The Press REALLY Doesn't Want AOC To Be President

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently made a relatively ordinary appearance at the Munich Security Conference.

During one interview, AOC was asked about China's ill-intent toward Taiwan (see: this point in the YouTube video). She stumbles a little before unremarkably stating that you'd hope economic intervention and political savvy could preempt military conflict.

The comment was innocuous, if not entirely graceful. But the U.S. media, prompted by a phalanx of bad actors and financial conflicts of interest, turned the unremarkable moment into an entire week-long news event replete with ample hand wringing about AOC's purported unsuitability for higher office.

Story after story after story framed AOC's comments as utterly disastrous, "embarrassing," and even "incomprehensible":

First, I'd like you to note that all of the media outlets in the image above are now owned by affluent right wingers. Every last one.

Affluent right wingers currently courting the Trump administration across a wide swath of regulatory favors, whether its Larry Ellison's (CBS) planned merger with Warner Brothers, Jeff Bezos' (Washington Post) vying for taxpayer space subsidies, or Perry Sook (The Hill) lobbying for Nexstar/TEGNA merger approval. 

Affluent Republicans increasingly own the entirety of traditional and new media. While somehow simultaneously complaining that they're being cancelled, silenced, or crowded out in the "marketplace of ideas" by broad "mainstream media liberal bias" that never really existed in the first place.

The consistent implication of the recent "AOC um" news cycle was that the popular progressive was somehow unsuitable for broader office due to thirty-seconds of clumsy verbiage. Despite ample preceding evidence, including at the exact Munich conference she attended, of her being extremely bright and well spoken.

The attacks come as AOC ponders whether to run for a spot in the Senate or something significantly more ambitious. That's not great news for an extraction class fat and comfortable from Trump-era tax cuts and the total decimation of whatever was left of U.S. corporate oversight.

You've probably noticed that Donald Trump, in between acts of historic corruption, can ramble incoherently or post AI slop of himself literally defecating on the public only to have the press yawn or normalize it. Key Republicans can engage in overt acts of grotesque racism and it's quickly memory holed.

In contrast, a minority progressive woman says "um" twice and you'll notice it's suddenly a national media crisis.

Much of the recent hyperventilation originated with right wing propaganda outlets like Fox News and the New York Post. But I'd like to direct your attention to this interesting piece by Emily Horne, which notes that the phony media cycle was also driven by right wing propagandists at "pink slime" newspapers.

"Pink slime" newspapers are fake local newspapers created by local partisan ratfuckers (almost always right wing) to seed propaganda in the minds of poorly educated and already misinformed local voters, most of whom live in "news deserts" where reliable local news no longer exists.  

The total of such fake newspapers has tripled since 2019, and now exceeds the number of real journalism organizations in America. To most locals they're indistinguishable from a real newspaper:

As Horne notes, these outlets seed false narratives locally that are often picked up by national outlets and cited as authentic, good faith arguments made by authentically-objective Americana. It creates an ouroborus of pseudo-journalistic propaganda that then gets seeded into the the broader media discourse.

In this case Horne found that both Politico and the New York Times linked back to one such fake local Michigan paper named The Midwesterner as an example of good faith criticism of AOC's Munich speech. Here's what that looked like in the pages of Politico, a prominent DC political gossip outlet:

That first link is to a random right wing troll on Elon Musk's X right wing propaganda website. The other links to The Midwesterner without noting it's not a real newspaper, but a right wing political propaganda rag. More specifically, a right wing propaganda rag owned by a former Republican opponent of Whitmers.

It would have taken just a tiny bit of actual journalism for Politico and The New York Times to notice they were citing bad actors as examples of legitimate criticism, but Horne observes they couldn't be bothered:

The main takeaway here: it’s clear that the Midwesterner isn’t a real media outlet, it’s a right-wing political content mill—which the New York Times and POLITICO both failed to note when they cited its viral tweet as the kind of foreign policy criticism that Democrats just need to face.

The leading political news outlets of our time should not be sourcing their reporting from scammy, obviously partisan websites with no mastheads. They shouldn’t be linking to their content without explaining who it’s from and what it’s about. But it appears they either didn’t know what they were citing, or didn’t care to find out.

The New York Times, like most mainstream outlets, routinely goes comically out of its way to try and normalize President Donald Trump's verbal incontinence. But when it comes to a progressive challenger to establishment norms, you'll notice they're suddenly very careful to transcribe and accentuate every verbal misstep:

So again, right wingers will create a narrative (AOC isn't competent enough to become President because she said "um" twice in Munich). That narrative gets seeded in the discourse via right wing AM radio, fake local papers, broadcast TV (Sinclair, Nexstar), cable TV (Fox News, OANN, Newsmax), and the internet.

Then it gets picked up by a consolidated corporate press also increasingly owned by right, white, Conservative males with a vested interest in defending the extraction class (predominantly because they like deregulation, dislike paying taxes, and want their latest shitty mergers approved).

Before you know it you've created a week long media cycle out of hot air.

If AOC attempts to defend herself from these sorts of coordinated bad faith attacks, it only acts to extend the phony news cycle, as outlets like Fox News can frame her as unreasonably defensive:

Right wing propaganda outlets like Fox News specifically built to peddle agitprop are one thing, but these types of bad faith new cycles are predominately propped up by media outlets widely viewed as bipartisan and credible by the broader public.

But major outlets like Politico (whose owner was caught on email praising Trump and then tried to lie about it) and the New York Times (which can routinely be found propping up bad faith right wing attacks on trans Americans) are such consistent and enthusiastic participants in this kind of bad faith bullshit peddling, they long ago lost the benefit of the doubt as to whether any of this is accidental.

It becomes obvious that establishment media views progressive reformers (and more equitable taxation and more consistent corporate oversight) as a bigger existential threat than rampant corruption and even authoritarianism.

Major U.S. news outlets used to at least pretend that there were meaningful firewalls between the interests of ownership and editorial. We used to have media consolidation and diversity ownership requirements designed to encourage a little ideological diversity. But those days are long and obviously dead.

This was all avoidable. Republicans spent decades targeting journalism, publicly-funded media, and public interest guardrails while building a massive ecosystem of party-friendly propaganda. Democrats, in contrast, spent most of that time struggling to forge even a marginally coherent media reform platform despite plenty of media academics and scholars laying the path directly at their feet.

"Rebuilding this system up from the ashes will require massive public investments not reliant on private capital and corporate sponsorship,” UPenn media scholar Victor Pickard recently wrote in a new study on how to repair U.S. media. “American public media 2.0 should be radically democratic and truly public, not just in name, but actually owned and controlled by local communities.”

In the interim, you can expect things to get decidedly worse. You may have gotten a taste from the way the press utterly hyperventilated at a progressive Muslim running for New York City Mayor. The coming attacks on AOC in the weeks and months to come are going to take bad faith bullshit to an entirely new level.