Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) is youngest woman ever elected to Congress at 29 years old. She is of Puerto Rican descent and lived in Bronx, New York before becoming a state representative. Before her entrance to Washington as a politician, she was an organizer for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Presidential primary campaign, an educational director, and then a bartender. She now represents the 14th Congressional District of New York. In the Democratic primary in the summer of 2018, she defeated a powerful incumbent, Joseph Crowley, who served in Congress for nearly 20 years (Goldmacher and Martin 2018). After her primary win, she won the general election in the midterms of 2018. Her primary shocked the political world as many touted Crowley to be the next Speaker of the House if the Democrats were to take back the House of Representatives in the November elections (Mitchell 2018). She is a member of the 116th Congress which has the largest number of women from minority backgrounds that the United States of America has ever seen.

After her primary win, and even after her entrance into Congress, she continued to make headlines as she called out establishment politicians and practices- extending her criticism to both parties (Bade and Caygle 2019). For example, in March of this year she tweeted her criticism about the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (DCCC) rule “to blacklist and boycott anyone who does business w/ primary challengers,” (Ocasio-Cortez 2018). Her Twitter following increased from 49,000 last summer to over 4 million today (Alter 2019). She has clearly sparked attention across the nation and promptly received a proliferation of media coverage in the process. Since her primary win, she has been consistently vocal on social media with her liberal politics, attracting many supporters and critics alike. A self-described Democratic Socialist, she is part of a larger wave of women entering the political sphere in 2018 which has been dubbed the Year of the Woman. AOC is an especially interesting individual to consider when examining how the media cover candidates due to her symbiotic interaction with the media and becoming a political celebrity and household name (Simón 2018). She has been featured in a Sundance documentary called Knock Down the House which follows candidates who challenged powerful incumbents in the 2018 Midterm elections. Since her primary, she has been featured in multiple magazines including Time, Rolling Stone Magazine, Interview Magazine. Her feature spread in the last of these magazines sparked controversy as she donned a pantsuit that cost around $3,500. Her critics and conservative news outlets like Fox News began to cover AOC and her pantsuit, claiming that she wasn’t a champion for lower-income people as she claimed because of the expensive suit that she wore (Bellafante 2018). Media coverage of the politics of her Interview Magazine pantsuit was just one of many topics surrounding her and her campaign. She was a novel candidate and her primary win pushed her campaign into the spotlight. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional campaign and entrance into Congress was covered often in news media outlets, which begs the question: How was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez covered in the New York Times specifically in the two months leading up to the November 6th general midterm election and two months after her January 3rd entrance into Congress?

Gender, Politics and the Media 

Media and Politics’ Relationship

The proliferation of media content in the past few decades and the prominence of the 24-hour news cycle has allowed for  information to come readily at our fingertips. More specifically, information about politics and those who represent the country is extremely accessible with the help of the media. As a result, according to a PEW Research Center Poll, an increasing number of Americans are getting their news online (Mitchell, 2016). Online news platforms are becoming an increasingly important medium for politicians to project their message across as it reaches a large number of constituents. The way that politicians are covered in these online news media sites also mean that these portrayals impact how an increasing number of Americans are understanding and viewing the candidates. Media coverage of politics does not exist in a vacuum, as historical events play huge roles as to how the media systems cover politics the way it does today. In order to understand why the media is so important to politics, it is necessary to consider the history of media and politics relationship.

