MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell launched a scathing attack on the way cable news networks—including his own—covered Donald Trump’s press conference on Thursday.
In his opening monologue on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, the host vented his frustrations at the media for failing to “fact-check every lie” Trump told during live coverage of the event at Mar-a-Lago. “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,” he said.
Trump did share some staggering untruths during the press conference, incorrectly claiming to have once survived a helicopter crash with an ex-boyfriend of Vice President Kamala Harris and wrongly asserting that more people turned up for his speech in front of the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, than Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 (King’s crowd was around 25 times bigger, according to the Associated Press).
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“It would be hard to find a sentence in what Donald Trump said today that did not include at least one lie,” O’Donnell said. “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.”
He said networks have the capacity to fact-check Trump’s lies in real time by running “a live scroll at the side of the screen” debunking the Republican nominee’s claims. But O’Donnell also expressed exasperation at the sheer brazenness of the lies.
“Many of the falsehoods Donald Trump spread today in his responses came from that vast well of stupidity that takes up most of his brain,” O’Donnell said. “The stupidest person who has ever won a nomination for president stood there in front of those reporters and said his opponent isn’t smart enough to do what he was failing at right in front of those reporters.”
O’Donnell went on to criticize networks for failing to carry live coverage of Harris’ speech in Michigan on Thursday after Trump’s event, specifically calling out MSNBC.
“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,” he said. “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.”
“It’s 2016 all over again,” O’Donnell added. “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.”
