MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Tears Into His Own Network for Airing Trump Press Conference Without Fact-Check
MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell tore into the major cable news networks, including MSNBC, on Thursday after they aired former President Donald Trump’s press conference live and didn’t “fact-check every lie” he told.
During his opening monologue on Thursday evening, O’Donnell protested:
It was 2016 all over again today. Donald Trump spoke at his home in Florida for over an hour and all of the cable news networks, including this one, carried it live just like they all did repeatedly in 2016. It would be hard to find a sentence in what Donald Trump said today that did not include at least one lie. Some of the networks tried to play catchup with fact-checking after Donald Trump finished speaking, but that, of course, is way too late and utterly useless. No network even attempted to fact-check every lie Donald Trump told. Every network has the capacity, especially with these wide screens we now have at home, to run a live scroll at the side of the screen fact-checking many of Donald Trump’s lies. Not all of them, that would be impossible, but many of them as he speaks.
O’Donnell then complained that “to make a bad news coverage situation worse, none of the networks – none of them – carried Kamala Harris’ speech live after the Trump appearance. None of them.”
Taking aim at his own network, the MSNBC host said:
This network brought you the last few minutes of Kamala Harris’ speech live, but was actually doing Olympics coverage when the speech began and kept doing it. And so, as a first order of business in this hour tonight, we will correct that mistake by presenting to you in full, and unedited as if live, everything that Kamala Harris said today in her speech in Michigan, which all of the networks knew was coming, they knew what time it was coming, they knew how to cover it live, and they didn’t, after giving Donald Trump more than an hour of live coverage on all of their networks.
O’Donnell concluded, “It’s 2016 all over again. The same mistakes are being made. I have never seen an industry slower at learning from its own stupid mistakes than the American news business, and you cannot expect them in the next 89 days to figure out what they haven’t been able to figure out in nine years: how to cover a Trump for president campaign.”
Watch above via MSNBC.