Halin and Macini (2003) explain that because the media system does not live ahistorically, important world events need to be acknowledged when considering how the media and politics coexist. Events like wars, humanitarian crises, political scandals, and economic changes can have a strong impact as to how the media and politics interact. The authors argue that media coverage has become increasingly negative over the past decades- with major events such as Watergate and the Vietnam War contributing to this negativity. The media is not only reporting unfavorable events happening in the political world, but projecting this attitude into every future event. The media is often skeptical and suspicious of what is going on in Washington (Halin and Macini 2003). This is not necessarily a bad thing, however the implications of its skepticism can play out in different ways. The United States also doesn’t live in a vacuum, as they argue that not only is the US experiencing negative political media attention, but also most Western democracies (Halin and Macini, 2003). Negative coverage is boosting the already existing suspicion of the American people. What these theories haven’t seemed to completely explain to whom, if anyone, the negative coverage seems to target. While high-profile candidates are often covered in the news, other biases may affect how other politicians are covered. Although negative coverage of government and politics in the media as a whole is a trend, it may be that some politicians receive more negative coverage than others. Some researchers suggest that female politicians, especially female politicians of color, may be more apt to receive negative media coverage (Kahn 1994; Kahn and Goldberg 1991; Silva and Skulley 2018; Ward 2016). With more and more people receiving their political news online, it is important to understand how the two interact and affect one another. Specifically, it is critical to examine how the media can affect certain members more than others in politics. 

Negative Media Coverage of Female Candidates

The definition of sexism is not completely agreed upon in the field of Women and Gender Studies. Many scholars have differentiated between different forms of sexism and how it may manifest itself with real world implications. Widely cited scholars Glick and Fiske (1996) differentiated between two forms of sexism: hostile and benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism is considered the instances based on “faulty and inflexible generalizations,” (Glick and Fiske, 1996, 491). The most blatant forms of sexism, which includes instances of sexual harassment, violence, as well as restrictive social roles are examples of hostile sexism, according to the authors. Benevolent sexism, however, involves the “positive” aspects of women. They define it as “a set of interrelated attitudes toward women that are sexist in terms of viewing women stereotypically and in restricted roles but that are subjectively positive in feeling tone (for the perceiver) and also tend to elicit behaviors typically categorized as prosocial (e.g., helping) or intimacy seeking (e.g., self-disclosure),” (Glick and Fiske 1996, 491). This definition tends to be the more common forms of sexism that paint women in a fragile light, dismiss her professionalism and focus more on her appearance than her ideas. The authors do not claim that this form of sexism is less important or ‘better than’ hostile sexism. They also offer that these different forms of sexism can vary in frequency between cultures. This definition of sexism is more than twenty years old, so while times have changed, examples of benevolent sexism seem to appear most often in the research studies which affirmed that the media is sexist or negative.

Researchers like Kahn (1991), and Kahn and Goldenberg (1992) have said that being a woman puts the candidate at a sort of disadvantage. This research says that the media covers the female candidates disproportionately, and the quality of coverage is skewed in favor for the male candidate (Kahn, 1991; Kahn, 1994; Kahn and Goldenberg 1992; Kittilson et. al, 2008; Ritchie, 2013). This research seems to suggest that the media covers female candidates in a sexist way that could have affected the candidate’s perception to the voters. Ritchie’s (2013) study examined Hillary Clinton and how the media portrayed her during her Democratic Primary campaign in 2008.  Clinton was often portrayed as a ‘monster’ in online media during her primary run. The portrayals to Clinton as a monster/cyborg not only dehumanized her but decreased her viability as a candidate for office. In Clinton’s 2008 run for the Democratic nomination for President, Ritchie (2013) found that while some media coverage was out rightly sexist, it was also negative. Other researchers had found that while the volume in which that she was covered was comparable to her opponent, Barack Obama, the coverage was not as positive (Falk, 2010; Ritchie, 2013; Uscinski and Goren, 2011). Some of the media coverage was sexist in very small ways, like referring to Secretary Clinton by her first name and commenting on her lack of femininity- the latter of which was a more unconventional way to examine sexism in the media coverage (Uscinski and Goren, 2011). An additional study that examined the effects of negative media coverage is Funk and Coker’s (2016) “She’s Hot, for a Politician: The Impact of Objectifying Commentary on Perceived Credibility of Female Candidates”. The researchers conducted an experiment in which fabricated news feeds were set up (one with objectifying commentary, one without) to see if the commentary had an impact on how voters perceived the candidate. They suggested that the objectifying commentary seemed to shape a conversation that questioned the female candidate’s perceived credibility. The objectifying commentary activated participant’s pre-existing ideas of gender roles and gender hierarchies, potentially damaging for the female candidate. While this was an experiment, and not an actual example of media coverage of a female candidate, they suggest that journalists should be careful in the way they construct the image of the politician as it may spark damaging conversations surrounding gender roles and stereotypes (Funk and Coker, 2016).

