Lawrence O’Donnell took apart the corporate media apparatus and called out their stupidity for their terrible performance at Trump’s news conference.
Video:
Here is the full segment of Lawrence O’Donnell shredding the media performance at Trump’s news conference, “Anyone who tells you that Donald
Trump answered reporters’ questions is lying to you and anyone who tells you that is not smart enough to know what an answer is.” pic.twitter.com/CcLk2kUjhj— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) August 9, 2024
O’Donnell said in part:
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. 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. One of the Harris-Walz campaign slogans now is we’re not going back, but we just went back today. We went back nine years in the press coverage of the campaign.
The media coverage, Donald Trump gets credit from the people he lied to today for lying to them. They appreciate it. Reporters understandably and incorrectly believe that the most important thing a candidate can do is answer their questions, but they don’t know what an answer actually is.
Words spoken after their question marks are not necessarily answers and are never answers when they come from Donald Trump. There are rumblings in the news media now about Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate not doing what Donald Trump did today, stand up in front of reporters and take their questions and some of the tinier minds in the news media continue to give credit to Donald Trump for standing up and lying in response to every single question they ask a lie is not an answer. Donald Trump never answers reporters questions, never anyone in the news media who tells you that Donald Trump has answered reporters questions and Kamala Harris hasn’t, is lying to you and they’re too stupid to know that they’re lying to you because they don’t know what an answer is.
Donald Trump answered no questions today. None. He stood up there in a room where he made sure the reporter’s questions could not be heard by the TV audience. And so when he spoke, the TV audience had no idea what the question was. Most of the questions were terrible.
The silliest possible questions you could ask questions about campaign strategy. What a waste of a moment with a convicted felon, former president to ask questions like that. Here’s one question, Mr. President, can you tell us a bit more about your upcoming interview with Elon Musk? That was an actual question to Donald Trump today. Question. What do you think of Kamala Harris not picking Josh Shapiro as her VP? Most of the questions were wasted questions like that.
And so Donald Trump could just ramble about anything that came to mind including lying. Of course, about the size of his crowds. And the biggest lie he now tells about the size of his crowds is the lie about which of his crowds was his biggest crowd. He now claims that the crowd that gathered to hear him tried to overthrow the presidential election on January 6th was his biggest crowd ever. It wasn’t, investigations have estimated that that crowd was about 53,000 people. Today, Donald Trump said that the biggest crowd he’s ever spoken to that. That was it. He actually had a much bigger crowd on his inauguration day, but that was still a smaller crowd than Barack Obama’s inauguration day. So he had to lie about that too. At the time today, Donald Trump said that his January 6th speech attracted a bigger crowd than Martin Luther King Junior’s. I have a dream speech in Washington in 1963. The most famous speech ever delivered in Washington by someone who was not president of the United States. Martin Luther King’s crowd was five times the size of Donald Trump’s crowd on January 6th.
I know it can sound almost tedious that I am fact checking Donald Trump’s crowd size lies today, but that’s the way Donald Trump wants it to feel. He has been telling crowd size lies for nine years and he wants to wear the news media down to the point where they just accept it and he has won because no one in that room fought him on that in any way today or on anything else they did not fight a single lie that he told in that room today. It was the tamest collection of reporters asking questions that you could ever see.
Are they afraid of Donald Trump? Are they afraid of the Trump campaign banning them from opportunities to have Donald Trump lie to them in the future? Now, I’m not
advocating that reporters be combative with Donald Trump or anyone. I don’t see the need for that. I really don’t even with Donald Trump. But how can you be so tame and timid in the presence of Donald Trump when you do this?
The performance was disgraceful. If the press conference would not have been so helpful to Kamala Harris, Democrats might have complained, but when evaluating the media, it was all the same mistakes of 2016 repeated again.
The corporate press refused to confront Donald Trump, while they choose to treat Democrats like garbage that they have nothing but contempt for.
Lawrence O’Donnell spoke for the majority of Americans who are tired of seeing the corporate press bend the knee to a rapist convicted felon why treating decent public servants like criminals.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association