Lawrence O'Donnell tore apart the corporate media apparatus and called them stupid for their terrible performance at Trump's press conference.
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Here's Lawrence O'Donnell's full piece breaking down the media's performance at Trump's press conference:
Trump answered reporters' questions, lied to you, and anyone who tells you that isn't smart enough to know what the answer is.” pic.twitter.com/CcLk2kUjhj— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) August 9, 2024
O'Donnell said in part:
All things Kamala Harris said in a speech in Michigan today that every network knew was coming. They knew what time it was. They knew how to cover it live, and they didn't after giving it to Donald Trump over an hour of live streaming across all their networks, it's 2016 again. The same mistakes are made.
I've never seen an industry slower to learn from its stupid mistakes than the American news business. And you can't expect them to figure out in the next 89 days what they couldn't figure out in nine years of how to cover the Trump presidential campaign. Now one of the Harris-Waltz campaign slogans is we're not going back, but we just went back today. We went back nine years with the press coverage of the campaign.
The media coverage is giving Donald Trump credit from the very people he deceived today for lying to them. They appreciate it. Reporters understandably and wrongly believe that the most important thing a candidate can do is answer their questions, but they don't know what the answer really is.
Words spoken after question marks are not necessarily answers and never are answers when they come from Donald Trump. There is an uproar in the media right now about Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate not doing what Donald Trump did today, stand in front of reporters and answer their questions, and some small minds in the news media continue to appreciate Donald Trump. because standing up and lying in response to them lying is no response. Donald Trump never answers questions from reporters, never anyone in the news media who tells you Donald Trump answered questions from reporters and Kamala Harris didn't is lying to you and they're too stupid to know they're lying to you , because. they don't know what the answer is.
Donald Trump did not answer any questions today. None. He stood there in a room where he made sure that the reporter's questions could not be heard by the viewers. And so when he spoke, the viewer had no idea what the question was. Most of the questions were terrible.
The dumbest possible questions you can ask about campaign strategy. What a waste of time to ask such questions with a convicted felon, a former president. Here's a question, Mr. President, can you tell us a little bit more about your upcoming interview with Elon Musk? That was a topical question for Donald Trump today. Question: What do you think about Kamala Harris not picking Josh Shapiro as her VP? Most of the questions were such pointless questions.
And so Donald Trump could just ramble on about anything he could think of, including lying. Of course, about the size of his crowd. And the biggest lie he's telling now about the size of his crowd is the lie about which of his crowds was his biggest crowd. He now claims the crowd that gathered to hear him try to overturn the Jan. 6 presidential election was his biggest crowd ever. This is not the case, investigations have calculated that the crowd was about 53,000 people. Today, Donald Trump said it was the biggest crowd he had ever spoken to. That was it. He actually had a much larger crowd on his inauguration day, but it was still less than Barack Obama's inauguration day. So he had to lie about that too. Donald Trump said today that his Jan. 6 speech drew a bigger crowd than Martin Luther King Jr.'s. I have a dream speech in Washington in 1963. The most famous speech ever given in Washington by someone who was not the President of the United States. Martin Luther King's crowd was five times larger than Donald Trump's on January 6th.
I know it may seem almost tiresome to actually fact-check the lies of Donald Trump's crowd today, but that's the way Donald Trump wants it to feel. He's been telling mob-sized lies for nine years and wants to saturate the media enough to just accept it, and he won because no one in that room fought him in any way today or anything. He didn't fight any of the lies he told in that room today. It was the most delicious collection of questions journalists could ever see.
They are afraid of Donald Trump. Are they afraid of the Trump campaign preventing them from giving Donald Trump a chance to lie in the future? Now, I'm not
advocating for reporters to be combative with Donald Trump or whoever. I don't see the need for it. I'm really not even with Donald Trump. But how can you be so tame and timid in the presence of Donald Trump when you do that?
The performance was shameful. If the press conference hadn't been so helpful to Kamala Harris, the Democrats might have complained, but in evaluating the media, the same mistakes of 2016 were repeated.
The corporate press refused to stand up to Donald Trump while they choose to treat the Democrats like trash for whom they have nothing but contempt.
Lawrence O'Donnell spoke for the majority of Americans who are tired of seeing the corporate press kneel before a convicted rapist, why decent public servants are treated like criminals.
Awards and professional memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Political Science Association
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