Changing Tides in Coverage of Female Candidates

Literature in the intersection of gender, politics and the media has pointed at the differences in treatment towards female candidates in the media, particularly the negative coverage. However, the majority of this research is from the late 20th and early 21st century, which provides an appropriate opportunity for the scholars of today to examine how, if at all, this media coverage has begun to change. Literature has already begun to point out that the field is indeed changing, and that sexist or negative media coverage may not be as prominent as it once was (Hayes and Lawless, 2016; Hayes et. al, 2014; Bystrom et. al, 2000). Multiple different research methods have been utilized to support this claim, including content analyses, experiments and survey data. These data have shown that media coverage can sometimes be different, but not necessarily sexist. Hayes and Lawless (2015) suggest that there is no difference in candidate portrayals of male or female candidates in the amount of coverage, nor any differences in references to their sex, traits or issues in which the candidates were associated with. Numerous studies have shown that the media is treating the female candidate just as they are treating the male candidate (Bystrom et. al, 2000; Hayes and Lawless 2016; Lavery 2013; Zulli, 2018). These studies found virtually no meaningful statistical differences in their content analyses of how male and female candidates were portrayed in the media. While the media may no longer blatantly comment on the female candidate’s appearance and regard to her in more endearing terms, studies have shown that they portray female candidates often in terms of their personality traits (Bystrom et. al, 2000). This may not be considered as sexist as previous research studies have found earlier in the 21st century and later in the 20th century. Furthermore, Atekeson and Kreb (2008) found that female candidates expanded the scope of conversation simply by being part of the race in ways that are favorable and positive to the female candidate. They found no bias toward male candidates in terms of media coverage. An emerging abundance of literature now reports that sexism once appearing abundantly in the media is no longer prominent.

Women of Color and the Media

There has been less focus in the discipline about the experience of women of color and women of other minority backgrounds e.g., those who identify on the LGBT spectrum, Muslim women, non-able-bodied women, etc (Gershon, 2012; Gershon, 2013; Silva and Skulley, 2018; Ward, 2016). My study aims to help contribute to the small, but critically important and growing field of research that focuses on how women of color are portrayed in the media. Gershon in 2012 found that being a woman or a minority alone does not present significant problems to the candidate, on par with research done by the scholars that say gender is no longer a significant factor in Congressional races. However, women of color often face a two-fold struggle on the campaign trail. Not only do they have to deal with issues of portrayals of femininity as discussed in the negative portrayals section above, but they have to confront issues of race and ethnicity. Gershon (2013) found that women of color had often received more negative media coverage than their white colleagues. The author found that both tone and content of media coverage of minority women were more likely to lean negatively. She also found that “the Anglo Congresswomen examined clearly received a higher proportion of coverage, compared with their Latina and African American counterparts” (Gershon, 2013, 710). This means that candidates of color may have a more difficult time communicating their message to voters through the media and perhaps could be a symptom of why there are so few women of color in Congress. Ward (2016) found that minority women “face a clear disadvantage in terms of securing positive campaign coverage compared to similar candidates from all other racial, gendered groups” (337).  In short, minority women face challenges their white female counterparts, and certainly their white, male colleagues do not have to worry about. Minority women face a double-barrier with their minority status and their womanhood. Less research has been conducted on media coverage of minority women politicians. Future research could hone in on minority women instead of aggregating women as a whole because different results may arise. Different implications for the path to office for women of color also may emerge, as well as implications about how the media portray women of minority backgrounds.

