When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Congress this week, she asked him about his "ongoing dinner parties with far-right figures" -- that is to say, the meals where he listens to Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Hugh Hewitt and other Nazi- and Nazi-adjacent figures whine about "leftist social media bias."
The criticism wounded the beleaguered billionaire, who used his own Facebook account to complain about it and to clarify that he eats with these would-be ethnic cleaners because he throws dinners where he can hear from "lots of people across the spectrum on lots of different issues all the time."
Facebook's spokespeople could not name anyone from any part of "the spectrum" who wasn't to the right of Fox News, however, so The Intercept's Jon Schwarz canvassed the editors of The Nation, Mother Jones, Black Agenda Report, Jacobin, Current Affairs, FAIR, Democracy Now, and other members of the sweeping left-wing media cabal, and, surprisingly enough, not one of them has ever been invited to one of Zuck's dinners.
Look, we all know why Zuck is masticating the far-right's most prominent grifter thinkfluencers: it's because he's fallen for the right's most tiresome rhetorical gimmick, in which they claim that because the press refuses to pretend that (say) climate change isn't real, or that (say) tax breaks for the rich don't create jobs, or that (say) Sandy Hook wasn't a false-flag masterminded by gun-grabbers, that there is "bias" in the system.
And they're right: it's totally true that reality has a well-known leftist bias, which is why any moderation effort that prohibited literal Nazis would block "mainstream Conservatives" in the bargain.
Zuck doesn't want to meet with The Nation or Mother Jones because they argue for fundamental structural reform that would make it impossible for businesses to abuse their customers, permit competition, and pay their share of taxes. Even the most moderate version of these reforms would, in Zuck's own words, "suck for Facebook."
Meanwhile, conservative pundits merely want to exterminate all the brown people and trans people and queer people and many of the poor people (leaving behind enough to terrorize workers who contemplate unionizing with the example of how miserable they'd be if their "job creator" overlords fired them for daring to try). This is all OK with Zuck.
The only alternative is to believe, as Naureckas says, that large media corporations like Facebook hate being attacked from the left, but “do not mind being attacked from the right, because the right is fundamentally in favor of the kind of corporate power they represent.” It would also mean believing that Zuckerberg, one of the most powerful people on this planet, is an absolutely shameless liar.
For Some Reason We Can’t Find a Single Leftist Mark Zuckerberg Invited To His Dinners With Pundits from “Across the Spectrum” [Jon Schwarz/The Intercept]
