It started in depressing fashion, but the 2020 election season may have officially begun when a right-wing group aired a vicious attack ad last week against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. The spot, which aired on a couple of major-market ABC stations the night of a prime-time Democratic debate, featured Ocasio-Cortez’s image being consumed by fire, followed by a black-and-white image of human skeletons in an apparent reference to Cambodia's Khmer Rouge genocide in the 1970s.
The ad was so outrageously over the top that it instantly recalled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign from the 2004 presidential election, which targeted John Kerry and his war service in Vietnam. Those 2004 accusers famously manufactured nearly every allegation they made about Kerry. They lied about documents. They lied about eyewitnesses. And they lied about their partisan leanings and connections. Back then, the news media helped amplify the phony GOP claims by repeating them as legitimate news. There's no indication the news media will do the same with the slanderous claims about Ocasio-Cortez's socialist leanings.
But here is the question as we head into 2020: Will media outlets—and particularly television networks—stand up to GOP slander campaigns when conservatives come peddling more bogus attack ads? There's simply no way the Ocasio-Cortez hit piece ever should have aired on an ABC affiliate in prime time, especially in conjunction with a presidential debate. But that commercial was just the beginning. As President Barack Obama's former assistant Ben Rhodes noted on Twitter, if they're burning pictures of Ocasio-Cortez now, imagine what they're going to be doing one year from now during the frenzy of a Donald Trump presidential campaign season.
The attack ad not only set fire to Ocasio-Cortez’s photograph, which clearly sends a dangerous message in the current culture of violence on the right. The ad also suggested that the socialist Ocasio-Cortez somehow supports, or is politically aligned with, the historic mass murder in Cambodia, an absolutely outrageous claim that no member of Congress should face on the public airwaves.
The key, though, is that media outlets helped spread the super PAC's out-of-bounds message of hate.
The ad ran on a WJLA-TV, which is owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group. The company today completely dedicates its resources to supporting to Republican Party and Trump, to the point where it orders its affiliates to air commentaries that simply double as GOP propaganda. But the anti-Ocasio-Cortez ad also aired on WABC-TV in New York City, which is owned by ABC News. (The ad aired after the debate had concluded, but during the post-debate coverage.)
Let's be clear: It's very unlikely that the Ocasio-Cortez hit job slipped through the cracks last week. It's just not possible that an ABC affiliate would receive a request to run a hyperpartisan ad during a prime-time Democratic primary debate and that the commercial would not be seen and reviewed at the most senior level. And that means people who knew better watched the commercial and thought it was fine to air a burning picture of a Democratic congresswoman while she's condemned as somehow being connected to mass murder.
This is more evidence that media companies have become inured to the conservative culture of hate and political violence, and that somehow the metaphorical burning-at-the-stake ad is seen as a mainstream and perfectly acceptable form of public debate. I understand that media companies don't want to be in the position of calling balls and strikes when it comes to the content of political ads and whether they should be aired, but I also know that media companies have commonsense guidelines. The Ocasio-Cortez example should have been a painfully easy call of rejecting the ad outright. (If a liberal group made a commercial depicting the burning of Trump's image and suggesting that he supports the genocide of the Holocaust, would an ABC station run it?)
It's not just the acceptance of the GOP’s rhetorical violence, though: it's also the media once again being intimidated by conservative crusaders. And it's media companies not wanting to be attacked after they reject political ads that don't belong on television. They don't want to feel the wrath when GOP PACs go whining to Fox News decrying mainstream media "censorship" when their outrageous ads are rightfully rejected. They don't want Trump getting involved via Twitter, ginning up the phony outrage. Basically, they just don't want to deal with the headaches.
Sadly, conservative bullying works. Just ask social media and tech giants such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which have been on the receiving end of a relentless attack campaign from conservatives, all in hopes of bullying the companies into changing their behavior. And it's working. Republicans complain so loudly and so ferociously about phantom fouls of "liberal bias" that tech companies think twice about even appearing to offend Republicans down the road. Conservatives carry this out via congressional hearings, presidential tweets, relentless messaging from Fox News, and hardball legal action.
The hateful broadside against Ocasio-Cortez was part of a larger, coordinated Republican and conservative media attempt to portray Democrats as dangerous socialists. Fox News regular Mike Huckabee has claimed that she's a "Manchurian candidate" boosted by "dark forces" behind her. Her politics are wildly denounced as "radical left” and “progressives gone wild,” and Tucker Carlson has attacked her as a moron.
The attack ad in question was part of a media campaign surrounding last week's Democratic debate. "Ahead of Thursday's debate, the Trump campaign unleashed an ad blitz that included buying two full-page newspaper ads and flying a massive banner in the air that criticized socialism just before the debate began," ABC News reported.
This appears to be the GOP blueprint for 2020: Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, but on steroids. It's going to be up to media companies not to get rolled by the smear campaigns.
Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.
This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.
