Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Congress is considering action to “rein in” the spread of “disinformation” through the creation of a commission on media literacy.
“There’s absolutely a commission that’s being discussed,” the New York Democrat told viewers on an Instagram live on Tuesday. “But it seems to be more investigatory in style rather than truth and reconciliation.”
Considerations for a commission, AOC said, came after the mob riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 that left five people dead. The riot, she said, was incited by Trump and aided by the spread of misinformation.
“I do think that several members of Congress in some of my discussions have brought up media literacy because that is a part of what happened here,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation. It’s one thing to have differing opinions, but it’s another thing entirely to just say things that are false. And so that’s something that we’re looking into.”
AOC suggests adding “media literacy” as a mandate for a congressional “truth and reconciliation” committee pic.twitter.com/sv7UXMwvaO
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 13, 2021
While Ocasio-Cortez claimed to be committed to the truth, her opinion on facts has changed during her time in Congress. In 2019, AOC told Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes” that she was less worried about making factual statements and more focused on prioritizing morality.
“If people want to really blow up one figure here, or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees,” she said after Cooper confronted her for claiming that $21 trillion in Pentagon “accounting errors” could cover two-thirds of “Medicare for all.” “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”
During the rest of her Instagram live, AOC explained how she didn’t “feel safe around other members of Congress” and said that she feared Republican members would help the Capitol rioters find and hurt her.
“I myself did not even feel safe going to that extraction point,” Ocasio-Cortez said of the House bunker, which harbored lawmakers from the chaos, “because there were QAnon and white supremacist sympathizers and frankly white supremacist members of Congress in that extraction point.”
