Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (pictured) was live-streaming one of her kitchen-table video blogs on Tuesday when she was asked about the role media that reported on the apparent stealing of the 2020 election played in the Capitol riots. Freedom of the press definitely needs to be "reined in," replied the leader of "The Squad":
Ocasio-Cortez: "There's absolutely a commission that's 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 ….
"… Several members of Congress, in some of my discussions, have brought up media literacy because that is a part of what happened … 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."
Attorney Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel says a year or more ago, such a proposal would have been dismissed out of hand as a direct violation of the First Amendment. However, he says, all that has changed as politicians – with the blessings of the courts – are forbidding people from going to church and restricting their movements in public, while Big Tech throws public figures and private citizens off their platforms for questioning the integrity of the 2020 elections.
"We have a political leader [in President-elect Joe Biden] and political party that want to punish anybody who doesn't agree with them. I think we're moving in to some really uncharted territory," he warns.
Staver shares that he's seen these types of restrictions before: "This so-called 'Truth Commission' or 'Ministry of Truth,' whatever they want to call it, is shocking … and it really comes out of the Communist/Marxist playbook."
The Liberty Counsel founder isn't alone in his concern.
"… [For Ocasio-Cortez] it's not about being factually correct; it's [about] what she sees as being right and wrong from a moral perspective," said The Hill columnist Joe Concha on Fox News. "… This sort of thing in terms of government regulating speech should stay in China or stay in North Korea …."
New York Post columnist David Harsanyi penned: "It's just creepy, not to mention wholly un-American, for an elected official to advocate the state as adjudicator of our political speech. It's also crassly hypocritical. If anyone could use a truth commission, it's Congress."
And as far as Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce is concerned, the media – "an arm of the Democratic Party," she calls it – already falls into line for AOC and her fellow leftists:
"What they're talking about are dissenters, talking about arguments like this … a conversation that critiques and dissents within the framework of what they're doing. But it also exposes … the idea of the power that they think they have [and] that this is now what their job is."
At the same time the United States passed 500,000 coronavirus-related deaths a media watchdog has noticed a remarkedly different tone in the media that was not around when Donald Trump was being blamed for the death toll.
News stories each weekday from reporters you can trust without the liberal bias found in much of "mainstream" media.
News stories each weekday from reporters you can trust without the liberal bias found in much of "mainstream" media.
A left-leaning New York congresswoman says she and her Democratic colleagues are considering establishing a federal commission that would be tasked with regulating what the media can and can't say.
The New York Times and Democrats are telling President Joe Biden to “ease up” on and “rescind” his executive actions – after he said last year during his campaign that dictators rule by executive order … and then signed a record-breaking 24 executive orders in his first week at the White House.