WHAM, the ABC affiliate for Rochester, NY, said a Wednesday interview with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was canceled after the station said it didn’t want to limit the interview to questions about his new book, All Things Possible.
“Nobody was interested in just doing a story about his book,” Brian Houseman, WHAM assignment manager, said in a story the station did about the interview.
After one book related question, the publisher said 13WHAM would be free to use the remainder of the four minute time slot to ask about other topics. “Hydrofracking, we wanted to talk about the Marsh Road Bridge, the governor’s race,” Houseman said, “so we wanted to get him on that.”
AdvertisementThen, a member of the governor’s campaign staff called to ask us to limit our interview to questions only regarding the book.
13WHAM News refused multiple times and the interview was subsequently cancelled. Cuomo’s interviews with other stations across New York went ahead as scheduled.
Houseman said, “I think that that’s just him trying to sell his book and that’s nothing that’s really newsworthy that we would want to cover.”
The Governor’s camp would not comment as to why the interview was cancelled—they deferred questions to the publishing company but no one there had a comment either.