Ocasio-Cortez Outraged by McConnell ‘Quote’ – Turns Out a Liberal Outlet Made It Up

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed the Mitch McConnell campaign for responding to a “groping” scandal by purportedly saying, “Boys will be boys.”

“‘Boys will be boys.’ Is that also the reason why you’ve chosen to block the Violence Against Women act too, @senatemajldr?” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Tuesday. “It prevents dating partners w/ records of abuse + stalking women (also an early warning sign from many mass shooters) from obtaining a gun.”

Ocasio-Cortez was reacting to a tweet by left-leaning outlet The Daily Beast, which described the McConnell campaign’s response as “essentially” saying “boys will be boys” in response to a viral photograph of teen supporters of the Senate majority leader “groping and choking” a life-sized cardboard cutout of the freshman congresswoman.

In the McConnell campaign’s original statement, spokesman Kevin Goldman said that Team Mitch “in no way condones any aggressive, suggestive, or demeaning act toward life-sized cardboard cutouts of any gender.”

MORE: Team Mitch Trolls AOC Over Cutout Scandal: We Stand With ‘Cardboard Cutouts of Any Gender’

“These young men are not campaign staff, they’re high schoolers and it’s incredible that the national media has sought to once again paint a target on their backs rather than report real, and significant news in our country,” Golden added.

https://twitter.com/formambuh/status/1158832391936446465?s=20

The AOC cutout scandal and “media malfeasance”

But as conservative writer Allen Ginzburg noted on Twitter, several media outlets – and apparently Ocasio-Cortez herself – took The Daily Beast’s editorializing at face value.

In a tweet about Ocasio-Cortez’s response,  Newsweek failed to make clear to its 3.3 million followers that the “boys will be boys” verbiage was not an actual quote from the McConnell campaign.

There was no "boys will be boys" defense.

— KSLawWolf (@KSLawWolf) August 6, 2019

The New York Daily News’ coverage of the controversy was arguably more egregious. Daily News reporter David Goldiner wrote that McConnell’s campaign “literally says boys will be boys” in responding to the incident.

And now the New York Daily News also reported the fake quote, claiming the McConnell campaign "literally" said something they did not say. pic.twitter.com/Q84l2QNwgB

— AG (@AGHamilton29) August 7, 2019

Rep. Dan Crenshaw weighed in on Thursday by castigating the press for “media malfeasance.”

MORE: AOC Says Poor People Can’t Be Held Accountable When They Riot: They ‘Have No Choice’

“This is the new normal of outrage culture: When the facts don’t warrant sufficient outrage, new facts are created to fill the gap,” the Texas lawmaker tweeted.

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