Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Netroots Nation political conference in 2018. (Jonathan Bachman/Reuters)

Does she really believe the Washington Post is biased in favor of Trump?

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attacked fact-checkers on Monday, saying that they were guilty of “false equivalency” and “bias” in correcting her mistakes.

In a series of tweets, Ocasio-Cortez attacked both the Washington Post and PolitiFact.

Facts are facts, America. We should care about getting things right. Yet standards of who gets fact-checked, how often + why are unclear. This is where false equivalency+bias creeps in, allowing climate deniers to be put on par w/scientists, for example.https://t.co/87c6kVzIuI — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 7, 2019

Or why did @washingtonpost give my confusing tweet on military accounting offsets the same “Pinocchios” as Trump’s flat denial of how many Americans died in Puerto Rico? These are legitimate questions not intended to attack. Who makes these decisions? How? Is there a rubric? — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 7, 2019

In case you missed it, The Post had run a piece titled “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s $21 trillion mistake” on December 4, and Politifact ran a similar piece. Both pointed out that she had misunderstood or misrepresented data when she claimed that “Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon” in a tweet.



Everyone makes mistakes — I know that I have — but dealing with it by attacking the fact-checkers who pointed them out is absolutely ludicrous. It’s even more ludicrous to attack them on grounds of “bias,” as if President Trump has never been fact-checked. In fact, as Washington Post columnist Sal Rizzo (the author of the column that Ocasio-Cortez attacked) pointed out in a tweet, “there’s a big difference between the colossal amount of time we spend fact-checking Trump (7,645 false/misleading claims and counting) and TWO fact-checks of @AOC.”

It’s true: The Post fact-checks Trump often. So often that it’s completely bizarre to see Ocasio-Cortez actually accuse the publication of somehow being biased in favor of him. Truly, I have no idea how she was able to write that tweet and press send without thinking about how totally ridiculous she sounded, and I can’t believe that more people aren’t talking about it.

Factual errors matter — especially when they’re coming from politicians who are discussing policies and proposals that are going to actually affect Americans. It’s wrong when Trump does it, and it’s wrong when Ocasio-Cortez does it, too. Telling lies about the way that some of her pie-in-the-sky programs could be funded could easily lead to people supporting them without realizing that their support lies apart from reality. It could wind up leading to her proposals getting more popularity than they deserve based on the facts, which is particularly scary when you consider the socialist direction her proposals would take our country. She shouldn’t get a pass on spreading false information just because she is a Democrat or because she sees herself as morally superior to Trump. Facts are facts, and when you get them wrong, you deserve to be called out. All that she or any other person can do is be more careful with the information that she spreads — because false information can have real consequences.