Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticised Dominion Voting Systems for taking a settlement from Fox News without eliciting an apology.
The New York Democrat spoke out about the settlement on former White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s new MSNBC program: “This was a corporation suing another corporation for material damages. Their job is to go in and get the most mony that they can. And I think that they did that.”
Last week, Dominion and Fox News avoided a high-profile court trial and Dominion instead took a $787.5m (£633m) settlement from the media conglomerate. Dominion had sued Fox for spreading false statements about its voting machines after the 2020 presidential election.
Ms Ocasio-Cortez argued that the settlement did not match the damage done to the country and that Dominion should have demanded an on-air apology.
“They are not lawyers for the American public, and I think what is best for the country, what would have been best for the country would have been to demand that, and to not settle until we got that,” she said. “But that is not their role, and so for us, I think this really raises much larger questions of, very often, I believe that we leave to the courts to solve issues that politics is supposed to solve, that our legislating is supposed to solve.”
Ms Psaki asked whether Ms Ocasio-Cortez thought media organisations and social media platforms should be held accountable for incitement of violence like on January 6.
“I believe that when it comes to broadcast television, like Fox News, these are subject to federal law and federal regulation in terms of what’s allowed on air and what isn’t,” Ms Ocasio-Cortez said. “And when you look at Tucker Carlson, and what some of those other folks on Fox do, it is very, very clearly incitement of violence.”
In the years since she beat Representative Joe Crowley in a stunning Democratic primary victory in 2018, Ms Ocasio-Cortez has remained firmly in the left-wing of the Democratic coalition, voting against the bipartisan infrastructure bill in 2021 because Democrats had not yet passed their signature Build Back Better social spending package.
At the same time, she’s emerged as one of the House Democratic Caucus’s most astute defenders of the Biden administration who regularly attacks Republicans who promote conspiracy theories. She now serves as the number-two Democrat on the House Oversight & Accountability Committee, behind only Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland.
