On Monday, The Washington Post outdid itself in terms of wildly dishonest fact-checking. This time, the Post gave Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) zero Pinocchios for her blatant lie that her Green New Deal proposal was doctored. Here’s what Ocasio-Cortez tweeted:
This is a lie. There were no doctored GND resolutions or FAQs “floating around.” There were people satirizing AOC’s own asinine Green New Deal backgrounder and FAQ. And there is no evidence that there were “draft versions floating out there.” Yet the Post didn’t see anything wrong with AOC’s statement. Even further, the Post claimed that President Trump’s tweet on the subject was false:
The Post concluded:
No one is proposing to “eliminate all planes, cars, cows, oil, gas and the military.”
That’s simply a lie. Here are direct quotes from AOC’s original backgrounder and FAQ:
“We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast…”
“The green New Deal makes new fossil fuel infrastructure or nuclear plants unnecessary….we don’t just need to stop doing some things we are doing (like using fossil fuels for energy needs)…”
AOC’s Green New Deal, as discussed in January, proposed to cut military spending in half.
Yet according to The Washington Post, we can simply dismiss AOC’s backgrounder and FAQ. Here’s the alleged fact-checker:
There’s a case to be made that the criticism about ending airplanes and cows was a stretch to begin with, since the resolution didn’t mention any of that and the FAQs were not definitive on those points. But Ocasio-Cortez has now disowned the FAQs and the statements that went beyond the resolution. The line about providing for people “unwilling to work” has been walked back completely. So we won’t be awarding any Pinocchios in this kerfuffle.
Oh, so AOC got caught with her hand in the stupid drawer, and then withdrew it, so no need for the Post to evaluate her lie about her original document. Fun to see that’s how fact-checking now works: so long as you withdraw your originally controversial claim, and then lie about it, we will pretend the originally controversial claim didn’t exist.
Solid fact-checking, Washington Post.
So. Much. Journalisming.