Daily Beast contributing editor Justin Baragona, who frequently live-tweets clips of Fox News, appeared to believe that he caught Tucker Carlson's show going out of their way to make Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) look bad. But it turns out that was not the case.
It started on Wednesday evening during Carlson's show when he showed a picture of AOC with her eyes looking bigger than usual. This prompted Baragona to tweet a screenshot of the segment with the following caption, "So it appears Tucker's producers added googly eyes to AOC in this image."
The only issue with Baragona's tweet was that no photoshop was added to AOC's image. It is a real screenshot that has made the rounds of the internet since 2018. Baragona admitted to the mistake in a follow-up tweet.
Taking down this tweet as the image of AOC has been out there since at least May 2018.
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) February 18, 2021
Anyway, I'll take the L and the addition to the list @SirajAHashmi pic.twitter.com/BVvc8URssT
Every day you log onto Twitter, you hope to get through it without being it.
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) February 18, 2021
Tonight, I was it.
And I absolutely deserved to be.
Word of advice -- if you don't want to be IT, make sure you don't send out factually inaccurate tweets that can be easily verified and debunked.
Baragona's assumption there were googly eyes added when it was actually AOC's real eyes prompted some mockery on Twitter.
So it appears that Tucker's producers added googly eyes to AOC in this image pic.twitter.com/sSxGZZpht5
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) February 18, 2021
He deleted this masterpiece pic.twitter.com/X9DOziaN9T
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 18, 2021
.@justinbaragona I think it’s best if we all just take a breath and calm down. There’s no need to get angry. pic.twitter.com/IVLy4HXBwX
— Prison Mitch (@MidnightMitch) February 18, 2021