a governor famous for closely monitoring his media coverage, has occasionally fumed aloud about coverage by Charter Spectrum’s news channels. One person familiar with his thinking said that pursuing Charter’s reported shortcomings when it comes to broadband build-out amounts to a political twofer, allowing him to also “prosecute his anger at them for coverage.”

Karen Scharff, who is supporting Nixon and is executive director of Citizen Action of New York, said there are serious concerns about Charter’s treatment of consumers, but the Cuomo administration’s push to punish the company still gives her pause.

“It’s sort of the classic Cuomo: Do something with some good and kill your enemies in the process,” she said.

Azzopardi, the governor’s spokesman, said the suggestion that Cuomo’s actions and rhetoric have anything to do with coverage is absurd and that his remarks last week “were directed at Charter, not Zack, who the governor respects.” The governor has other reasons to attack Charter. Members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 3 have been on strike for more than a year and rallying behind those workers is good politics for Cuomo, who hopes that union members will similarly rally behind him in next month’s primary. Various arms of the IBEW have been major contributors to Cuomo over the years, giving more than $100,000 since 2014, including $10,000 this April from the union’s New York political action committee.

Cuomo has railed against Spectrum’s news stations for failing to sufficiently cover that strike, as well as other legal challenges, including a lawsuit filed against Charter Spectrum by the state’s attorney general. “They virtually blacked it out,” Cuomo complained the day that the Public Service Commission voted to kick Charter out of the state.

Charter Spectrum’s news channels did briefly cover the Public Service Commission’s move to kick the company out of the state.

Cuomo is hardly the only politician feuding with Charter Spectrum. This week, Anthony Brindisi, a Democratic candidate for Congress in central New York, tried to air a television ad criticizing the company but it was rejected. Brindisi accused Charter Spectrum of trying to “censor” his campaign.

The day after Cuomo snapped at Fink, Charter Spectrum announced it would stop running ads touting its own success — the spots that Cuomo had called “a fraud.”

On Wall Street, where Charter is publicly traded, analysts have largely reacted to the threats from New York government with a shrug. Thomas Rutledge, chief executive of Charter, said on a recent earnings call that labor issues “have politicized the actions” of New York regulators and that the company has a “strong legal case.”

Vijay Jayant, an analyst who studies the media and telecom industry for Evercore ISI, wrote in a research note that the whole episode of revoking Charter’s license was “political theater” and “highly unlikely to actually come to pass.”

“2018 is an election year for statewide offices in New York,” Jayant noted, “and cable companies (which are widely disliked by consumers, for reasons both fair and unfair) have historically made low-risk targets for politicians.”