The tweet above is a joke, and announces itself as one. What makes the joke especially funny is that it is conceivable that New York’s ridiculous, socialist, Dunning-Kruger victim Congresswoman would really say something like this. That is also why it is extremely important ethically for the satire account’s tweets to make it clear that its output is parody.
The site does that. The account has the handle @AOCpressTwo and the username Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Press Release (parody). Its bio reads, “I’m the boss – you mad bro? (parody)” (www.twitter.com/AOCpressTwo).
However, in conservative website Power Line’s weekly collection of memes, cartoons and jokes covering the previous seven days’ events from a rightish perspective, it includes this version of the tweet:
Some other sources online have done the same, and there has been a wave of insults aimed at AOC online from those who have taken the parody as a genuine outburst from this embarrassing ( to her party, her state, her district, Congress, the United States of America, her gender, her species) progressive hack. Maybe Power Line was one of those taken in, but it is supposed to be better than that. Power Line is “a site that features commentary on the news from a conservative perspective,” its “About” page announces, and the commentary is typically erudite, carefully considered and well-researched. The four contributors are….
- John H. Hinderaker, a retired litigator with a Harvard Law degree who is now President of Center of the American Experiment, a think tank headquartered in Minnesota
- Scott W. Johnson , a Minneapolis attorney and former law partner of Hinderaker’s who has been writing published public policy commentary for many years
- Steven Hayward, senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, and a visiting lecturer at Berkeley Law School despite not being a lawyer, and
- Elizabeth Stauffer, also not a lawyer but an MBA and former financial analyst, who writes commentary for The Washington Examiner, The Western Journal, and other websites in addition to Power Line.
The lawyers particularly should be ashamed of themselves: their code of ethics condemns intentional misrepresentation and dishonesty. At a time when deviations from leftist GoodThink are routinely shrugged off by the news media as lies and conspiracy theories, this kind of sloppiness (if indeed it was sloppiness) doesn’t help. The deceptive version of the satirical tweet almost fooled me, but I checked it out. And my respect for Power Line and inclination to trust its commentary is permanently damaged.
Ethics Alarms 
And this just as I determined to put a Power Line short cut on my laptop…
Seriously? It’s humor for the sake of humor, not intended to be “accurate news”. It’s a cartoon in a sea of similar cartoons intended to be funny for it’s audience, which is what cartoons are supposed to do whether they skewer the left, as Power line does, or the right, as most of the political cartoons of yore did in newspapers of the day.
And what you show is not the complete cartoon, the rest of which shows a google search screen with the words “did you mean sail boat?” It is meant to poke fun at the stupid nonsensical things AOC routinely says.
You may not like memes, but to say your “…inclination to trust its commentary is permanently damaged.” regarding all of the serious content they post is, in my opinion, a gross over reaction.
Plenty of non-political fun stuff, too, I’d certainly encourage those reading to take it all in.
Wrong. That wasn’t a meme. It was presented as an actual tweet, with a derisive comment on the tweet included. It was deliberately deceptive….and it did, in fact deceive. It also led into the usual section including actual quotes and wild headlines. There was no hint in the presentation on Power Line that it wasn’t an actual AOC tweet.
I can’t imagine why you would defend it, and your defense is as dishonest as the Power Line presentation. I just checked it again. It was intended to deceive, and it DID deceive.
“Wrong. That wasn’t a meme. It was presented as an actual tweet, with a derisive comment on the tweet included. It was deliberately deceptive….”
It’s in a sea of humor. The item is presented as a whole, with a google search window that reads “a ship that runs on wind power – did you mean sail boat”. That is definitional, not derisive. The intent is clearly to poke fun at the idiotic things AOC says on a regular basis. It is what I refer to as a cartoon, and in the modern digital age, easier to add text and photoshop than draw.
The definition of meme from MW online is: an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media.
It is not presented as news, there is no surrounding text around it so as to present as anything like a serious news story or newsworthy item. It is amusing, it is intended to be amusing to anyone with a passing knowledge of AOC’s lunacy.
There are six cartoons that follow before headlines of the week, and the one immediately following is the Jaws meme “we’re going to need a bigger battery”. The one immediately preceding it is “a paper straw in a plastic wrapper – the green movement in a single picture.” I’m not sure I buy that photo, either (though like the AOC thing, certainly captures the sentiment). A segment of photos poking fun at “green energy”, which for anyone paying any attention, may not be all that green. Talk about deception….
To tar and feather the great commentary of Powerline on innumerable topics over what is clearly a joke, well, your choice.
But it’s not clearly a joke, and your argument makes no sense. Power Line has done this before; so has Instapundit. As I said, the headlines like “Man Walking Dog Knocked unconscious By Falling Cat” are NOT jokes, they are actual headlines. If Power Line wasn’t trying to deceive, it would not have cut (prody account) out of the tweet before they posted it (or used a version of the tweet that had it missing.) The thing is funny as a clear parody or satire. If presented as a genuine AOC tweet, it’s an intentional target of derision, and LESS comic.
OK, it’s a great site. Hinderaker is especially sharp. It doesn’t make this any less despicable—smearing someone who gives plenty of legitimate justifications for ridicule, and deceiving readers.
As I said, “Wrong.”
Press Release 2 bears some culpability in that they chose a long name that gets cut off when tweets are embedded. This is a technical limitation, but an addressable one. They course corrected once by adding “parody” to the title, so maybe they can finesse it further.
One thing that must be noted is that Powerline posted a version that included a user comment shown. The commenter responded as if to show AOC were an idiot. Without that second part, it looks like Powerline merely let the title get cut off, which might happen with mere carelessness. With the comment, it more clearly shows the issue.