AOC-narrated Green New Deal clip nominated for Emmy for… news analysis?

Democratic socialist New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been nominated for an Emmy award for “news analysis” for a video envisioning how the implementation of the Green New Deal solves all the US’ problems.

Ocasio-Cortez revealed the seven-and-a-half minute video she narrated, produced by the Intercept and illustrated by Molly Crabapple, was shortlisted for an Emmy for News and Analysis in the Editorial and Opinion category on Thursday. Initially published in April 2019, the clip outlines the environmental disasters facing the world and describes how the proposed ‘Green New Deal’ will solve them in one miraculous decade.

The segment will face off against an episode of the Rachel Maddow Show titled “Tiller and Beyond: Abortion Wars in Kansas,” a segment of ‘Real America with Jorge Ramos’ called “Detained by a Dictator,” a New Day Weekend bit titled “‘Infested,’ He Says,” and the New York Times clip “Equal Play.” While the Emmys have no official political point of view, none of the News Analysis noms deviate from the anti-Trump-yet-pro-imperialist mainstream media line.

Indeed, some of the picks – Ocasio-Cortez’s segment, Maddow, and “Infested” in the Opinion and Editorial category, but also a documentary on Trump’s housekeepers and a number of selections denouncing various aspects of Trump’s immigration policy – seem designed to get under the publicity-obsessed president’s skin.

AOC predicts with characteristic breathlessness that Democrats will take back the Senate and White House in 2020, then immediately implement the Green New Deal with “swing for the fence ambition” that won’t “leave anyone behind.” Medicare for All – a signature issue for AOC and other progressive Democrats – is a key part of this agenda, never mind that Democratic candidate Joe Biden has pledged to veto any such proposal.

The future depicted in the segment includes hurricanes swallowing up Miami, oil workers learning not to code but to plant trees, and the state paying people to raise children that are not their own. “We became a society that was not only modern and wealthy, but dignified and humane too,” she gushes, though the actual GND proposal as introduced in Congress last year devotes more space to farting cows than changing human nature. 

Some of the video’s lines seem especially out of touch just a year later – “We stopped being scared of each other” doesn’t quite work in a nation where merely breathing on one’s fellow citizen can trigger a beatdown, or a faceful of mace, for example – but it’s easy to see why uplifting speculative fiction would be a hit in the middle of a pandemic and an economic depression.

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