The Future of Gender, Politics and the Media

Scores of scholars studied gender, politics and the media and came to different conclusions based on their time. The field of literature regarding female candidates in the media seem to be at a sort of crossroads. While many recent empirical studies claim that there is no sexism in the media today as there has been in the past, they cannot explain how or why many everyday people strongly claim that the media is sexist. Some scholars suggest that this is because women experience sexism in other aspects of their lives, (in the workplace, at the grocery store, etc.) and then assume it must happen in the media to female politicians as well. (Hayes and Lawless, 2016) Many female politicians are now embracing their femininity and talk about policies that specifically affect women which encourages the media to talk about the fact that they are a woman. More recent scholarship (Atkeson and Kreb 2008; Hayes et. al, 2014; Hayes and Lawless, 2016) has shown that the print, television news media has become less sexist- covering female candidates in the same way they cover male candidates. Gender and sex seem only to come into play if the candidate makes it a part of her (or his) campaign messaging. Essentially each study admits to the fact that the effects of media coverage are not completely understood. Political Science research has shown that above all else, party identification is what most saliently predicts how a voter will behave at the ballot box (Dolan 2014; Hayes and Lawless 2016). Women do not vote for women simply because of their gender- instead, if one identifies as a Democrat, they most likely will vote for a Democrat. The same scenario can be applied Republican voters. Party identification eclipses or overshadows many other factors that will predict how a voter behaves on election day. (Dolan 2014; Hayes, Lawless and Baitinger 2014). Media coverage of female candidates is on a positive trend to a less sexist portrayal. Future research could further examine the effects of media coverage, specifically in the conversation amongst the audience that is sparked as a result of the content of the coverage. Future research should look at a more nuanced approach to understanding how women are portrayed in the media. Women of color and other minority backgrounds require special attention and research in order to understand the full spectrum as how female candidates are portrayed in the media. While this research study looks to help provide a small piece to this puzzle, future research should also look at the effects of how objectifying commentary can affect the politician, even if that does not look specifically at the outcomes on election day.

Research Design

To test my research question, I performed a quantitative content analysis in which a total of 153 New York Times articles were selected for analyzing. The New York Times search feature was utilized to stratify the term “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez”. The date range used was from (pre-election) September 6th to November 6th, 2018, and then from January 3rd to March 3rd, 2019 (post-election).  The first dates were used as they were the two crucial months leading up to the general midterm elections which occurred on November 6th, 2018. To remain consistent, I also used the same span of time after her entrance into Congress. I chose to look at the media coverage during this time to see if there was any difference in media coverage since in this time frame she was physically in Congress and voting on laws. Opinion articles, letters to the editors, and columnist articles were not used as those columns are not meant to be consumed as truth but rather as one writer’s own opinion. While these are an important aspect of media coverage, I chose to focus solely on articles that were meant to be consumed as news to inform the audience. There were other articles that were omitted- these included ones that appeared in the search of her name, yet did not mention her at all within the article. The search engine gave 79 results for the pre-midterm election search date, (September 6th to November 6th, 2018) but only 40 were suitable for my research design. The post-election search date (January 3rd- March 3rd, 2019) resulted in 211 search results, but only 113 were used as they fit the criteria for my research design.

The New York Times was the newspaper selected to conduct a content analysis because it is one of the most elite news sources in the country and is also known as the ‘paper of record’. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is from New York, making the Times more apt to cover her as she represents the people that the newspaper often focuses on.

The coding instrument:

1. Number of times her appearance is mentioned in the article
2. Number of times her race is mentioned
3. Number of times her age is mentioned
4. Number of times her politics are mentioned
5. Number of times mentioned explicitly that she’s a woman
6. Number of times she is mentioned with other women of color
7. Number of times her ‘surprising’ win is mentioned
8. Tone: positive/negative/neutral

Her age is one of the components that made AOC such a novel person to examine, as she is the youngest woman to enter Congress. Her age could have made her momentous and relevant in the news cycle, which is why I chose to code for it. She is also of Puerto Rican descent, so her race may have also been particularly newsworthy in this election cycle. Because of previous research that distinguished women of color from white women, coding for her race was significant to this content analysis. (Gershon, 2012; Silva and Skulley, 2018; Ward 2016).  A symptom of sexism in the media is the coverage being overly focused on the appearance of the female candidate as well as other factors that do not involve the candidate’s stances on policy (Funk and Coker, 2016; Kahn, 1994; Ritchie, 2013). For this reason, mentioning of appearance was coded for. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s politics was coded in order to understand if her policies and stances on current events would be mentioned. This included mentioning that she identifies as a Democratic Socialist, as well covering her position on certain policies. ‘Surprising win’ was coded as it began to be a recurring theme within the articles, especially in the pre-election search date. Surprising win refers to her Democratic primary win over former Representative Joseph Crowley in June of 2018. The ‘women of color’ code also emerged from a preliminary inspection of the articles where AOC was often mentioned in the articles with other women of color. This was coded in order to understand if she was being covered by herself or with other people, specifically women of color. The tone of the coverage was coded because previous literature has reported that media coverage of female candidates can be more negative than male coverage (Kahn, 1994; Ritchie, 2013).

