Aris Folley, The Hill, January 12, 2019

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y) criticized CBS News Saturday night for what she considered lack of diversity in its team of reporters covering the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

“This WH admin has made having a functional understanding of race in America one of the most important core competencies for a political journalist to have, yet [CBS News] hasn’t assigned a *single* black journalist to cover the 2020 election,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a tweet.

“Unacceptable in 2019. Try again,” Ocasio-Cortez added.

{snip}

Her tweet was in response to another post shared by an associate producer at CBS News, Ben Mitchell, who shared a tweet showing the news agency’s 2020 election team of reporters and associate producers.

“It’s Official: The @CBSNews 2020 Election Team has assembled!” Mitchell said in the tweet, which also featured a photo of the 12-person team of media professionals.

The newly sworn-in congresswoman faced some blowback from other reporters over the criticism, including Josh Kraushaar, a politics editor at the National Journal, who said the New York Democrat had “another thing” in common with President Trump: “media scold.”

Ocasio-Cortez fired back at Kraushaar in another tweet on Saturday night, saying: “Or: maybe having powerful editorial positions awash in people from one race, class, or gender isn’t a good idea; since we get 1000% more takes on ‘brown lady says a curse word’ than an actual white supremacist in Congress.”

{snip}

In another tweet responding to Ocasio-Cortez, however, Kraushaar wrote that he felt the team’s reporters looked racially diverse “at least based on [their] last names.”

For what it’s worth, the mix of 7 embedded campaign reporters looked racially diverse (at least based on last names), with the exception of lacking an African-American.

But Ocasio-Cortez responded to Kraushaar’s reasoning in another tweet in which she also contended that “one race isn’t substitutable for another.”

{snip}