Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she finds Fox’s coverage of her ‘fascinating’

AOC says attacks from within the Democratic Party were more hurtful than those from Fox News

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she finds Fox News coverage of her “fascinating” because it reveals the right-wing network’s “subconscious narratives”.

Speaking to CNN’s Dana Bash, the Democratic Congresswoman said she only watched Fox “once in a while” and tended to view the personal attacks on her from an academic perspective.

“I actually find it to be really, really fascinating because it reveals a lot about the subconscious of folks that are crafting these narratives, and they very often are speaking to these very subconscious narratives about women, or about people of colour, or about Latinos or Latinas, or about working-class people,” Ms Ocasio-Cortez said.

“You know, these caricatures that are developed are not really personal, they are societal.”

Ms Ocasio-Cortez said attacks from within the Democratic Party were more painful.

“That is the one – that’s the stuff that hurts. But the right-wing stuff doesn’t hurt,” she told CNN’s new longform interview series Being...

Ms Ocasio-Cortez has endured frequent attacks from Fox and other right-wing press since she won her New York House seat in 2018.

The barrage of negative coverage has fuelled a steady stream of death threats, and Ms Ocasio-Cortes told of reviewing pictures of men who send her violent messages in case she ever comes across them.

“The thing that I think some folks may not understand, is how direct the through-line is between right-wing targeting on TV and how much that is actually a driver of very real physical threats,” she said.

She went on to tell Ms Bash that she feared she was in danger of being targeted by the mob that stormed the US Capitol on January 6.

“I didn’t think that I was just going to be killed,” she said.

“I thought other things were going to happen to me as well.”

One of the people who allegedly entered the US Capitol on January 6 was arrested for threatening to assassinate her.

When asked if she was contemplating a run for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat, Ms Ocasio-Cortes refused to rule it out.

“I can’t operate the way that I operate and do the things that I do in politics while trying to be aspiring to other things or calculating to other things.”

She said she had never mapped out what course her political career would take.

“For what it’s worth, Senator Schumer and I have been working very closely on a lot of legislation and that, to me, is important,” she said.

“And so, we shall see.”