Mainstream Media Receives More Backlash Over Biased AOC Coverage

The mainstream media has, once again, drawn criticism over blatantly biased coverage of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Sometimes, the mainstream media just can’t help themselves in being absolutely awful at their jobs.

For years, mainstream media has suffered from rock bottom trust issues with the public. Very few people are willing to trust them with their coverage.

As I’ve long argued, a major part of the problem is the fact that mainstream media refuses to even acknowledge that their sometimes crappy coverage is even the problem. Instead, media types spend their days explaining away all of their obvious problems by blaming anyone and everything other than themselves.

One of their favourite scapegoats for the mainstream media is social media. The frequent whining from the mainstream media is that it’s all social media’s fault for misinformation and disinformation. This despite mainstream media winding up being a major source of disinformation themselves. In fact, mainstream media is so comically stupid about these things sometimes, they even go so far as to blame free speech in general, saying that if we just did away with that pesky thing called “free speech”, then people would once again fully trust the media as the little compliant automatons that they should be. I mean, nevermind the fact that it’s the media itself that depends on an environment with thriving free speech rights, yeah, free speech is the real problem here.

If anything, mainstream media even sometimes blame their own audience for their problems. At one point, one journalist even suggested that audiences are too stupid to understand what a journalist does. So, that “journalist” wrote an article explaining what a journalist is and why you should trust all journalists. Seriously, it doesn’t get more out of touch than that.

The reality is that mainstream media has been badly fumbling at their jobs for years. One area they have been completely missing the mark is US politics. In 2024, US president, Joe Biden, at one point, mumbled during his debate. In response, the mainstream media completely lost their fucking minds. This by screaming about how Biden is mentally incompetent or that he was just unfit to be president. In some cases, they even pushed the narrative that Democrats are all doomed for the election. At one point, for three days straight, “journalists” kept saying that Democrats are going to their national convention like they were going to their own political funerals. With the relentless howling from the mainstream media, those “journalists” finally got what they wanted and coerced Biden to step down. ultimately, the mainstream media brought down Biden through relentless biased coverage.

This wouldn’t be so bad if Trump got the same treatment. Unfortunately, Trump did not. Instead, the mainstream media spent their days since doing everything to coddle Trump by refusing to cover his insane ramblings, obvious lies, plain as day mental decline, blatant corruption, and fascist ties to Project 2025. This habit of serving as Trumps proxy PR team would be generally known as sane washing. Mainstream media generally dismisses these obvious accusations, making arguments that they are not there to make political statements, but rather, explain the world around them. They are just reporting the facts and not there to editorialize the situation. In other words, they dismiss the well founded accusations as little more than “nothing to see here, move along citizen”.

Even after the elections were over, mainstream media was bending over backwards to the point of contorting themselves into a pretzel to try and explain away the unhinged insanity of Trump. Whether it was through the Trump regimes slaughtering of American citizens on the city streets being dismissed as a “both sides are bad” story while dismissing obvious video evidence, the big government takeover of Intel being met with indifferent shrugs, the building of a massive social media surveillance system being met with collective yawns, the arresting of both political opponents and journalists being treated as background noise, or even the military invasion of another country being seen as just an insignificant political development that stopped being news for a few days, there are countless examples where the mainstream media simply refused to believe that this was even politically problematic for the regime. It’s all very frustrating to watch and shows just how much the mainstream media has normalized such an extreme level of madness.

Today, however, a Democrat made some comments. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC, did a speech at Munich. During her speech, she said “um” a couple of times. The mainstream media responded by completely losing their fucking minds, screeching about how this whole thing was some kind of massive disaster for the Democrat party. Here are some of the headlines I’m seeing:

CNN Panel Melts Down After Kevin O’Leary Compares AOC’s Munich Word Salad To Kamala Harris (AOL)
At Munich showdown AOC serves word salad as Rubio channels strength (MSN)
AOC bumbles through Taiwan defense question in embarrassing word salad (Sky News)
AOC hit with social media backlash after appearing to struggle with question about US defending Taiwan (Yahoo! News)
AOC’s terrible horrible week just keeps getting worse (The Hill)
AOC tries strategic incomprehensibility (Washington Post)
AOC claims gaffe-filled Munich performance ‘well-received’ by Europeans: ‘Distract from the substance’ (NYPost)
AOC’s Munich Stumble Is a Warning to the Left (Intelligencer)

Yup, these are the same fascist supporting media outlets that will scream at you until they are blue in the face that they don’t editorialize. They are unbiased. They are there just to provide the facts. So, ignore all of their Trump coddling coverage where they dismiss the insane ramblings and lies as just not worthy of coverage. A Democrat said “um” during a speech and that’s the real story to get worked up over. Sure, the blood of American citizens are flowing on the city streets right now due to the Trump regimes policy of “empty the gun clip”, but honestly, is that even really a story? Let’s have a huge political panel discussion to talk about “umgate”.

Obviously, this blatant bias in the media didn’t go unnoticed. Karl Bode of TechDirt has offered up his own summary of the situation. From TechDirt:

I’ve long written about how the U.S. establishment press no longer genuinely serves the public interest. Years of consolidation at the hands of (usually) rich, white, male, Conservative owners has resulted in a lazy U.S. press that reflects the interests of ownership. As a result you get a lot of feckless “he said, she said” coverage that struggles to report the actual truth, peppered with infotainment and agitprop.

This consolidated media ownership broadly normalizes Trump and Trumpism because it represents the sort of things affluent media ownership likes (deregulation, corporate tax breaks, unaccountable subsidies, rubber stamped merger approvals). But when there’s a meaningful progressive challenge to establishment norms (as we saw with coverage NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani,) the fangs quickly come out.

You saw that recently during Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s trip to the Munich Security Conference, where the press went out of their way to criticize her for some relatively innocuous comments about Taiwan. Outlets like the New York Times, which will endlessly normalize Trump’s incoherent rambling, spent extra time making a news cycle out of AOC saying “um” a few times during a question response

This is, again, the same press that will routinely treat Trump’s insane, incoherent ramblings as completely normal, going so far as to edit his speeches to actively try to make him sound more cogent. Yet again, AOC saying “um” a few times became a huge news cycle by a press owned by people who are personally financially invested in AOC not becoming Senate Minority/Majority leader or President

(screenshot of the media freaking out in their headlines)

As is often the case, a lot of this non-story news cycle was started by Conservative media, which has come to dominate much of AM radio, traditional papers (WSJ, NY Post, WAPO), broadcast television (Sinclair, Nexstar, Tegna), cable news (Fox, OAN, Newsmax), and now the internet. And, as Emily Horne notes, a big player in the the AOC um news cycle was so-called “pink slime” newspapers.

This is the state of mainstream media today. They will do everything in their power to make Trump look good while feigning accountability by occasionally fact checking the odd thing here and there. This while relentlessly attacking Democrats for even the smallest, most innocuous thing. Did Biden mumble? Headline news for weeks on end. Did AOC say “um”? Nonstop freaking out. Trump turning American into a fascist police state? You bet the media is going to respond with crickets. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is why people don’t trust the media.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.