In the words of drag queen and current RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars season 4 contestant Monique Hart, facts are facts. Here’s a fact: New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Anderson Cooper during last night’s 60 Minutes that she thought there were more people “concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.” Here’s another fact: Ocasio-Cortez also told Cooper that if she makes a factually incorrect statement, she says, “OK, this was clumsy,” before restating her point.
Here’s one more fact: Ocasio-Cortez’s entire thought could fit into a tweet of 280 characters or fewer. Tell that to CNN’s Chris Cillizza, who tweeted out only the first portion of her quote without context, making it sound like the truth isn’t all that important to AOC.
In response, the new member of Congress chastised Cillizza for not including the rest of the quote, to which Cillizza claimed he simply didn’t have room to fit it all in.
So Ocasio-Cortez’s entire quote didn’t fit in a tweet? Sure, you might have to cut out Cooper’s cross-talk, but there was plenty of room to quote her in full, as Media Matter’s Parker Molloy clearly pointed out:
Uh uh uh! Cillizza wasn’t letting this go:
Just read the story, folks. Because that’s what everyone definitely does: They read past the tweet with the outrageous quote and click through to the story to read it in context.