On his program The Last Word Thursday night, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell glorified the tech experts who repaired Healthcare.gov after its disastrous launch, calling them “heroes.”
And yet, the host lamented, the pocket-protector posse don’t consider themselves to be heroes.
Lawrence O'Donnell
By Paul Bremmer | February 28, 2014 | 5:46 PM EST
By Jeffrey Meyer | February 25, 2014 | 12:19 PM EST
Actor and gay rights activist George Takei is known for his outspokenness when talking about gay marriage. As a result, the former "Star Trek" cast member felt the need to jump into the debate surrounding Arizona’s new religious freedom bill.
Appearing as a guest on The Last Word w/ Lawrence O’Donnell on Monday night, Takei expressed his outrage with the Arizona bill and proclaimed that not only is Arizona’s SB 1062 “not a religious freedom bill at all” he shrieked that “religious freedom is just a cloak for prejudice.” [See video below.]
MSNBC Completely Ignores Latest ObamaCare Delay in Prime Time, Spends Nearly One-Fourth On Chris Christie
By Jeffrey Meyer | February 11, 2014 | 1:54 PM EST At 4:57 on Monday afternoon, MSNBC’s Alex Wagner hyped “Breaking news from the Treasury Department. The White House has announced a second delay to part of the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate. Details on that are next.” But the next “details” did not come for 12 and a half hours at 5:30 a.m. Tuesday morning during MSNBC’s Way Too Early broadcast.
In between, MSNBC ran 9 full stories on Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) and the “Bridgegate” scandal surrounding his administration. Rachel Maddow, devoted nearly half of her broadcast, 29 minutes to the Christie scandal. The rest of her primetime colleagues similarly couldn’t be bothered to inform their viewers of the latest ObamaCare delay, despite Wagner’s promise: “details on that are next.”
It’s Not Just a Tweet: MSNBC’s Despicable Record of Smearing Republicans, Conservatives, and Tea Party as Racists
By Rich Noyes | February 3, 2014 | 8:27 AM EST
On Thursday, MSNBC President Phil Griffin apologized for a Twitter post suggesting conservatives (“the rightwing”) are racists who would “hate” a cute new Cheerios ad because it featured a biracial family: “The tweet last night was outrageous and unacceptable. We immediately acknowledged that it was offensive and wrong, apologized, and deleted it. We have dismissed the person responsible for the tweet.”
Griffin’s statement was a good first step, but if an apology is owed for this tweet, then MSNBC owes conservatives many, many more. The Media Research Center has compiled a long list of instances in which the network’s anchors have committed character assassination disguised as journalism, unjustly smearing conservatives, Republicans and the Tea Party as racists. Here are just some of the many outrageous examples we have documented:
By Randy Hall | January 30, 2014 | 10:09 PM EST
During an interview with Lloyd Grove of the Daily Beast website, MSNBC president Phil Griffin strained at gnats when he stated that his network “has never had an ideology” but insisted that the dominant Fox News Channel does.
“An ideology is a single thought across all programs,” he said. “We’ve never had that.” However, Griffin asserted, MSNBC instead has “a progressive sensibility,” which he claimed is not the same as an ideology. “Obviously, I hire people who fit the sensibility” because “we do stay true to facts. You have to build your argument. That's why I call it a sensibility.”
By Brad Wilmouth | January 24, 2014 | 5:33 PM EST
Appearing on Wednesday's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, MSNBC.com Executive Editor Richard Wolffe asserted that Tea Partiers want someone to "be annoying and inflammatory" in responding to President Barack Obama's State of the Union Address as the group discussed the news that Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee will give a Tea Party response to the President.
By Brad Wilmouth | January 2, 2014 | 4:59 PM EST
On Monday's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, MSNBC's Richard Wolffe mocked NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre for asserting a year ago that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," by using the example of Antoinette Tuff, who last August heroically talked a gunman in a school into surrendering.
Wolffe treated one exceptional and unlikely case as if it proved LaPierre wrong as he awarded Tuff the show's "person of the year" award. Wolffe: [See video after jump.]
By Tim Graham | December 28, 2013 | 2:24 PM EST
It's not often that liberals and conservatives can agree on something, but on Thursday night's "The Last Word" on MSNBC, host Lawrence O'Donnell agreed with us that Edward Snowden showed a very flimsy grip on reality in his "alternative Christmas message" that aired on Britain's Channel 4.
"So, here we have another Edward Snowden statement. And once again, Joy Reid, he says things, every time he speaks, every time, he will say things that are absurdly, wildly overblown." Let's stipulate that MSNBC is "leaning forward" for the Obama administration, and yet reality is reality:
By Brad Wilmouth | December 27, 2013 | 6:48 PM EST
Thursday's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC displayed a classic example of how liberals fail to grasp the basic logic of people's economic decisions or, even when they are aware of economic principles, they still find reasons to be dismissive of a predictable outcome that goes against how they wish the world would function.
As host O'Donnell convened a group to discuss an article by Carl Gibson of ReaderSupportedNews.org about why it makes more economic sense for a young, healthy person to pay a $300 fine than to spend thousands of dollars for insurance since they cannot be denied coverage for a preexisting condition later, Washington Post columnist and MSNBC analyst Ezra Klein explained how ObamaCare could result in there being "no system that is affordable to take care of" elderly and sick people.
By Rich Noyes | December 21, 2013 | 9:14 AM EST
This week, the Media Research Center announced our “Best Notable Quotables of 2013,” reviewing the worst media bias of the year, as selected by our panel of 42 expert judges.
2013 was the year that scandal after scandal — from the IRS targeting the Tea Party, to Benghazi, to the lies surrounding ObamaCare, and on and on — hit the Obama administration, but journalists kept acting as if the President and his team were clean as a whistle. So today, the results of our “Move Along, Nothing to See Here Award,” for denying Obama’s scandals. (Winning quotes and video below the jump.)
By Randy Hall | December 19, 2013 | 5:30 AM EST
As 2013 draws to a close, Fox News Channel continues to dominate cable television news programming, according to Nielsen data through Dec. 8.
In an article for Variety, Rick Kissell stated that Fox has averaged 1.774 million viewers in prime time -- down 13 percent from last year's presidential election-driven numbers -- while the Cable News Channel fell 15 percent, and MSNBC lost 29 percent.
By Scott Whitlock | December 18, 2013 | 4:24 PM EST
Far-left MSNBC anchor Lawrence O'Donnell on Tuesday spewed invective at the father of the Constitution, James Madison. Angry over Judge Richard Leon's contention that Madison would be "aghast" at the National Security Agency's spying program, O'Donnell spewed, "We do know that James Madison would be aghast at interracial marriage. We do know that James Madison would be aghast at an integrated cabinet room in the White House, first with African-American members of the cabinet and now with an African-American president presiding over that cabinet." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]
An angry O'Donnell misinterpreted the three-fifths compromise in the Constitution, sneering, "It was Madison himself who made sure that slaves were counted in the Constitution as three-fifths of a human being." In fact, abolitionist and civil rights champion Frederick Douglass framed the compromise as a check on the slave-holding south.