Findings of AOC’s Media Coverage

Table 1. Total Number of Articles Mentioning the Candidate in The New York Times

**Note: Numbers reflect total number of mentions of the politician in both pre- and post-election dates.

In order to examine and begin understanding the volume of coverage AOC received, Table 1 demonstrates the exact proliferation of media coverage of Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez. Table 1 shows the amount of articles that each politician were mentioned in both stratified search dates. A selection of candidates that are both male and female, well-known and lesser-known, belong to minority backgrounds, and represent a variety of states are included.  All of these politicians are freshmen in the 116th Congress, like AOC. Opinion editorials, letters to the editor, and columns are all included in this number. AOC was mentioned in some way in 279 articles in the four months that were selected. Jahana Hayes, Lauren Underwood, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley are all women of color who entered Congress in 2019. Table 1 demonstrates that not one of these politicians came near the amount of coverage that AOC received. Rashida Tlaib came closest at 74 articles, yet pales in comparison to AOC’s 279. Table 1 also demonstrates that the politician that received closest to the amount of coverage Ocasio-Cortez did is Max Rose who represents the 11th District of New York. Nonetheless, Representative Max Rose still did not receive close to the amount of coverage that AOC did in the selected four months. Not one candidate received half of the amount of coverage that she did. Table 1 demonstrates the volume of coverage that AOC received compared to a range of different candidates in the four selected months.

Table 2. Number of Mentions and Percentages of Articles in Pre- and Post-Elections

**Note: Numbers include total mentions across all of the articles. Percentages signify the percentage of articles with at least one mention.

Pre-Election Coverage Findings

Table 2 displays the results from the content analysis. It is bifurcated into pre-general election coverage and post-election coverage. Table 2 shows that pre-election coverage focused most significantly on AOC’s surprising Democratic primary win. Most of the articles within these dates mentioned her surprising primary win, despite the fact that she had won the primary months before these articles were published. Throughout all of the articles, her surprising win was mentioned in some way about 43 times. Of all of these articles in this time period, 85% of them mentioned her surprising win at least once. The second most recurring theme in the pre-election selection was how AOC was often talked about in conjunction with other women of color. Nearly 60% of these articles mentioned her with other women of color- most repeatedly Ayanna Pressley of the 7th District of Massachusetts. She was mentioned with women of color who ran similar, progressive campaigns- often ones that unseated a powerful Democratic incumbent like AOC did.

Furthermore, Table 2 also shows that her politics were only mentioned in 23% of the articles and 9 times overall. There was not a large focus on her policies and stances on issues. Additionally, 20% of all pre-election articles, or 8 times in total, explicitly mention that she is a woman. There was not an emphasis on the fact that she was a woman, nor on her policies as her surprising primary win were paid special heed. Moreover, her race and age were also not mentioned significantly during the pre-election, despite these being the attributes that made her a novel candidate. Her race was only mentioned 2 times in all of the articles- only 5% of the articles mentioned her race. These articles tended to be special features of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her age was included in 13% of the pre-election articles and was mentioned 5 times overall. Finally, her appearance was not often mentioned in the pre-election articles. Her appearance was mentioned 4 times in all  of the articles for a total of 5% of pre-election articles. Appearance mentions had to do with the 3,000 dollar suit she wore for Interview Magazine, as well as the red lipstick that she often wears.

