AOC “Squad”: Who in the media is responsible for this term in the reference to four members of the House of Representatives? MEDIAite Colby Hall addresses this issue in the following article:
“Among the many horrible news trends that have occurred of late, near the top of that list is the use of ‘the squad’ as common media parlance to describe the four freshmen congresswomen who have found themselves facing political, and racist, attacks from president Donald Trump.
“The term ‘squad’ has emerged as a shorthand to represent four newly-elected women of color: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, representative Ayanna Pressley, representative Rashida Tlaib and representative Ilhan Omar, all members of the Democratic Party.
“The four have all become lightning rods for attention on both sides of the political aisle since being elected last Fall, but have recently found themselves in the media spotlight due to Trump’s racist tweets that told them to go back to where they came from, despite the fact that all are American citizens, and only representative Omar was born outside the United States, and came to this country as a Somali refugee when she was 12 years old.
“Over the past week to 10 days, the media has apparently decided to almost exclusively refer to these four as ‘the squad.’ We didn’t all agree to call them the squad. It just sort of happened. Now it feels like every cable news host, anchor, and contributor has channeled an inner-Phil Dunphy by referencing this ‘youth culture’ term in a failed attempt to be cool and hip.
“Just how prevalent has this awful trend become? According to the television transcript database TVEyes, on Monday, the term was mentioned 30 times more on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, than it had been on (the previous) Friday.
“So where did the wretched term originate? According to Know Your Meme, the term originally comes from the early aught’s world of hip-hop, particularly the trap music subgenre, but entered the broader American lexicon in the early to mid-teens when Taylor Swift, and a Miley Cyrus-host Saturday Night Live sketch, took the term to a national reach.
“Now to be clear, these four appear to have first started this term by posting ‘squad pics’ after getting elected in November 2018. And we will ignore the seeming cultural appropriation of a term started in the Atlanta trap music scene to others.
“While it’s hard to know exactly when the congresswomen were first anointed ‘the squad,’ some simple search tools help reveal who exactly is to blame for the term exploding in the past week. Did the term start on television and move to online publishing or vice versa?
“Mediaite first searched TVEyes, using the terms ‘squad’ and ‘AOC’ (the latter of which is the common shorthand for representative Ocasio-Cortez of course) and learned that the first on-air mention of ‘squad’ occurred July 7 during Weekends With Alex Witt on MSNBC. The culprit? The Daily Beast writer Jonathan Alter, called it, ‘a mistake to assume, as some people in the press have, that the democratic energy is all on the left with this — they call them the squad, these four freshmen or freshwomen congresspersons.’
“So is Alter to blame for being the first established media personality to use ‘squad’? Not quite. He may have been the first to say it on a national television outlet, but Alter seems more than likely to have picked that term from a column published the previous day, July 6. Who was the author?
“None other than New York Times contributor Maureen Dowd. She is the person most responsible for this abhorrent term when she wrote:
‘“I asked (U.S. House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi whether, after being the subject of so many you-go-girl memes for literally clapping back at Trump, it was jarring to get a bad headline like the one in HuffPost that day — ‘What The Hell Is Nancy Pelosi Doing?’ The article described the outrage of the Squad, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts are known.’
“The passage cited above is somewhat confusing, as it suggests that the HuffPost article linked uses the ‘Squad’ term, but a cursory “command F” (on the computer) search of that article finds no such usage.
“There it is, Maureen Dowd and Jonathan Alter, respected leaders in the field of opinion journalism, were the first media figures to promote the term, which subsequently blanketed major media coverage of the four congresswomen. (Caveat: There are almost certainly others to have used the term before these two, but in our surface research, no one else with as big a platform is more responsible.)
“To be fair, when Dowd and Alter used the term it was unique and, perhaps, even a clever, ironically-detached term to quasi-mock the millennial elected officials. Also, these four elected officials have used ‘squad’ as a term of endearment and presumably their supporters love it as well.
“But the true villains in the trite use of the term are the mass of copycat media people, too lazy to say the four names and instead just parroting the thing everyone else has said.
“The greatest trick the devil ever played was making people believe he didn’t exist. The greatest trick The Squad ever played, apparently, was to make middle-aged media personalities clown themselves by speaking as though they’re trying to blend into a millennial Ridgemont High,” Colby Hall wrote.