MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell criticizes own network for covering Trump presser but not airing Harris speech
MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell criticized the media, including his own network, for fully covering former President Trump's Thursday press conference but not airing a campaign speech by Vice President Harris in its entirety.
"It’s 2016 all over again," O'Donnell said on "The Last Word" Thursday night. "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 have not been able to figure out in nine years: how to cover a Trump-for-president campaign."
Trump gave a widely covered, lengthy press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday. On the same day, Harris held a campaign rally in Michigan, and she also gave brief, informal remarks to reporters on the tarmac at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport.
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"Donald Trump proved once again today that he is not smart enough to do a news conference by saying something that was provably false in every response he gave to every single question," O'Donnell said, calling most of Trump's statements during his press conference "knowing lies" and "falsehoods."
"And to make a bad news coverage situation worse, none of the networks, none of them, carried Kamala Harris’ speech live after the Trump appearance," he said. "None of them."
"This network brought you the last few minutes of Kamala Harris’s speech live, but was actually doing Olympics coverage when the speech began, and kept doing it," he continued, saying that MSNBC would "correct that mistake" by showing the entire speech.
The networks, O'Donnell said, all knew the exact time of Harris' campaign speech on Thursday and "knew how to cover it live and they didn't."
O'Donnell said that the media's coverage of Trump felt like going back "nine years in the press coverage of the campaign."
"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," he said. "Words spoken after their question marks are not necessarily answers and are never answers when they come from Donald Trump."
Trump bashed Harris throughout his press conference on Thursday, saying that she has avoided media interviews "with friendly people because she can’t do better than Biden."
Harris briefly fielded questions from reporters on Thursday but has yet to hold a formal press conference or do a sit-down interview since emerging last month as the presumptive nominee.
The Harris and Trump campaigns did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.