A brand exercise

Dan Froomkin points out that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems to make the people at the NY Times very nervous.

So rather than report on how Ocasio-Cortez’s riveting, viral speech on the House floor on Thursday was a signal moment in the fight against abusive sexism, Times congressional reporters Luke Broadwater and Catie Edmondson filed a story full of sexist double standards and embraced the framing of her critics by casting her as a rule-breaker trying to “amplify her brand.”

Here’s her speech in case you need a refresher.

Then consider that the Times described the speech as “her most norm-shattering moment yet,” leading with the fact that “she took to the House floor to read into the Congressional Record a sexist vulgarity that Representative Ted Yoho, a Florida Republican, had used to refer to her.”

The point is not that it’s a vulgarity. The point is that it’s misogynist, and it’s meant to intimidate. Men don’t call women fucking bitches for the hell of it, they do it to express intimidating rage and hatred. Vulgarity is completely beside the point.

A critical “tell” in the Times’s coverage – something perhaps only fellow journalists would fully appreciate at first – was how the paper had previously avoided directly quoting Yoho’s particular words, but did so now:

“In front of reporters, Representative Yoho called me, and I quote: ‘A fucking bitch,’” she said, punching each syllable in the vulgarity.

You’d think the whole thing was her idea. It’s Yoho who said it; she was quoting him. It’s as if they decided to say she punched every syllable to make her sound like the aggressor. She did not in fact punch anything, nor did she call anyone insulting names.

In the first Times article on the matter, on Tuesday, Broadwater described Yoho’s words as “a pair of expletives” – noting that Ocasio-Cortez “sought to turn the insult to her advantage.”

Oh yes, what a whore she is, trying to make money from being called a fucking bitch by an adult man who works alongside her in Congress.

James Fallows, the renowned Atlantic national correspondent, asked in a tweet: “WHY should these words appear in a quote from AOC, at whom they were hatefully directed, rather than one from Rep. Yoho, who actually said them?”

Um…to make her look bad? To shame her? Am I close?

The Times reporters wrote that after her speech, “Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who excels at using her detractors to amplify her own political brand, invited a group of Democratic women in the House to come forward to express solidarity with her.”

The whore. How dare she invite a group of Democratic women colleagues to come forward to express solidarity with her? That’s so brand-amplifying. A decent modest woman would say nothing about it and pretend it never happened, and nice Mr. Yoho could get away without so much as a whispered rebuke. Maybe if they put her in a burqa they would feel less anxious?

Hamza Shaban, a business reporter for the Washington Post, called attention to the similarities between the Times’s framing of the story and the story’s own description, toward the end, of how Republicans have demonized Ocasio-Cortez.

She should just put up with it, like a nice prim quiet woman from 1955.

In fact, the double standards were everywhere. New York magazine writer Rebecca Traister, responding to Harris’s tweet, noted: “Women’s anger at male power abuse [is] regularly presented as path to self-advancement for the women. Voicing fury at systemic degradation is read as opportunistic. Whereas men’s abusive behavior rarely understood as fundamental to how they attained & maintain THEIR power. But it is!”

Read the whole thing.

H/t Tim Harris

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