New York - Behind the Curtain, Cuomo Runs His Own P.R. Machine


Press conferences called by Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo have a “Wizard of Oz” feel: They are routinely done by conference call, with Mr. Cuomo remaining invisible, a booming authoritative voice sticking carefully to his chosen subject.

His sit-down interviews are so rare that the 24-hour television news station NY1 displays a “Cuomo Clock,” which details the number of days that the attorney general has ignored invitations to appear for an on-camera interview (as of Monday, it was 1,195).

His reticence has become such a punch line that a front page headline in the recent April Fools’ issue of City Hall, a weekly political newspaper, blared: “Cuomo Convenes Conference Call to Say, ‘No Comment.’ ”

But, off stage, perhaps no elected official in New York spends more time on the telephone with reporters, calling them day and night, coaxing, massaging, disputing, and cajoling — always off the record. At a bar in Albany this year, a reporter’s cellphone rang near midnight: it was Mr. Cuomo with a concern about news coverage of an event he had attended.

In a way that is rare in an age of publicists, communications staff members and strategists, Mr. Cuomo is his own image shaper, relentlessly working the news media in a way that is unseen by the public and that is challenging for those trying to pin him down on any issue.

His approach, and success at attracting favorable coverage, is about to be tested in coming weeks, as he announces his campaign for governor and confronts tougher scrutiny from an increasingly frustrated press corps.

“They talk to the media quite a bit, just not in an official way,” Edward-Isaac Dovere, the editor of City Hall, said of Mr. Cuomo and his staff. “There are not a lot of politicians who, when so much media attention is focused on them, have succeeded at really not being interviewed and not speaking on the record.”

Mr. Cuomo, who declined to comment for this article, has had an intense and at times fiery relationship with the news media ever since his days just out of law school, when he worked as an adviser to his father, former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo.

His father was known as a serial off-the-record dialer, at times tracking reporters down in hotel rooms while they were away on assignment to talk about stories. As an aide to the former governor, Andrew Cuomo would sometimes make calls to reporters on his father’s behalf, often playing the bad cop.

David Hepp, a former public television producer who reported for the show “Inside Albany,” recalled going head-to-head with Mr. Cuomo about the conditions under which his father would agree to a televised debate during his 1986 re-election campaign. “Andrew was the tough guy,” Mr. Hepp said. “At one point, he said this wasn’t personal, this was business. Because I’d known him a long time.”

Mr. Hepp said he eventually became so frustrated with the demands the Cuomo campaign and other candidates made that he told his station managers to scrap the debate, which they did. “I don’t think they wanted to debate,” Mr. Hepp said of the Cuomo staff. “They wanted to string the negotiations out as long as possible. That was his job, and he made that clear to me.”

The younger Mr. Cuomo appears less trusting of reporters than his father, and becomes especially sensitive when asked about his highly public divorce from Kerry Kennedy.

During a 2006 interview, the former NY1 anchor Dominic Carter pressed Mr. Cuomo about a child support dispute he and Ms. Kennedy had. “There was a misunderstanding; it was immediately reconciled,” Mr. Cuomo responded tersely, adding he did not feel the divorce would be an issue in his campaign for attorney general that year. “I can’t believe anyone would bring it up.”

Mr. Cuomo has not done an interview on NY1 since.

The station’s political director, Bob Hardt, said NY1 had repeatedly reached out to Mr. Cuomo but could not persuade him to come back on the air. The station’s news staff became so fed up at being denied that they told the attorney general’s office they would start the “Cuomo Clock.” Mr. Cuomo’s staff members were unmoved. “We got no response from his office whatsoever,” Mr. Hardt said.

Still, whatever the grumblings, Mr. Cuomo’s strategy has largely worked: He has avoided taking positions on controversial issues, even as the state, facing a large budget gap, grapples with the prospects of laying off state workers, raising taxes or eliminating programs.

Mr. Cuomo has managed to steer clear of much of what is messy about Albany, and any politician would be delighted to draw the approval ratings he routinely does. A March 26 poll by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion found that 61 percent of voters said he was doing a good or excellent job.

His aides say the conference calls are easy to criticize but serve an important purpose: They allow as many reporters as possible to participate, rather than only those who can show up. An aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to discuss Mr. Cuomo’s press strategy publicly, described the calls as “one of the greatest press maximizers.”

Whatever the intent, the conference calls also deprive reporters and television viewers the opportunity to observe Mr. Cuomo in person, rankling some journalists. “It’s a way to prevent a gaffe from looking really bad,” Mr. Hardt said. “TV people do not like those conference calls.”

As he prepares his campaign for governor, Mr. Cuomo is adding firepower to his communications staff, bringing on Phil Singer, a veteran of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign who is known as a devoted and aggressive advocate for the candidates who employ him.

Some of the complexity of both Cuomos’ attitude toward the news media is rooted in an unease with the establishment that they retain, despite all their successes. Both men have paid fastidious attention to how they are portrayed, and can react fiercely to any slight, real or perceived.

And they are determined to get their side of things across, to anyone who will listen. Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute who is a former reporter for The New York Times and The New York Post, recalled the elder Mr. Cuomo’s calling his house once and having a 45-minute conversation with the cleaning woman about housing policy.

“He knows how to dial,” Mr. Carroll said of the former governor, adding that both Cuomos “care very, very much about what’s written about them and said about them.”

NY Times

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