MSNBC star Rachel Maddow was miffed on Tuesday night when her network carried a portion of Donald Trump’s Super Tuesday victory speech live, calling the editorial decision “irresponsible.”
Having long taken the approach of refusing to air Trump’s remarks live, especially when Maddow and other liberal hosts are at the helm, MSNBC has started to loosen up those restrictions in recent weeks.
After declining to carry any of the presumptive GOP nominee’s address after his Iowa caucus victory, MSNBC has aired portions of his live speeches following his other primary wins, albeit with extensive fact-checks and heavy criticism. The network also broadcast some of Trump’s remarks after the Supreme Court decided that states couldn’t remove him from their ballots.
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Following Trump’s dominant performance in Tuesday night’s GOP primaries, all but securing him the Republican nomination, the twice-impeached former president took the stage at Mar-a-Lago to bask in his victory. MSNBC, much like the other cable news networks, took his comments live.
Maddow, who was anchoring the channel’s Super Tuesday special coverage, eventually cut into Trump’s speech to express her dismay that they were even carrying it. (CNN and Fox News, meanwhile, carried the ex-president’s remarks in their entirety.)
“Okay, I will say that it is a decision that we revisit constantly in terms of the balance between allowing somebody to knowingly lie on your air about things they lied about before, and you can predict they are going to lie about, and so, therefore, it is irresponsible to allow them to do that,” she groused.
“The balance between knowing that that’s irresponsible to broadcast, and also knowing that the de facto, soon-to-be-de facto nominee of the Republican party—this is not only the man who was likely to be the Republican candidate for president, but this is the way he is running,” Maddow added.
MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle suggested that the way “we balance it” was to “fact-check the hell out of him.” Maddow, however, was not entirely sold on the concept. “So we do that after the fact, and that is the best remedy that we got,” she replied. “It does not fix the fact that we broadcast it.”
Later in the broadcast, fellow progressive firebrand Lawrence O’Donnell proposed giving Trump “half the screen” while rolling a real-time fact-checking scroll on the other half. “You know he is going to say all of this stuff repeatedly,” he noted. “Just put it there right beside him on the screen while he is saying it because they are the same lies over and over again.”
Maddow has been extremely outspoken about why MSNBC shouldn’t broadcast the ex-president’s speeches live, claiming it could put the network in legal jeopardy for “knowingly broadcasting untrue things” he says. Of course, this is an obvious reference to Fox News paying a whopping $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit alleging the right-wing network willingly aired Trump’s lies that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the 2020 election.
Along with MSNBC, CNN has also come under fire from conservatives and Fox News for interrupting Trump’s speeches in order to issue fact checks of the truth-averse ex-president. Hours ahead of the Super Tuesday polls closing, Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer went so far as to demand that other networks “take news out of your name” if they opted not to carry Trump’s address in full.
At the same time, though, Hemmer’s own colleagues have cut away from Trump’s speeches to correct the record. During the former president’s remarks in South Carolina last month, anchor Neil Cavuto jumped in to tell Fox News viewers that Trump was lying about the stock market’s performance and the 2020 election, adding that while he “is entitled to his opinion, he is not entitled to his own set of facts.”
