Lawrence O’Donnell Calls out Networks Including MSNBC for Airing Trump’s Presser and Ignoring Harris’ Speech: ‘It Is 2016 All over Again’

O’DONNELL: “The networks could’ve simply put on the side of the screen ‘Kamala Harris is a graduate of Howard University and University of California Hastings College of Law.’ Of course, 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. Most of those were knowing lies by Donald Trump, but many of the falsehoods Donald Trump spread today in his responses came from that vast well of stupidity that takes up most of his brain. The stupidest person who has ever won a nomination for president stood there in front of those reporters and said his opponent isn’t smart enough to do what he was failing at right in front of those reporters. And to make a bad news coverage situation worse, None of the networks, None of them, carried Kamala Harris’s speech live after the Trump appearance. 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. And so, as a first order of business in this hour tonight, we will correct that mistake by presenting to you, in full and unedited, as if live, 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 have not 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 are 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.”