Lawrence O’Donnell appears nightly on MSNBC at 10 pm EST. I love his show because he is so smart.

As a bonus, here is Robert Reich wondering why the media doesn’t report honestly about Trump’s dementia.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Media, Trump

24 Comments Post your own

pabonner says:

August 15, 2024 at 11:09 am

So much of news today is about click bait. Outrageous or one sided headlines pull in all sides. The corporate media is about attention that becomes money. It gets old.

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- Threatened Out West says:
  
  August 15, 2024 at 6:00 pm
  
  I don’t disagree with you. But Trump’s mental health IS clickbait. That’s why it makes no sense that the media isn’t covering it.
  
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  - FLERP! says:
    
    August 15, 2024 at 6:26 pm
    
    One of the top stories on Drudge is “Allies fear he is in self-destructive spiral.” Drudge has been hammering Trump for quite a while now. And of course Drudge is just links to media stories (often tabloid).
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    August 15, 2024 at 10:34 pm
    
    TOW,
    
    I agree with you. The MSM reports Trump’s rants, but seldom questions their veracity. He has repeatedly called Harris and Walz “communists.” I have not heard either of them say anything remotely “communist.” When she talks about improving our healthcare, she is referring to the healthcare systems found in Western Europe. Trump is simply replaying the insults he heard from his friend Roy Cohn, who destroyed people’s lives by calling them “communist.”
    
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  - pabonner says:
    
    August 16, 2024 at 9:25 am
    
    I would once like to hear commentary that insists we stop calling all of those who so enthusiastically participate in our capitalist campaign system communist.
    
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  - pabonner says:
    
    August 16, 2024 at 9:05 am
    
    One might think so, but I can’t help but think the profit motive drives corporate media to believe it can draw some right wingers to subscribe impacting the bottom line. MAGA has shown itself a commercial force and the private press wants a shot at those dollars.
    
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retired teacher says:

August 15, 2024 at 12:22 pm

The media gives Trump too much leeway to spread misinformation and lies. Maybe the instantaneous fact checkers should be required during the political season. Perhaps instead of screaming at the press secretary, the press should be required to raise their hands the way teachers often control responses in a classroom, or some type of electronic system like a button on a phone to manage the questions. The current screaming system at press conferences rewards the most aggressive and loudest voices in the room. Repeated screaming, uncivil offenders should be removed from the room. I can remember some yelling at press conferences in past years, but nothing like the current unruly mob of today.

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- LisaM says:
  
  August 15, 2024 at 12:31 pm
  
  Or maybe the media is giving trump enough rope so that he can hang himself? Everyone was complaining that trump was getting all the headlines. Personally, I thought that the media was letting him have a very public mental breakdown. The electric boat/shark rambling was hilarious!
  
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    August 15, 2024 at 12:42 pm
    
    LisaM,
    
    More often, I think, the media overlooks Trump’s lies because he has been lying so often and so long that it’s old news.
    
    When he had a press conference a while ago, NPR said he lied 162 times in 60 minutes. Many sites referred to the stat but I didn’t see any that listed the lies.
    
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  - FLERP! says:
    
    August 15, 2024 at 3:40 pm
    
    You just can’t expect a newspaper to run a story listing every lie Trump speaks. For one thing, it would be an overwhelming task, because of how long he speaks and how many falsehoods he utters. For another, it would be a boring read and not enough people would read it to justify the manpower. For debates, yes, it’s typical for papers to do fact checks of each candidate. Even so, Trump is so spectacularly untruthful that papers will sometimes make the effort to do full fact checks—like the Times article from earlier this week that listed all the lies Trump told in his Musk interview. But it’s not reasonable to expect that for every single time Trump speaks, for the reasons I mention. Case in point: I read the entire article about Tim Walz’s history of gun policy stances, because he is a relatively new figure on the national stage and I wanted to learn more about him. By contrast, I just skimmed the fact check of Trump, because I really wasn’t interested in what particular lies he was telling, since I’m so used to him lying in the last nine years he’s been in national politics.
    
