According to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Andrew Kaczynski is a sexist shill for the Republican Party. This is news to me, as it will be to anyone who’s been following Kaczynski and his investigative journalism for nearly a decade.
BREAKING NEWS: Lady Had A Job, Got Paid More Than Me
Nice work. Now do the amount of Wall Street, Big Pharma, & Fossil Fuel ? presidential candidates accepted over their careers & how much they’re taking now. https://t.co/PI7xh1eQOE
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 23, 2019
There are about a dozen or so problems with this tweet. For starters, the article shared by Kaczynski wasn’t even written by him; two women at the Washington Post wrote it. And Ocasio-Cortez’s blatant attack on the independent press aside, the notion that Kaczynski is targeting Democrats instead of the agents of Ocasio-Cortez’s much reviled “Big Capitalism” is downright laughable. Kaczynski’s investigative journalism has derailed the careers of multiple Trump appointees. He did it purely by digging up damaging media and writings from years past.
But the article Kaczynski shared didn’t even pretend to tell of a scandal. It was just a story, and a relevant one at that, if only judging by Ocasio-Cortez’s freak-out.
If Ocasio-Cortez had bothered to click on the piece, she probably would’ve made it to the second paragraph, which explicitly states:
Ocasio-Cortez’s outrage and the 11,000 livid comments on Kaczynski’s tweet point to a disturbing trend of the public increasingly expecting journalists to behave like partisans rather than objective reporters and investigators of the facts. Perhaps that’s because far too many in the media have indulged their biases, but it certainly doesn’t help that politicians from Ocasio-Cortez to President Trump alike are cheering on and then deriding the press based on how politically expedient their coverage ends up being.
To be clear, Warren signed up for the scrutiny. All politicians do. Hell, her own party is using subpoena power against the president to acquire financial disclosures without any substantive allegation, let alone evidence of criminal or corrupt financial conduct in office. Should Trump’s professional past be off-limits too? Or does this new standard only apply to poor, helpless women?
The Post’s journalists are only doing their job in reporting on the cases Warren took on while teaching and, given Warren’s demonstrated tenuous relationship with the truth, whether she was honest about her disclosures regarding them. If Ocasio-Cortez thinks that’s sexist, she needs thicker skin. If she can’t handle it, maybe she just doesn’t belong in the spotlight of public office.
Sure, find fault with the Post not immediately contextualizing the cost of Warren’s work. Though, of course, there is great irony that Ocasio-Cortez, whose ideology is based on envy of the rich, should screech that Kaczynski is just jealous of Warren’s wealth. But don’t deny the validity of a story about the professional past of someone who wants to become the leader of the free world.
Exit question: With former Vice President Joe Biden taking the wind out of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., sails in the polls, Ocasio-Cortez still has an endorsement decision to make. Does she back the single most significant socialist in American politics since Eugene V. Debs, or does she send the old white man packing in favor of #GirlPower?
