AOC Talks About Possible Commission To 'Rein In' Media
Channel: The OverSeaTV
Date: 2021-01-15

AOC Talks About Possible Commission To 'Rein In' Media
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been accused of proposing a 'Ministry of Truth' following her suggestion that a government commission needs to 'reign in' the press in order to stop 'misinformation.'
The New York Democrat made the remarks in an Instagram livestream on Tuesday, saying her colleagues in Congress were discussing 'how we rein in our media environment so that you can't just spew disinformation and misinformation.'
The comment drew furious backlash from free speech advocates and conservative critics, who accused the self-avowed Democratic Socialist of hatching a dystopian plan to establish government control over news outlets and journalists.
'Let's unpack this proposal, she wants to basically establish a Ministry of Truth -- we've all read '1984' and, you know -- to determine what is truth and what is not. So who sits on this committee exactly?' said Joe Concha, a media columnist for The Hill, in an interview with Fox News. Ocasio-Cortez's comments came towards the end of an hour-long video address to more than 100,000 of her followers.
She was responding to a question from a follower about whether Democrats are planning a 'federal truth and reconciliation or media literacy initiatives to help with healing' as their party takes control of the White House and Congress.
'I can say, there is absolutely a commission being discussed but it seems to be more investigatory, in style rather than truth and reconciliation, so I think that’s an interesting concept for us to explore,' she replied. 
'And 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 and 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,' Ocasio-Cortez said. 
The American press is specifically protected from government intervention or control by the U.S. Constitution, and critics including Concha quickly raised questions about how government 'fact checkers' could politicize the role.
'How does Mrs. Ocasio-Cortez define truth exactly? She was asked in a [60 Minutes] interview, this was a couple of years ago after she was fact-checked on some very dubious claims, about those particular claims and she said, "People want to really blow up one figure here, or a word there, I would argue they are missing the forest for the trees, I think there is a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, semantically correct than being morally right,"' Concha said.
'Oh, so it’s not about being factually correct, it’s what she sees as being right and wrong from a moral perspective,' Concha continued. 
'Let’s say I want to argue against defunding the police or adding two states, which therefore would add four Democratic Senators, does that make me morally wrong and therefore do I have to testify before this committee? Am I pulled off the air?' Concha asked. 
'That’s the thing when you have a Democratically controlled Washington - Congress, Senate and White House – this sort of thing in terms of government regulating speech should stay in China, or stay in North Korea or, I don’t know, 1984,' he continued.
David Harsanyi, a columnist for the New York Post, also compared the proposal to the plot of 1984, George Orwell's famous novel about a totalitarian socialist government that controls all news and entertainment through its Ministry of Truth.
'It’s just creepy, not to mention wholly un-American, for an elected official to advocate the state as adjudicator of veracity of our political speech,' Harsanyi wrote in a column on Wednesday.