Last week on his TV program, “The Last Word,” Lawrence O’Donnell addressed something that has bugged me. It is the way the press treats Donald Trump so deferentially at his so-called press conferences and how Trump spouts off a bunch of nonsense with few, if any, challenges.
Lawrence O’Donnell lambasted this practice. The following are some excerpts from O’Donnell’s very appropriate rant.
Well. It was 2016 all over again.
Again, today, Donald Trump spoke at his home in Florida for over an hour, and all 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 catch-up with fact checking after Donald Trump finished speaking, but that was way too late and utterly useless. No network even attempted to fact-check every lie Donald Trump told. Every network has the capacity, with the wide screens we now have at home, to run a live scroll at the side of the screen.
[They could] 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. When Donald Trump said Kamala was not smart enough to hold a press conference, the networks simply could have put on the side of the screen, “Kamala Harris is a graduate of Howard University and the University of California Hastings School of Law.”
Of course, Donald Trump proved once again today that he is not smart enough to do a news conference by saying something that is provably false in every response he gave to every single question. Most of those were knowing lies by Donald Trump, but many of the falsehoods he spread today in his responses came from that vast well of stupidity that takes up most of his brain.
The stupidest person who has ever won a nomination for president stood before those reporters and said his opponent isn’t smart enough to do what he was failing at right in front of those reporters and to make a bad news coverage situation worse, none of the networks, none of them, carried Kamala Harris’s speech live after the Trump appearance. None of them! This network brought the last few minutes of Kamala Harris’s 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 providing to you, in full and unedited, as if live, everything that Kamala Harris said 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 is 2016 all over again. The same mistakes are being made.
O’Donnell went on to contrast the press’ kid-glove treatment of Trump with how they treat the Biden administration. To Trump, they asked useless questions with no follow-up, like, “Mr. President, can you tell us a bit more about your upcoming interview with Elon Musk? O’Donnell’s take: “What a waste of a moment with a convicted felon former president.”
O’Donnell showed how differently the press treated President Biden, whom they badgered and interrupted, and the Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, whom they harassed while pursuing what turned out to be a lie.
The press wasted most of the questions to Trump. Consequently, he could ramble about anything that came to mind, such as lying grotesquely about the size of his crowds. For example, he said his largest crowd was the Jan. 6 rally (fact check, estimated 53,000), which he claimed to be larger than the 1963 March on Washington (fact check, estimated 250,000).
The press gives Trump a free pass. As Lawrence O’Donnell implied, this atypical press treatment of Trump helped him win in 2016–and might do so again.
