That the Koch-funded Daily Caller is more of a right wing propaganda machine than a news outlet is hardly a novel conclusion, but we would be remiss not to highlight a video post from Friday.
The aim of the piece is to accuse Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of hypocrisy. The Caller’s headline asks why AOC drives to work when she doesn’t have to, given her environmental concerns, the GND’s call for clean cars, and her apartment’s proximity to Capitol Hill.
The impetus was a Fox “news” story combining the recent Uber and Lyft strike that AOC endorsed with a campaign finance report showing her campaign uses Uber and Lyft.
The premise of the Caller piece is an obvious Mr. Gotcha bad-faith logical nightmare, implying that someone can’t call for better working conditions for services they use, or can’t call for a dirty product they have little choice but to purchase to be made cleaner.
But it gets even more embarrassing for the Daily Caller. According to the video, “a little birdie” told the Caller’s Maranda Finney that AOC likes to drive to work every day. There’s no evidence that the car rides are for her daily commute to work and not other travel in places where public transit isn’t a viable option, but of course, collecting actual evidence isn’t the Caller’s strong suit.
The video instead “tests” what the most efficient way would be for AOC to get to Congress from her apartment: an Uber, a scooter, or walking.
But in the middle of the scooter trip, who does Maranda Finney pass, walking on the sidewalk?
None other than Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.
That’s right. A Daily Caller video designed to shame AOC for driving instead of walking caught AOC walking instead of driving. And they still included the footage in the video.
One would think that if a news outlet found evidence that directly contradicted a story it was telling, it would call into question the veracity of that story and cause the outlet to rethink whether to run it.
Not the Daily Caller. The Caller isn’t a news outlet; it’s propaganda. And it’s propaganda so blatant and bad faith that it doesn’t even bother to edit out the portion of the clip that disproves its point.
Because it knows that its audience doesn’t expect news from it, they expect comforting reassurances that their hate is justified. And that’s certainly something the Caller does Daily.
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