Pre-election coverage was overwhelmingly positive or neutral. Table 1 shows that there were no negative articles. 24 of the articles were coded as positive and 16 of them were neutral. Positive articles mostly emphasized her campaign in a constructive and affirmative light. These articles spoke positively about the future of her campaign and AOC’s future career in Congress. Neutral articles were ones that simply reported on the campaign and did not look to the future of her campaign. There were no negative articles in pre-election coverage.

Post-Election Coverage Findings

Table 2 reveals a shift in how the media covered AOC’s Congressional campaign in post-election coverage compared to pre-election coverage. It is most significant to note that there were 117 total mentions of her politics-which included her stances on policies and/or her commentary on current political events. Nearly 70% of the articles in post-election coverage mentioned her politics in some way. Her ‘surprising’ primary win continued to be mentioned after she entered Congress, though at a lesser rate compared to pre-election. About 12% of all of the post-election articles mentioned her surprising primary win compared to the 85% of pre-election. She also continued to be mentioned with other women of color, this time expanding the number of women she was mentioned with. Female politicians like like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, as well as Ayanna Pressley were mentioned in the same sentence as AOC. She was mentioned with these other women 22 times, or 13% of total post-election articles.Her appearance had more singular mentions in post-election findings- this was due to events like the State of the Union Address where many of the women in Congress wore white as a tribute to female suffragists in the late 19th and early 20th century. Nonetheless, articles that mentioned her appearance only constituted 6% of the total post election articles, revealing that appearance was not heavily emphasized in the post-election time period.  Her age was mentioned 7 times throughout all of the articles, and only 6% of the articles mentioned her age at least once. There was not a significant emphasis on her age in post-election analysis. Finally, her race and gender was not mentioned significantly either. Her race was mentioned twice throughout all of the articles and it was only mentioned once explicitly that she was a woman in these articles.

The media coverage in the post-election portion was mostly positive or neutral, with a few negative articles. Similarly, positive articles were ones that seemed to praise Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or paint what she was doing in an affirmative light. Neutral articles reported on her policy stances or stated the facts of what had happened in the political world that day, without a tint of positivity or negativity. In post-election coverage, over half of the articles were neutral compared to the 60% of the articles in pre-election coverage being positive. In post-election coverage, there were 3 negative articles, which constituted 3% of the overall coverage. These articles were deemed negative because they criticized and belittled AOC’s tax plans. Nevertheless, coverage was largely positive or neutral.

Methodological Reflection

There are a few limitations to this study. It is not particularly generalizable as AOC has become such a novel, distinct, and highly-covered candidate that it would be difficult to generalize her media coverage to other women of color in Congress as well as other freshmen in Congress who did not receive close to the amount of coverage she did. Her dissimilarity from the other women of color and freshmen members of Congress make her a unique case study, though make my results hard to generalize. Furthermore, the only media source examined in this study was the New York Times. As such, this may not be representative of AOC’s media coverage as a whole, but an example of one source of media coverage. The New York Times is considered to be a moderate or left-leaning news source, which could have affected the type of coverage AOC received. A right leaning news source like Fox News or Breitbart News could potentially produce extremely different results. Conservative news sources could potentially frame her in a more negative way as they are much less likely to agree with her ideas and stances on policies as she is ideologically distinct from them. Additionally, only one person coded this data so there may be discrepancy in intercoder reliability as my definitions and interpretations of the codes may line up exactly as another person’s. Further research could take many steps to augment and increase the validity and reliability of the study, as well as make the study more generalizable to answer bigger, more broad questions. Future research may want to examine and conduct a comparative analysis of how different women of color in Congress are covered in the media. Future research may also want to further examine the implications of this media coverage.

Making Meaning of AOC’s Media Coverage

First and foremost, it is significant to note that AOC appeared in significantly fewer articles from September 6th to November 6th, 2018 then she did 2 months after her entrance to Congress. Her name appeared considerably more in the latter search date. 40 articles from the New York Times were viable for my research within the first search date while 113 articles could be used for the second search date. Overall, it is important to recognize that the majority of articles from the first date did not have much to do Ocasio-Cortez. If she was mentioned it was often within a singular paragraph or two, unless the article was a complete feature about her. This makes the content of how she was talked about that much more important. The one or two sentences that she was mentioned in needed to speak to who she is as a politician in order to effectively communicate with her constituents and the entirety of New York Time’s readership (Silva and Skulley 2018).