    I think Harris and Walz have both received extremely fair and favorable press thus far, while the media narrative on Trump in the last month has been that he is flailing, panicking, completely without discipline, and also showing cognitive decline (Megyn Kelly made that point forcefully the other day).
    
    This won’t last forever, because the press is starting to get ornery about the lack of access to Harris in particular.
    
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  - Roy Turrentine says:
    
    August 16, 2024 at 6:47 am
    
    Agree with Flerp here. Newspapers cannot call out every hedging of the truth. Still, a guy can wish for some real discussion with facts, reason, and logic rather than the meme zinger.
    
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  - NYC public school parent says:
    
    August 16, 2024 at 12:27 pm
    
    When even Norman Ornstein is defending folks critical of the media who are being the attacked by the “NYT is so liberal and perfect and how dare anyone challenge the narrative that the media is always very fair to Dems” people, perhaps it’s time for those people to reconsider their knee jerk defense of the NYT.
    
    From a twitter discussion on this subject, Norman Ornstein:
    
    “David, I understand why journalists want to take this stance. But the fact is we have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have bern and continue to be 1
    
    Watch how often the White House press briefings end up as embarrassing zoos. Consider for example at O’Keefe’s shouting at and hectoring the press secretary. Far too many questions have little to do with what Americans care about, and more reflect the egos of the reporters. 2
    
    Watching the farce of a faux press conference with Trump, with not a single question about what should’ve been the big story of the day, an alleged $10 million bribe from Egypt, and few questions about what is most important, the stakes of the election and Trump’s approach to governance. 3
    
    I do think that sometime in the near future Harris should do not a press conference with campaign reporters who will not distinguish themselves with what is important but ask a flurry of gotcha and horse, race questions, but one or two in-depth one on one interviews. 4
    
    …. what I have seen over the past two weeks is a bunch of whining by self important narcissistic journalists who think it’s all about them. 5
    
    For Kamala Harris, this first period as the Democratic nominee is about defining herself and rallying the party and other voters sick about Trump, carrying through the convention. The Interviews should come after that. 6
    
    In the meantime, I watch with dismay as a press corps monomaniacally obsessed with Joe Biden’s mental condition almost completely ignoring the mental state of Donald Trump. His slurring, disjointed and embarrassing two hours with Elon Musk does not even get front page treatment. 7
    
    While there are stories and even some powerful editorials about Trump’s unfitness for office or plans for mass deportation, takeover of the civil service, promise of retribution, dictatorship on day one and invocation of the insurrection act, they are piecemeal at best, often relegated to less prominent places 8
    
    Which means most voters have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. The stakes of this election should be the core of coverage. Including of course, what a Harris presidency would be like and what it would do. I would be far more sympathetic to the push for more access by Harris if that were the case. 9
    
    Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy. The press does not have to side with Harris to do its job. It is falling so far short. 10
    
    What frustrates me as much as anything is that the centers of excellence I have so long admired and relied on, including the Post, the Times, the Journal, most news networks, the real opinion leaders that frame coverage for most of the other outlets, have failed so often and somehow refuse to even consider their shortcomings.”
    
    (I hope no one responds to disparage Norman Ornstein for having a different opinion of the media than they do or responds with a snarky comment as if this opinion is simply not worthy of anything but derision toward Ornstein.)
    
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NoBrick says:

August 15, 2024 at 1:06 pm

No amount of rump ‘splainin will change the “process”. Congress—both houses—pass laws. When Money controls the Houses, nothing proposed by a President (or VP) passes without Money support. The lobbyist of money shout louder than the media. Money talks while the media walks…

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NYC public school parent says:

August 15, 2024 at 1:20 pm

This is excellent reporting about Republican graft you will almost never see in the NYT. It was written by student journalists at the U. of Florida instead of by NYT political reporters whose idea of practicing journalism is to call up their Republican sources for a right wing narrative that they can turn into a “major news story to sow doubts about the Democrats” and thus prove how fair and balanced they are.

