MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell laid into news outlets on his show Thursday night, comparing their collective failure to call out Donald Trump’s falsehoods to 2016.
“It was 2016 all over again, today,” he told his viewers. “Donald Trump spoke at his home in Florida for over an hour and all the major cable news networks, including this one, carried it live. Just like they all did repeatedly in 2016. It would be hard to find a sentence that Donald Trump said today that did not include at least one lie.”
O’Donnell acknowledged that some networks attempted to fact-check the MAGA leader, but only after he finished his speech.
“That of course is way too late and utterly useless,” he said. “No network tried to fact-check every lie Donald Trump told.”
Exactly. There was a time over the Obama years where PolitiFact and WaPo’s Fact Checker were pretty popular. I’d frequent them often and they’d be in Digg and Reddit aggregators. I practically forgot about them in the last decade. I hate to say it but we are in the Post-truth era of fact-checking because it’s all about what narrative everyone wants. People who care about truth versus falsehoods already know Trump is full of shit. Everyone else is largely convinced the fact-checkers themselves are lying or at least distorting reality.