The New York Times also focused much of their attention of AOC on her stunning primary win during the dates September 6th to November 6th, 2018. Despite the fact that she was running in a general election and the primary win had occurred months ago, the Times often mentioned what a ‘surprising’,  ‘extraordinary’, or ‘shocking’ primary win Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez achieved.

Examples of this include:

• “It has become a familiar pattern this primary season. The day after a surprising victory by a progressive underdog, say Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, national audiences rush to meet the latest Democrat who defied expectations,” (Herndon and Roose, 2018).
• “In a year that has seen stunning upsets by insurgent Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez…” (Pager, 2018).
• “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who worked as a bartender, but became a community organizer, scored the second biggest upset of the season by unseating longtime incumbent Joe Crowley…” (Chira, 2018).
• “Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise victory has election watchers wondering if the same progressive voters will be out in force again,” (Mays, 2018).

These quotes demonstrate how the media talked about her primary win over Joseph Crowley. They characterized it as surprising, insurgent and stunning. The authors of these articles did not often go into detail as to how AOC was able to achieve such a feat, rather emphasizing that her ideological position was becoming more popular in a rising number of candidates. The New York Times authors did not go into detail about her stances on policies, specifically in pre- election coverage. Instead, these authors characterized her as a progressive, Democratic Socialist who took an anti-establishment stance on issues.

While it certainly was a noteworthy primary election, New York Times journalists grouped her surprising primary win often with Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.

Examples of this include:

• “…sought to tap into the same anti-establishment energy on the left that propelled successful congressional challengers such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Ayanna Pressley in Boston to victory over incumbents,” (Martin, 2018);
• “Upsets from like-minded progressives like Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York…” (Flegenheimer, 2018);
• “The most dramatic upsets have come in New York, where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 28-year-old activist and former bartender, defeated Representative Joseph Crowley…and Massachusetts, where Ayanna Pressley a 44-year old member of the Boston city council, on Tuesday wrested the nomination away from Representative Michael Capuono…” (Burns, 2018);
• “He predicted Republicans would tie her to figures like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, three liberal women of color who electrified Democrats in the midterms…” (Burns, 2019).

Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley are both women of color who ousted powerful white, Democratic men who were incumbents in their districts. The New York Times often linked the two women insofar as the similarity of the outcome of their campaigns and speculating about the future of the Democratic party. Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley (along with other women of color like Ilhan Omar) were labeled as insurgent progressives, with little to no elaboration about their policy stances. From this, the audience and readership of the New York Times only gets a limited understanding of the wide scope of their respective campaigns. While they may have run similar campaigns, there were significant differences between the two candidates that no article appeared to distinguish. While it is impossible for journalists cover everything, the coverage was not nuanced and grouped the female, politicians of color together to form a monolith of identity.

In the post-election portion of my content analysis, Ocasio-Cortez gets many more articles devoted just to her. 113 articles were viable for this part of the study compared to the 40 from pre-election. Contrasted to pre-election articles where there was often just a sentence or two she was included in, the post-election articles often had her name in headlines or dedicated a significant portion of the article to her. Additionally, she was mentioned significantly more by herself rather than alongside other women of color, which is a deviation from the two months leading up to the general election. Her stances on the most pressing issues were covered at length once she entered Congress. Amazon in Queens, the Green New Deal, the viral video of her dancing while she was in college, her position on taxing the rich, the State of the Union address and the government shutdown, were some of the most prominent themes that emerged from post-election coverage. While some articles still found it necessary to cover her primary win from the previous year, the majority of the emphasis was not in the past, but rather how she was speaking to Congress, legislating and her current positions on issues. Post-election coverage was much more nuanced compared to pre-election coverage. As a result of the Times covering her more often, more space was allotted to report and trace her stances on policies. While they certainly continued to characterize her as a steadfast anti-establishment Democratic Socialist, more attention was given to her opinions on issues and policies. Examples of how her politics were more effectively demonstrated in the post-election coverage include:

