MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell laid into news outlets on his show Thursday night, comparing their collective failure to call out Donald Trump's falsehoods to 2016.
"It was 2016 all over again, today," he told his viewers. "Donald Trump spoke at his home in Florida for over an hour and all the major 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 that Donald Trump said today that did not include at least one lie."
O'Donnell acknowledged that some networks attempted to fact-check the MAGA leader, but only after he finished his speech.
"That of course is way too late and utterly useless," he said. "No network tried to fact-check every lie Donald Trump told."
Every network, he railed, has the capacity to do so. Widescreen TVs allow for a live scroll on the side of a broadcast that could fact-check many of Trump's claims.
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An irate O'Donnell said many of Trump's falsehoods originated from a "vast well of stupidity that takes up most of his brain" and called the former president the "stupidest person who has ever won a nomination for president."
"And to make a bad news coverage situation worse, none of the networks — none of them — covered Kamala Harris' speech live after the Trump appearance. None of them," he said, blasting even his own network, which covered some of her speech, but had covered the Olympics as her speech began. "And kept doing it."
O'Donnell said that as a first order of business on his show, he would "correct that mistake" — and shared Harris' speech in full, unedited, and as-if live.
"Everything that Kamala Harris said today in her speech in Michigan which all of the networks knew was coming," he said, noting they all gave Trump more than an hour of coverage.
"It's 2016 all over again," he repeated. "The same mistakes are being made. I have never seen an industry slower at learning from its own stupid mistakes than the news business. And you cannot expect them to figure out in the next 89 days what they have not been able to figure out in nine years: how to cover a Trump for president campaign."
Watch O'Donnell's searing takedown below or at this link.
