United States Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s interview Sunday with Anderson Cooper on CBS’s “60 Minutes” was notable for a number of reasons. For one, not many first-year members of Congress get that kind of platform.

But one comment in particular touched a nerve for the fact-checking community. When Ocasio-Cortez was asked about a Washington Post fact check awarding her four Pinocchios for an inaccurate tweet about Pentagon accounting, she responded: “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. I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually and semantically correct than about being morally right.”

For some, that comment echoed the much-quoted 2016 argument, first made in an Atlantic article and later amplified by tech investor Peter Thiel, that the media had missed the larger phenomenon of Donald Trump because they were taking him literally but not seriously, while his supporters were taking him seriously but not literally. A number of columnists reminded Ocasio-Cortez that precision and morality are not mutually exclusive. Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum suggested “she’d be well-advised to slow down and study up just a little bit.”

Beyond the fracas, though, the episode touched off a larger — and public — back-and-forth about fact-checking, how claims are chosen and the standards used in checking them. That’s because Ocasio-Cortez, in a Twitter thread, asked how fact-checkers do their work, their rules and whether she is being treated fairly compared to other high-profile officials, like White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The fact-checkers answered, tweeted out their rules of engagement and explained how she was not being held to a standard different than anyone else.

And from there, the congresswoman pivoted away from conflict. She called fact-checking “critically important,” said it’s important for everyone to know the rules and thanked fact checkers for their work. Responded the Post’s Sal Rizzo: “This is classy and I appreciate it.”

As confrontations over fact-checking go, the outcome was as close to a win-win as can be had in this hyper-polarized environment. Ocasio-Cortez’s cordial exit let her reclaim some high ground, even if the original tweet is still there. And fact-checkers got a high-profile opportunity to explain what they do, how they do it — and why.