Hyper Coverage Of AOC’s ‘Um’ Non-Scandal Highlights How The U.S. Press Is Eager To Be Gamed By Bad Actors

I’ve long written about how the U.S. establishment press no longer genuinely serves the public interest. Years of consolidation at the hands of (usually) rich, white, male, Conservative owners has resulted in a lazy U.S. press that reflects the interests of ownership. As a result you get a lot of feckless “he said, she said” coverage that struggles to report the actual truth, peppered with infotainment and agitprop.

This consolidated media ownership broadly normalizes Trump and Trumpism because it represents the sort of things affluent media ownership likes (deregulation, corporate tax breaks, unaccountable subsidies, rubber stamped merger approvals). But when there’s a meaningful progressive challenge to establishment norms (as we saw with coverage NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani,) the fangs quickly come out.

You saw that recently during Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s trip to the Munich Security Conference, where the press went out of their way to criticize her for some relatively innocuous comments about Taiwan. Outlets like the New York Times, which will endlessly normalize Trump’s incoherent rambling, spent extra time making a news cycle out of AOC saying “um” a few times during a question response:

FWIW, I just emailed NYT's standards editor to ask about the paper's policy on this. Will update if I get a response.

— Parker Molloy (@parkermolloy.com) 2026-02-16T19:42:36.544Z

This is, again, the same press that will routinely treat Trump’s insane, incoherent ramblings as completely normal, going so far as to edit his speeches to actively try to make him sound more cogent. Yet again, AOC saying “um” a few times became a huge news cycle by a press owned by people who are personally financially invested in AOC not becoming Senate Minority/Majority leader or President:

As is often the case, a lot of this non-story news cycle was started by Conservative media, which has come to dominate much of AM radio, traditional papers (WSJ, NY Post, WAPO), broadcast television (Sinclair, Nexstar, Tegna), cable news (Fox, OAN, Newsmax), and now the internet. And, as Emily Horne notes, a big player in the the AOC um news cycle was so-called “pink slime” newspapers.

“Pink slime” newspapers are fake local news papers built by local partisan operatives (almost always right wing) to seed misinformation and propaganda in the minds of poorly educated and already misinformed local voters.  The total of such fake newspapers has tripled since 2019, and now roughly equals the number of real journalism organizations in America.

Horne noticed how major outlets like the New York Times and Politico linked out to several of these fake papers during the non-news cycle, helping amplify right wing propaganda. At several points they link out to a “newspaper” dubbed The Midwesterner, which isn’t a newspaper at all. It’s a right wing propaganda op run by Republicans to pee in the discourse pool:

“The Midwesterner purports to be a Michigan local news outlet. Per the Wayback Machine, the Midwesterner first appeared on February 4, 2023. It appears to have appeared online fully formed, with no announcement or notice. There’s no masthead, About section, or way to contact reporters. There are no ads, paywalls, or paid subscription options.”

Outlets like New York Times and Politico linked to the fake propaganda websites as serious examples of the kind of “criticism” AOC and other Democrats have to account for. But Horne discovered the dodgy nature of these outlets with just a little research:

“The main takeaway here: it’s clear that the Midwesterner isn’t a real media outlet, it’s a right-wing political content mill—which the New York Times and POLITICO both failed to note when they cited its viral tweet as the kind of foreign policy criticism that Democrats just need to face.

The leading political news outlets of our time should not be sourcing their reporting from scammy, obviously partisan websites with no mastheads. They shouldn’t be linking to their content without explaining who it’s from and what it’s about. But it appears they either didn’t know what they were citing, or didn’t care to find out.”

I’d recommend reading the whole thing in which she figures out who is secretly behind the Midwesterner (you guessed it, a top right wing political operative, not that that’s ever disclosed).

Mainstream outlets have been gamed by charlatans so consistently, we’re well past the point where they deserve any benefit of the doubt. While these outlets may still be peppered with some decent reporters, by and large they generally serve the extraction class. It’s not subtle. And the rise of fascism has made it less subtle than ever. Give your money, where possible, to reputable independent outlets and reporters.