MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell is drawing praise from progressives for his epic rant knocking the free campaign ads that the cable-news networks, including his own, gave to Donald Trump on Thursday.
In case you missed it, consider yourself lucky, but what went down is, the truth-challenged ex-president was allowed by the networks to pontificate, fact-check-free, for nearly an hour, prattling on, among other things, about Kamala Harris’ black-ness, asylum seekers coming straight from mental hospitals and whatever it was he was trying to say about mifepristone.
“It was 2016 all over again today,” O’Donnell fumed, and, yes, of course, he’s right about that, and right to also be critical of those same news networks ignoring a Harris speech at a campaign rally in Michigan later in the day, because, yes, equal time, only seems fair.
You can sense the but coming, can’t you?
But …
Are we really of the mindset that, in 2024, there are, one, people out there looking for accurate, fact-checked information, and, two, that, if we can’t find a speech airing live on the million channels on our cable or satellite, we can’t just go find it on YouTube or social media to watch when we want to?
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On that second point first: I was caught up with trying to finish my workday when the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz rally was aired live on the networks early Tuesday evening, but I found the rally on YouTube and watched it in full later that night, no problem.
And just to be clear, I’m an old – 52 years old, to be exact, which is to say, I’m not one of the kids who, early on in their lives, came to the realization that you don’t need a cable or satellite package to be able to watch whatever you want, whenever you want it.
Speaking for me personally, I hardly ever watch anything live on TV, other than sports, and the returns on Election Night, which might as well be sports, the way we treat politics anymore.
The group that still watches TV news live, as it happens, is the reason Fox News gets bonkers ratings, but doesn’t make any money from all the sets of eyeballs it gets each night.
The problem for Fox News is, its audience skews assisted living-adjacent, which helps explain why FNC gets double and sometimes triple the viewers of MSNBC and CNN, and still can’t get advertising outside of the people selling gold, erectile-dysfunction pills and Gorilla Tape.
Now, to O’Donnell’s argument – and keep in mind, O’Donnell is 72, right there in the Fox News demo sweet spot, so he might blindly assume that people watch TV today the same way they did 20 years ago, back when he was on “The West Wing” – that the networks need to fact-check Trump every time he speaks, but only because the only time the guy lies is when his lips are moving.
OK, so, one, if you’re watching Trump on CNN, you’re just lazy; you know going in that they can’t afford to bleed any more viewers, so they’re going to play both sides all the way to the grave.
If you’re watching on MSNBC, you don’t need a fact-checker to distract you from the fact-checking that you’re doing yourself on your phone, and honestly, you’re going to do a better job debunking, in real time, the story about Willie Brown and the helicopter, to cite one example.
And if you’re watching on Fox News, the fact-checkers, as far as you’re concerned, are Deep State leftist liars who are too busy trying to mutilate perfectly good kids into being trans to be unbiased in relation to whatever the Dear Leader has to say.
Seriously, I have two MAGA mothers-in-law – one is a step – and you can’t tell either one that Democrats (read: myself and my wife, their daughter/step-daughter) don’t actually support post-birth abortions, or that there isn’t really even such a thing as a port-birth abortion, among the various and sundry outright lies that have been seared into their consciousness by the far-right media that they consume every night.
I point this out to make the point that the quaint notion that there’s anybody left out there who blindly looks to a media outlet for unbiased fact-checking, and then trusts whatever they get back, left us around the time that Walter Cronkite gave us his final “that’s the way it is” signature send-off.
The only time I ever hear from anybody about how the media should be “fair to both sides” is when it’s a disgruntled MAGA reader; for instance, just today, I got an email from a guy named John Zielanski, who wrote to complain about an AFP story (he didn’t identify which one) to make the point that journalists “print both sides of a story, meaning not just your biased opinion, but content that appeals to both sides of the political spectrum.”
Naturally, when I Googled his name, and cross-checked the results against his email address, I landed on one of his social-media accounts, and the stories that he links to aren’t from news sources that “print both sides of a story,” and the batch that I glanced at were from far-right op-ed writers, which, I dunno, seems to me, they could qualify as “biased opinion,” and as such, their pieces wouldn’t qualify as “content that appeals to both sides of the political spectrum.”
I asked the guy to forward me copies of the emails that he has sent to his MAGA op-ed faves complaining to them about not printing both sides of a story and presenting their biased opinions; I’ve yet to hear back, which, yeah, surprise, surprise, right?
No doubt, we should all stick to the “facts” when we’re trying to get information out there, no matter what the topic is, but I don’t know that the problem we face as a species is access to the “facts,” when we can’t even agree on what the “facts” are anymore.
I mean, sure, I wish we lived in a world where a former president wouldn’t even want to tell angry lie after angry lie to a national-TV audience, much less that we’d need to live-fact-check the guy, and hope, then, that people would accept the fact checks at face value.
That world doesn’t exist, and probably never did, is my point here.
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Chris Graham
