It’s one thing for a newsroom to puff up a member of Congress.
It’s another thing entirely to help that lawmaker push a lie, which is exactly what the New York Times did this week when it published a servile bit of spin in service of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, D-N.Y, absurd Green New Deal.
The article, titled “Pressed by Climate Activists, Senate Democrats Plan to ‘Go on Offense,'” is mostly unremarkable. It’s the exact sort of thing you’d expect from a news organization that’s more likely than not to be sympathetic toward Democrats’ $93 trillion-dollar plan to remake the U.S. economy.
But there’s one section in the Times report that is particularly egregious. It reads [emphasis added]:
But it was also hit by a backlash, as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s website mistakenly published a draft summary of the document that included contentious provisions not endorsed by those candidates, like language that called for economic security “for all who are unable or unwilling to work.”
The authors of this passage are either ignorant or dishonest.
Ocasio-Cortez and her allies badly botched the rollout of her Green New Deal proposal by publishing draft summary that included a laughably silly “frequently asked questions” page that included nonsense about “farting cows” and providing “economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work.” Her office provided newsrooms with copies of this “FAQ.” It was not an error. The “FAQ” represented her premeditated position on the issue.
Unsurprisingly, the “FAQ” drew no small amount of laughter. However, rather own up to authoring and circulating something as stupid as the draft summary and its accompanying materials, the congresswoman and her staff instead lied about it, pushing some absurd narrative instead alleging they were the victims of a right-wing disinformation campaign. Ocasio-Cortez’s team admitted eventually to authoring the “FAQ,” but only after she had muddied the waters with some bogus claim about how someone else had created doctored versions of her bill.
As if that weren’t bad enough, newsrooms like the New York Times are actually helping Ocasio-Cortez to push the lie that her office didn’t mean to author and distribute the ludicrous “FAQ.” What’s so maddening about the Times simply accepting the congresswoman’s version of events is that it involves ignoring that her staff gave newsrooms the now-infamous “cow farts” documents.
National Public Radio was the first news outlet to report extensively on the contents of Green New Deal proposal. In its exclusive report, titled “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Releases Green New Deal Outline,” there’s a passage that reads:
The link included in the above passage leads readers back to the summary draft and accompanying “FAQ” the Times claims was “mistakenly” published. Don’t you just hate it when you mistakenly publish things on your own website and hand out documents to newsrooms?
An incurious press is a terrible thing. And when it comes to the press being incurious, nothing encourages that more than uncomfortable questions about Democratic lawmakers.
