It's another banner week for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network: the lead story on five days, with frontpage appearances every day of the week. You'll notice that several familiar themes and tropes weave their way into the narrative, according to Fox's needs and the flow of news. Let's start with last Monday (Feb. 25) and its combination of newly fabricated stories and rehashed fictions:
Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said young people have to ask a
“legitimate question” in the wake of climate change and mounting student
loan debt: “Is it okay to still have children?”
Well, no:
... In an Instagram Live video over the weekend, Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., welcomed supporters into her kitchen—and gave a “special hello to my haters”—while she made chili and poured herself a glass of white wine.
“Our planet is going to face disaster if we don’t turn this ship around,” she said, as she chopped sweet potatoes. “And so it’s basically like, there is a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult and it does lead, I think young people, to have a legitimate question. Ya know, should—is it okay to still have children?”
Earlier, she was debunking the previous week's three-byline New York Post exclusive:
Freshman New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday night confirmed The Post’s reporting that she’s relocated to a new Bronx apartment in her neighborhood.
A day after residents at the Democratic congresswoman’s listed address told The Post they’d never seen her around, her spokesman on Sunday said she moved recently to a larger apartment “a block and a half away” with her boyfriend.
She's the lead story again on Tuesday, with the Photoshop functioning as the equivalent of the old-fashioned 1A editorial cartoon after a few contortions in the second graf:
Amazon could be facing a New York-style backlash in response to its plans for a massive second headquarters in Virginia.
Inspired in part by the success of community activists and elected officials like New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a group of advocates calling themselves "For Us, Not Amazon" is demanding that Northern Virginia reject the tech giant's plans for a second headquarters in Arlington.
Later, a familiar columnist checks in to follow up on the previous day's fiction, now with added Socialism® ("diktat," geddit?).
Following on to another lead story about the disarray in the Democratic party, another Fox commentator checks in to point out, again, that she's proclaiming herself the leader of the party:
Republicans have described Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., as the leader of her party, the boss of the Democratic Party. And there's a reason that they are saying that -- because she is. She said so herself while discussing her budget-busting "Green New Deal" in an interview on Friday.
Wednesday starts with a follow-up to several previous fictions, this one moving into the realm of reality because, well, someone has filed something:
EXCLUSIVE – A Republican group filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday alleging that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's campaign may have illegally funneled thousands of dollars through an allied PAC to boyfriend Riley Roberts.
Stay with it, though:
... Wednesday's complaint comes after a blog post on Medium by political consultant Luke Thompson, who first flagged the payments to Roberts.
His screed prompted pushback from Ocasio-Cortez and her chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti as it also included unverified speculation of legal impropriety and an incorrect claim that the Democrat’s campaign raised only about $3,000 while spending nearly $28,000 by October 2017 – ignoring that the campaign also raised more than $33,000 from small donors.
You can see why people aren't eager to return phone calls from Fox seeking comment. But Ocasio-Cortez moves into the lead position again Wednesday in a truly unusual fashion:
You'd almost think she was a real congressperson doing a real job or something:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., on Wednesday asked President Trump's onetime personal attorney Michael Cohen if Trump had intentionally devalued his real estate assets to reduce his tax bills, to which Cohen responded, "Yes."
Too bad there was no room for that in the hed, huh?
Thursday, she's back to her hypocritical ways (even as CPAC is hearing about the Stalinist plan to outlaw hamburgers):
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., lashed out at an anonymous shutterbug who “creepily” snapped a picture of her at a restaurant with an aide who was feasting on a juicy burger -- an image that soon made the rounds on social media, as it was taken days after she questioned whether Americans needed to eat so much meat.
Note that the Cohen follow-up manages to keep Rashida Tlaib front and center as well, and there's yet another take on the existential threat posed by those 2020 Dems:
On Friday, Ocasio-Cortez's Soviet-style domination of the party is the lead story again ("Dem darling is a throwback to those days of August when she was still a new figure in the Fox pandaemonium):
After more than two dozen moderate Democrats broke from their party's progressive wing and sided with Republicans on a legislative amendment Wednesday, New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reportedly sounded the alarm in a closed-door meeting Thursday and said those Democrats were "putting themselves on a list."
Those pesky Democrats and their doomed platform reclaim the lead position later, but another Fox commentator manages to point out Ocasio-Cortez's threat to yet another American institution:
How many catches and throws will baseball superstar Bryce Harper make for the federal and local state governments every year? Given his newly inked deal with the Philadelphia Phillies for $330 million over 13 years, if the “socialist Democrats” get their way, close to 90 percent of his work could be for free.
If you hang on until the ninth graf, Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar both show up then. A little later, though, we have her malign, mesmerizing influence leading the party to its doom, even though she doesn't illustrate the frontpage presence:
The 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have served a combined 48 years in the Senate. They’ve served an additional 27 years in various mayoral offices and governor’s mansions across the country. Their total time in the House of Representatives adds another three decades of service. When you factor in likely candidates who have not yet declared or formed exploratory committees, those numbers rise to 108, 73, and 76 years, respectively. Yet who leads this historically broad and experienced presidential field? A 29-year-old bartender just wrapping up her first month in office.
To be sure, New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is too young to launch her own bid for the White House. Nevertheless, the freshman congresswoman controls an entire primary pack of candidates too craven and opportunistic to offer any ideas themselves.
By Saturday, we seem to have figured out which picture should have been used in the first place:
And for Sunday, the dystopian-steampunk illustration from Monday is back in the lead, this time following another hard-hitting exposé from the New York Post (building -- now let's not always see the same hands -- on a familiar fabrication):
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded Saturday night after a published report excoriated the freshman congresswoman for pushing her Green New Deal
initiative while still traveling on airplanes and using ridesharing
services -- instead greener travel methods such as public
transportation.
The piece mentioned the New York
Democrat’s call in January for more sustainable energy solutions: "The
world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,”
she said at the time.
All in all, it's a week of familiar roles for Rep. Ocasio-Cortez in Fox World. She's a communist hypocrite who's imperiling the American way of life at every turn, she's a Svengali wresting control of her failing party from the adults, and she scoffs at the laws and restraints that keep the political process in line. (Often, we should note again, based on fictions that people eventually grow tired of debunking.) The only familiar role that doesn't seem to be evident over the past week is being schooled, rather than schooling: getting a lecture on how the world really works from those who know better. But it's still barely midafternoon Sunday.
Labels: AOC, fox, framing, securitization
