‘It is not in numbers, but in unity, that our great strength lies,’ said Thomas Paine. Washington Examiner news reporter Eddie Scarry must be praying for a taste of that unity after the couple of days he’s had.
Presumably hoping to score points over millennial thought-leader and newly-christened Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Scarry tweeted a surreptitiously-taken photograph with the following caption:
‘Hill staffer sent me this pic of Ocasio-Cortez they took just now. I’ll tell you something: that jacket and coat don’t look like a girl who struggles’
Unsurprisingly, some people online didn’t take too kindly to the Examiner reporter creepshotting the 28-year-old Democratic socialist like one of 4chan’s finest. ‘hey Eddie, sorry to hear about how your entire brain got replaced with an ass, could happen to anyone,’ wrote @thetomzone. Others parodied the premise of his post:
Hill staffer sent me this pic of Ocasio-Cortez they took just now. I’ll tell you something: that jacket and coat don’t look like a girl who struggles pic.twitter.com/FI0hWxapWu
— David Mack (@davidmackau) November 15, 2018
Hill staffer sent me this pic of Ocasio-Cortez they took just now. I’ll tell you something: that jacket and coat don’t look like a girl who struggles. pic.twitter.com/TidcIgEm79
— Julia Moser (@juliamoserrrr) November 15, 2018
Hill staffer sent me this pic of Ocasio-Cortez they took just now. I’ll tell you something: that jacket and coat don’t look like a girl who struggles. pic.twitter.com/UrP3uGrjVL
— julia reinstein 🚡 (@juliareinstein) November 15, 2018
Hill staffer sent me this pic of Ocasio-Cortez they took just now. I’ll tell you something: that jacket and coat don’t look like a girl who struggles. pic.twitter.com/Ct0gCsgVpO
— Charlotte Wilder (@TheWilderThings) November 15, 2018
Hill staffer sent me this pic of Ocasio-Cortez they took just now. I’ll tell you something: that jacket and coat don’t look like a girl who struggles. pic.twitter.com/jq49oOpzHB
— Asawin Suebsaeng (@swin24) November 15, 2018
The congresswoman, whose campaign was punctuated with her deft use of social media, responded to Scarry directly:
If I walked into Congress wearing a sack, they would laugh & take a picture of my backside.
If I walk in with my best sale-rack clothes, they laugh & take a picture of my backside.
Dark hates light – that’s why you tune it out.
Shine bright & keep it pushing.✨ https://t.co/mRq5wn0v9A
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 15, 2018
At first, Scarry reacted to the backlash in a perfectly reasonable way: by trying to hawk his book, in case people wanted to hear more from him.
https://twitter.com/eScarry/status/1063193793942425600
Then, sensing his post may have been…misjudged? Sinister as hell?… after being ratio’d into oblivion, Scarry deleted his tweet.
https://twitter.com/eScarry/status/1063230377073041409
Which Ocasio-Cortez also did not take kindly to:
Oh, does @eScarry think he can delete his misogyny without an apology?
I don’t think so. You’re a journalist – readers should know your bias. pic.twitter.com/2KJuiPsUR2
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 16, 2018
As the inexperienced reporter became a Twitter piñata, he must have looked around for a sign of support from somewhere. Perhaps he hoped approval might come from his Ocasio-Cortez-skeptical colleagues at the Examiner?
Absolutely not, it turns out:
I'm sorry, but this is not a proud moment for the @dcexaminer — the place where I work and have fought so hard to make respectable as a breaking news editor. https://t.co/it1LnA6isl
— Daniel Chaitin (@danielchaitin7) November 15, 2018
https://twitter.com/SirajAHashmi/status/1063236536018190336
While other reporters continue to dine out on his Twitter history, it was back to business as usual for Eddie Scarry this morning, as he published a story about a judge ordering the return of Jim Acosta’s press pass. Cockburn scoured the piece for any detail about whether Judge Kelly’s gown looked like that of a girl who struggles, but was unable to find any.
