Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez exploded onto the scene last June with a New York primary victory over Rep. Joe Crowley, chair of the House Democratic caucus, many in the media wondered why they’d failed to see her coming. While left-leaning outlets such as The Intercept, Splinter, and The Young Turks had paid attention to Ocasio-Cortez’s longshot bid, more mainstream publications had overlooked both her campaign and the radically progressive platform it touted. “Abolish ICE” and “Medicare for all” quickly entered the lexicon of the political press.
Seven months later, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez fills column inches as a disrupter in Washington. In addition to her agenda, plenty of ink has spilled on her social media game: prominent media and tech writers have lined up recently to hail it as a mini-revolution in political communication. Where Trump, is “online,” Ocasio-Cortez is “Extremely Online,” Kara Swisher writes in her New York Times column. Ocasio-Cortez’s #relatable video content humanizes her, Swisher adds, whereas Trump’s disembodied tweets make him look “more and more like a giant cartoon bobblehead.”
ICYMI: How a problematic NYT article shows how newsrooms are out of touch with the communities they cover
The right-wing mediasphere, which had become accustomed to its own viral dominance, has developed an obsession with Ocasio-Cortez. Other top targets, like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, have rarely dignified its ire with a response, yet Ocasio-Cortez, backed by her many supporters on social media, has proved adept at drowning out the noise with blaring counter-noise. When critics tag a “scandal” to her, she quickly turns it around—and scores points with her fans in the process.
When, in November, a Washington Examiner reporter shared a picture of Ocasio-Cortez dressed in normal clothes with the caption “that don’t look like a girl who struggles,” he was, as Vice put it, “ratio’d into oblivion” on Twitter—reigniting a debate on salaries for incoming lawmakers. Last week, after an “Anonymous Q” Twitter account shared a video of Ocasio-Cortez dancing in college, she filmed and tweeted an update; this time to the song “War (What Is It Good For).” This week, the Daily Caller found itself on the end of another Ocasio-Cortez clapback after sharing a hoax “nude selfie” of her in the bath that had already been comprehensively debunked. Ocasio-Cortez used this episode to draw attention to the heightened scrutiny women face in leadership positions. “No wonder they defended [Brett] Kavanaugh so fiercely,” she wrote.
Responses to these conflagrations represent only a small portion of Ocasio-Cortez’s online presence: she’s on social media day-in, day-out, sharing everything from serious policy points to cooking tips, using the informality of the latter to boost the appeal of the former. As BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel (who yesterday announced he is headed to the Times opinion desk) writes, all these posts are “agenda-setting.” Ocasio-Cortez has not limited herself to social forums: last weekend, she used a high-profile 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper to suggest tax rates as high as 70 percent to fund a “Green New Deal”; on Tuesday, soon after Trump’s Oval Office address to the nation, Ocasio-Cortez went on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show, drawing attention to the separation of families at the border. Taken together, it all begins to seem like one big, personalized, multimedia feedback loop.
That’s quite a lot for a Congresswoman just now wrapping up her first week. Despite being a newbie in Congress, she’s been effective in speaking for her colleagues. Last weekend, she told Cooper that she does not see herself as a “flamethrower” but as a “consensus builder.” Nonetheless, both her policy platform and communication style show she’s intent on burning the status quo. Ocasio-Cortez intends to dominate the conversation, and not let it dominate her.
ICYMI: Mainstream media grapples with a left-wing wave
Below, more on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
- A disrupter: Wired’s Antonio García Martínez writes that “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a social media marketing genius, and very likely a harbinger of a new American political reality … The same way florid, hours-long public oratory (echoed by the newfangled telegraph and newspapers) was the route to power for Lincoln in 1860, the preeningly candid self-display of streaming social media will be the route to power in 2020 and beyond.”
- On fact-checking: When Cooper fact-checked an old Ocasio-Cortez tweet on Medicare for all, she drew criticism for responding “I think there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.” Writing for New York’s Intelligencer, Eric Levitz argues that she has a point. “Which truths and falsehoods the mainstream press chooses to spotlight—and which it leaves unscrutinized—does reflect the ideological biases of the “objective” press,” he writes. “While Medicare for All’s proponents are constantly confronted with the fiscal implications of their preferred policy, opponents of dramatically expanding the public sector’s role in health care are rarely confronted with the humanitarian implications of leaving nearly 30 million Americans uninsured.”
- The status quo: Ocasio-Cortez created a new Instagram account yesterday, blaming “House rules” for having to mothball her old one. “The Members’ Congressional Handbook doesn’t explicitly say that lawmakers are required to make new accounts, but in most cases it’s easier to separate their government resources and personal ones in order to avoid ethics violations,” The Verge’s Makena Kelly explains.
- Pulling teeth: Braving a new #relatable frontier yesterday, Beto O’Rourke broadcast his dental appointment in an Instagram Story. Some people wish he hadn’t. “A sudden rush of extremely online candidates could leave some politicians oversharing,” The Daily Beast’s Kelly Weill writes. “When everyone is uploading folksy videos from their kitchens, it takes an otherwise questionable Teeth Video to cut through the noise.”
Other notable stories:
- Trump went to the border yesterday to reinforce his demand for a wall and tape an “interview” with Sean Hannity—showing up despite telling network anchors earlier this week that he thought the visit would be pointless. (Trump countered that the previous remarks were “OFF THE RECORD.”) Hannity spent the visit with White House staffers, not the press corps; he was spotted huddling with his old pal Bill Shine, a former Fox executive who is now Trump’s communications director. Katie Rogers and Maggie Haberman of the Times report that Trump may be getting sick of Shine: “Shine, according to his critics, has shown little understanding of the conservative media beyond the cable news ecosystem and his former network—the one place where the president does not need much assistance, and where Shine has few remaining admirers.”
- The National Enquirer claimed credit for Jeff Bezos going public with his divorce, boasting that it tracked him “across five states and 40,000 miles” to reveal him “whisking his mistress off to exotic destinations on his $65 million private jet.” The Enquirer’s history with Trump, and Trump’s hatred of Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, sparked rumors of something sinister, though CNN’s Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy are skeptical: the Trump-Enquirer relationship “visibly ended in April when the FBI raided [Michael] Cohen’s office and subpoenaed records from the Enquirer.” We might know more about Cohen and the Enquirer’s work to bury bad stories about Trump on February 7, when Cohen will testify to Congress.
- When three Russian journalists turned up in the Central African Republic to investigate Russian private military contractors’ work there, they were tracked closely, then killed in “a well-planned ambush involving a senior police officer with shadowy Russian connections,” according to new evidence seen by CNN’s Tim Lister and Sebastian Shukla.
- Q13, a Fox affiliate in Washington state, fired a staffer after the station aired an apparently doctored video of Trump’s Oval Office address on Tuesday night. The video made Trump look bright orange and showed him “sticking his tongue out languidly between sentences,” Christine Clarridge and Ryan Blethen of The Seattle Times report.
- Agenda, a corporate news service owned by The Financial Times, deleted quotes from a supposed interview with Les Moonves, the disgraced former CEO of CBS, after Moonves strongly denied speaking to its reporters, The Wrap’s Jon Levine reports. Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter’s Jeremy Barr reports that Jeff Flake, who just finished his term as a Republican US senator for Arizona, is in talks with CBS about a role at the network, which could be “as an on-air contributor—or as something more.”
- And for CJR, I checked in with a new magazine in France that looks at big challenges facing the world through the prism of … toilets.
ICYMI: How Der Spiegel was deceived by a fabulist
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.