Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) said Sunday there was an “actual ecosystem” of conservative media and online influencers that spreads disinformation on behalf of the Republican Party.
“There’s an actual ecosystem that pumps out this disinformation consistently on behalf of them,” she said on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” adding that Democrats in Congress need to figure out how best to communicate with the public.
“We’ve got to settle into that and recognize that not everyone is going to sit on a podcast. Not everyone’s going to be social media-savvy. But they are going to have to find their communication lane,” she said of Democratic politicians.
Referring to the Republican Party’s media influence, Crockett noted that tech billionaire Elon Musk owns the social platform X, adding, “We’ve also got the other news network that I won’t name and some other things.”
The Texas Democrat said the party may be pushing back against this disinformation, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean that people can hear us or see us.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) made a similar point last week in response to comments from Fox News primetime host Jesse Watters.
“We are waging a 21st century information warfare campaign against the left,” Watters said on an episode of “The Five” this week. “And they’re using tactics from the 1990s.”
“What you’re seeing on the right is asymmetrical,” Watters continued. “Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.”
“This is true,” Murphy wrote in a social media post, in response to a clip of Watters. “And until the left builds an infrastructure to confront this reality — and stops acting like political communication is still just buying millions of TV and digital ads every two years — we are cooked.”
Crockett, who often appears on podcasts, says some of her colleagues are more “amiable” when it comes to appearing on different platforms where they can reach more people.
“But amplifying those things is very difficult,” she added.
