We’ve come to the part of the story where reporters and pundits are openly defending Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, hyper-partisan, incoherent, factually inaccurate, and incendiary attacks on the press.
The implication: If you thought the news media’s thirsty denunciations of President Trump’s attacks on the press were about anything other than combating a Republican in the White House, the joke is on you.
The freshman congresswoman is “walking this line by pointing out some of the biases that we do have in the media, and also supporting the media as an institution,” Time correspondent Charlotte Alter said this weekend. Oh, please.
Alter’s defense of Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., comes after the congresswoman attacked the Washington Post’s fact checker Glenn Kessler. Kessler had authored a report last week titled, “Ocasio-Cortez’s misfired facts on living wage and minimum wage,” panning the congresswoman’s factually inaccurate remarks during a recent panel discussion:
Kessler gave these comments a flunking three-Pinocchio rating, writing, “A lot of Americans do not earn enough for a living wage, but we cannot find evidence that it is the ‘vast majority.’”
He added, “Amazon and Walmart pay well above the minimum wage, contrary to her statement, and it is tendentious to claim those companies specifically get some sort of a wealth transfer from the public when such benefits flow to all low-wage workers in many companies.”
Even before the fact-check was published, Ocasio-Cortez was on the attack. Her office tweeted the following note just moments after Kessler called to discuss his findings with her staff, ridiculing him for seeking to clarify her comments:
Me: “I don’t think billionaires should concentrate wealth while employing people who are sleeping in cars working a zillion hours to survive.”
Next day: “That will be TEN PINOCCHIOS to Ocasio, ‘zillion’ is not a number and I found someone who sleeps in a tent, not a car.”
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 23, 2019
After the publication of the fact-check, Ocasio-Cortez didn’t let up for anything. She claimed the Post article cited a study published by a “Walmart-funded think tank.” She also claimed that the author of the supposedly “Walmart-funded” study is a lobbyist.
The study was authored by then-New York University professor Jason Furman. The study is being hosted on the right-leaning Mackinac Center’s website, which is almost certainly where Ocasio-Cortez got the idea to dismiss it outright as right-wing agitprop. But Furman, who formerly chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Barack Obama, wrote the report on his own time as a university professor. It was not funded by any group. The study was shared later in a forum hosted by the ultra-left-wing Center for American Progress, which was founded in 2003 by former President Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff John Podesta. CAP accepts Walmart donations, but, again, like the Mackinac Center, it had no hand in the production of the study.
Thanks for the respect. That paper was done for a conference at the Center for American Progress (not saying they agreed/agree with it) and was not funded by anyone. I have never heard of the Mackinac Center and assume they must have reposted it on their website.
— Jason Furman (@jasonfurman) January 25, 2019
In other words, Ocasio-Cortez is once again wrong on all counts. But rather than admit error, she has chosen instead to hide behind her most ardent fans, many of whom reflexively defend her regardless of what she has done. (Sound familiar?)
Put aside for a moment the argument over whether her remarks about Walmart are accurate. Her response to the fact-check has been both contemptuous and riddled with inaccuracies. In the era of Trump, you’d think there would be the normal shows of solidarity with Kessler, with every blue check-marked journalist rushing to proclaim himself an ally of both facts and checks.
This hasn’t happened at all. For example, in a segment this weekend on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” titled “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s relationship with the media,” neither the show’s host nor his guests made any effort to defend Kessler from her bogus assertions. There wasn’t a single mention of the fact that Ocasio-Cortez’s responses to the Post fact-check have been fact-free. The show’s guests did use the segment, however, to argue that the fact-checking of the congresswoman has been maybe a little sexist. Really, that happened. The host also took the opportunity to marvel at the congresswoman’s social media skills, saying she’s “using Twitter really well.”
Worse yet, some in the news media are actually applauding Ocasio-Cortez’s response to Kessler.
CNN contributor Jess McIntosh, for example, claimed that Ocasio-Cortez was “right to criticize the pro-Walmart ‘fact checking’ of her comments.” Even though there’s no link of that study to Walmart, here’s a supposedly fact-based journalist defending her fact-free attacks on the press.
“No,” the cable news commentator added, “that doesn’t make her Trump. She’s shaping her own narrative and frankly, she’s crushing this.”
Ocasio-Cortez has banned reporters from public events, characterized legitimate news reporting as “birdcage lining,” accused newsrooms of peddling racism, sexism, and “news hysteria” because they’ve covered her remarks poorly, and she is now ridiculing fact-checkers with counterattacks based on totally false claims. She has done all of this even as the news media continue to build her up into one of the most visible and influential lawmakers in the country.
But don’t you dare say she’s like Trump. It’s totally different when she does it.