If the NYT was reporting on this story at all, it would be a story about how partisan Dems are attacking a former Republican politician’s tenure as university president, but how these are attacks are entirely partisan and “many good people” are defending the Republican university president for the great job he did. And then reporters would drop the story because they would hear from their right wing Republican buddies that even mentioning this story at all as a both sides issue was far too biased against them, and the NYT reporters would rush to prove how fair and balanced they were by writing another 4 negative stories to sow doubts about the integrity of Tim Walz.

I hope these student journalists never use NYT political reporters as role models:

https://www.alligator.org/article/2024/08/sasse-s-spending-spree-former-uf-president-channeled-millions-to-gop-allies-secretive-contracts

These students deserve a journalism award – I hope they keep pursuing this story because lazy, connected and privileged NYT journalists will surely keep amplifying the Republican narratives.

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- Roy Turrentine says:
  
  August 15, 2024 at 2:20 pm
  
  nice link. Thanks..
  
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Mike Johnson says:

August 15, 2024 at 2:56 pm

What an absurd posting. Almost the entire news media is obviously cheering for Harris to beat Trump. 99+% of political journalists – including everyone at MSNBC – went out of their way to not disclose to the public how serious Biden’s cognitive impairment is until the June 27 debate left no doubt except for the blindest partisans, e.g. Diane Ravitch.

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- Roy Turrentine says:
  
  August 15, 2024 at 8:06 pm
  
  read much?
  
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- Bob Shepherd says:
  
  August 15, 2024 at 8:50 pm
  
  So many of us are so tired of the orange buffoon. Would that what you say were actually the case.
  
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- Callisto says:
  
  August 16, 2024 at 4:25 am
  
  THE Mike Johnson? Wow!
  
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- Catherine King says:
  
  August 16, 2024 at 4:35 am
  
  Mike Johnson: It’s not that the news media is cheering for Harris to beat Trump. It’s that they are supposed to tell the truth (and they fail sometimes, like all of us do).
  
  But when you take the argument out of its political framework (Trump against Harris) and put it into a truth against lies framework, and then you identify with the truth, as the press is supposed to do,
  
  . . . and since Trump lies ALL OF THE TIME, the view from the political framework makes it sound like the press is siding with Harris.
  
  Trump even says everyone is trying to put him in jail . . . REALLY? . . . from a truth perspective rather than a political perspective, isn’t that what happens when you break the law OVER AND OVER AGAIN?
  
  The other thing, about the press cheering, is that Trump and the supporters of the 2025 project are wearing the Republican and religious banners while pushing the country into fascism.
  
  The whole movement is a strike against the FOUNDATIONS of the free press–which means if Trump gets power, the free press is gone, most are jailed or worse, as the Trump dogs will be let loose, and Americans get nothing but systematic propaganda.
  
  Have you watched the POD PEOPLE on those 2025 videos? Break open your brain, man. CBK
  
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- Roy Turrentine says:
  
  August 16, 2024 at 6:53 am
  
  This is absurd. The amount of media is not even a thing. What is pertinent is percent of people who hear reliable reporting of news. Rural access to news sources that regularly promote falsehood has produced political solidarity among my neighbors that rivals any modern phenomenon.
  
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  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    August 16, 2024 at 8:07 am
    
    Well said, Roy. And best to you and yours.
    
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Bob Shepherd says:

August 16, 2024 at 10:12 am

Magnificent segment by O’Donnell!!!!

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Catherine King says:

August 16, 2024 at 12:22 pm

Diane: I don’t want to oversimplify the press situation, but I think reporters are people; and most, if not complicit with MAGA, were and still are gobsmacked by Trump’s utter disregard for the principles we and they have grown up with and that are embedded deep in our subconscious understanding of how things work and ought to work.

It’s been like watching a horrible accident, over and over again. One’s eyes won’t turn away as the scene penetrates right past our common sense of anticipation.

I think, at the very least, the press is operating under that same “cognitive disturbance” and that “we” are only now able to turn away from it. (That does not mean there are no other complexities going on.) CBK

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