MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell criticized media outlets, including his own network, for giving full coverage to former President Trump’s Thursday press conference but not airing Vice President Harris’ full campaign speech.
“We’re watching 2016 all over again,” O’Donnell said on “The Last Word” Thursday night. “The same mistakes are being made over and over again. I’ve never seen an industry slower to learn from its stupid mistakes than the American news industry. And we can’t expect them to figure out in the next 89 days what they couldn’t figure out for nine years: how to cover the Trump campaign.”
Trump held a lengthy and widely covered news conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, the same day Harris held a campaign rally in Michigan and also gave brief, informal remarks to reporters on the tarmac at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport.
Kamala Harris FaceTimes reporters on plane but not publicly
MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell criticized media outlets, including his own network, for not broadcasting Vice President Harris’ speech in its entirety on Thursday. (MSNBC)
“Donald Trump proved once again today that he is not smart enough to hold a press conference where the answer to every question is something that can be provably false,” O’Donnell said, adding that most of Trump’s comments during the press conference were “deliberate lies” and “falsehoods.”
“And to make the bad coverage even worse, no TV network aired Kamala Harris’ speech live after Trump’s appearance,” he said. “None of the networks.”
“The network aired the final minutes of Kamala Harris’ speech live, when in fact they were covering the Olympics when the speech began and continued to do so,” he continued, saying MSNBC would “right that wrong” by airing the entire speech.
O’Donnell said all of the television stations knew the exact time of Harris’ campaign speech on Thursday and “knew how to cover it live, but they chose not to.”
Kamala Harris finally answers reporters’ questions after 18 days of avoiding the media since becoming Democratic candidate
O’Donnell said media coverage of the Trump-Harris race “is like going back nine years to covering the election.” (Getty Images)
O’Donnell said media coverage of Trump was “like campaign coverage going back nine years.”
“Reporters, understandably, mistakenly believe that the most important thing a candidate can do is answer a question, but they don’t know what the answer actually is,” he said. “Any words spoken after a question mark are not necessarily answers, and any words spoken by Donald Trump are never answers.”
Trump slammed Harris during a press conference on Thursday, saying she was avoiding media interviews with friendly people because “she can’t do it better than Biden.”
Harris answered questions from reporters on Thursday but has yet to hold a formal news conference or in-person interview since emerging as a potential candidate last month.
Click here to get the FOX News app
The Harris and Trump campaigns did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Fox News Digital.
