There is not a day that goes by during the week where media correspondents on the left aren’t trying to catch Tucker Carlson committing some supposed act of racism, sexism, etc. during his commentary on his popular primetime Fox News show.
Usually, it’s CNN’s resident media hall monitors Brian Stelter and/or Oliver Darcy who are providing up to the minute and predictably out-of-context updates on Twitter regarding Carlson’s every utterance. Sometimes it’s Vox.com’s notoriously dishonest “journalist” Aaron Rupar.
But on Wednesday it was Daily Beast contributing editor/media reporter Justin Baragona, who also spends a good deal of time doing Media Matters proud by monitoring Fox News reports, especially Carlson’s.
Last night, Carlson did a segment on how Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) claimed her Green New Deal would have helped prevent the widespread power outages that are happening in Texas and other parts of the country as a strong winter storm continues to wreak havoc.
As Carlson spoke, an image of AOC was displayed to his left. She had a surprised look on her face, with her eyes wide and her looking as though she might have been confused or displeased by something.
Baragona was tuned in and, as Fox critics on the left often do, he assumed the worst – that the image of Ocasio-Cortez had been doctored to make her look “googly eyed.” Here’s what Bargona originally posted, which has since been deleted:
— Journalists Posting Their Ls (@JournosPostLs) February 18, 2021
Who’s gonna tell him? pic.twitter.com/AyvE35R7xn
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) February 18, 2021
As it turned out, a lot of people “told him” about how the picture had not been doctored to make AOC look as though she had “googly eyes.” In fact, the image – which is real – has been available for nearly three years now:
lmao at this journo thinking Tucker edited this photo. it's one of the top pics on google. good to know he thinks AOC has googly eyes though. pic.twitter.com/w4wJhW69B1
— Watchdog (@LibWatchdog) February 18, 2021
Later in the evening, Bargona acknowledged his mistake and took the L, noting he absolutely blew his attempted own of Tucker Carlson:
Taking down this tweet as the image of AOC has been out there since at least May 2018.
Anyway, I'll take the L and the addition to the list @SirajAHashmi pic.twitter.com/BVvc8URssT
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) February 18, 2021
Every day you log onto Twitter, you hope to get through it without being it.
Tonight, I was it.
And I absolutely deserved to be.
Word of advice — if you don't want to be IT, make sure you don't send out factually inaccurate tweets that can be easily verified and debunked.
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) February 18, 2021
So instead of a dunk on the left’s most hated network and host, Bargona’s embarrassing flub turned into a teachable moment – for him. While many of us can respect it when someone in the media owns up to their mistakes, let’s just hope this incident is something he takes into consideration next time a right-wing news outlet or Fox News finds itself in a similar situation where they got something wrong.
All things considered, I don’t hold out much hope on that front – but maybe he’ll surprise us.
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