• “One freshman Democrat, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also voted against it because it would reopen Immigration and Customs Enforcement which she wants closed,” (Davis, 2019);
• “Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, suggested a top marginal tax rate of 60 or 70 percent incomes over 10 million,” (Qui, 2019);
• “Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, the superstar first-year congresswomen who represents parts of the Bronx and Queens, was one of the first politicians to attack the [Amazon] deal,” (Wang, 2019);
• “Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has supported a 70 percent tax rate on income over 10 million,” (Irwin, 2019).

These quotes demonstrate that the Times paid much more attention to her stances and ideas on policy issues. Part of the reason that the Times may have focused more on her policies in post-election coverage is because it was only during this time period was she legislating and debating on the floor of Congress. It may have been that her stances on issues were more accessible during this time period that before the general election. Nonetheless, a more detailed approach was taken in post-election coverage compared to pre-election coverage.

The data presented in the tables seem to affirm previous research that the media do not cover men and women differently in that the same amount of emphasis is put on the female candidate’s policies than her other attributes (Bystrom et. al, 2001; Hayes et. al, 2014; Hayes and Lawless 2016; Lavery 2013). The media covered AOC’s policies more than they covered her appearance in both post and pre-election.  While this data does seem to fit in with this literature, it also diverges from previous scholarship about women of color that said being both a minority and woman can be more of a blockade than a help while campaigning. While AOC’s race is mentioned a few times, it was not a topic that was frequently reported on. The media coverage did not overwhelmingly focus on her appearance. Her pantsuits and lipstick choices were sometimes mentioned, but this topic did not dominate the overall amount of coverage. Her proliferation of media coverage makes her distinct from many other members of Congress and especially other women of color in Congress. She is a unique member of Congress as the New York Times covered her more than any politician that entered the 116th Congress with her. This coverage seems to diverge from previous literature surrounding race, gender and media coverage, as the coverage during these specific time periods was chiefly positive or neutral- not negative and didn’t present to restrict her. The data in these tables demonstrate that while media coverage of AOC disassociates with research that says women of color face a double-bind, yet converges with research that says female politicians are receiving equitable amounts of coverage that isn’t negative.

Conclusion

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a politician who has amassed a significant social media following and is spoken about at length in the media, specifically The New York Times. Understanding how AOC was portrayed in the time period during her Congressional campaign and the immediate two months after she entered office is necessary to interpret media coverage of female candidates- particularly women of color. She is now a significant fixture not only in American politics but now in political and social media. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has received an abundance of media coverage compared to her freshmen colleagues in Congress. She has continued to make headlines across all platforms, not just the New York Times and her time in Congress will without a doubt continue to be covered in the media. This study found that during the pre-election months, she was often grouped with other female candidates of color and her surprising primary win was emphasized over and over again. Post-election, she was covered significantly more by herself, and an emphasis on her stances on the issues and policies were made. The media coverage also did not seem to focus on her appearance. In neither pre or post election was the media coverage overwhelmingly negative. She was covered in the New York Times in the four selected months more than any other freshman in the 116th Congress. The media coverage of AOC is distinct in this way which makes it difficult to conclude anything about what this says about women of color in politics and the media in general. Nonetheless, this research is important because it contributes to a growing field of literature examining how women of color are portrayed in the media. It also contributes to the field of literature that claims women are making strides of progress in terms of how they are covered in the media. While women of color only make up a minority of people serving in Congress, understanding how they are covered is important for the democracy of America and ensuring equitable treatment amongst all social demographics. The youngest woman in Congress has a long career in front of her and the media will be at her side waiting to cover it.

Appendix:

Table 1A. Total Number of Articles Mentioning the Candidate in The New York Times 

**Note: Numbers reflect total number of mentions of the politician in both pre- and post-election dates.

Table 2. Number of Mentions and Percentages of Articles in Pre- and Post-Elections

**Note: Numbers include total mentions across all of the articles. Percentages signify the percentage of articles with at least one mention.

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