BY CHRIS DAVISON
HRTS Board of Directors members Marc Korman of WME Entertainment, Pearlena Igbokwe of Universal Studio Group, and Andy Friendly of Andy Friendly Productions chaired the HRTS Virtual Newsmaker Luncheon – Lawrence O’Donnell: The State of the Free Press event via Zoom on October 22, 2020.
Lawrence O’Donnell, host of MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” opened the program by addressing the HRTS (transcript available HERE). Following his remarks, Emmy-winning writer, producer, and performer Larry Wilmore joined O’Donnell as Moderator of a one-on-one Q&A and then member Q&A facilitated by Korman.
WHAT THEY SAID: O’Donnell began the event by sharing his thoughts on the free press in the Age of Trump. He noted that the press are often in danger and that in terms of the safety of the free press, “we’ve seen a change in the way this country addresses it at the highest level. We had a Washington Post columnist assassinated and dismembered by the Saudi regime and the American government had nothing to say. The State Department, the Secretary of State, the President had no issue with it whatsoever.” And as a result, “what is known around the world, from every repressive regime, is that there will be no objection from Washington. If this reporter is killed, if this reporter is jailed, there will be absolutely no objection from Washington if that happens.”
The news media report facts but today things are uncertain, something that O’Donnell ascribes to the “phenomenon that Donald Trump introduced into our politics, which is this relentless form of lying that we have never seen before,” noting how it began when Trump saw “what the conventions of the news media are, especially for example the politeness conventions of the Sunday morning shows, and he exploited those wildly. And his first and major exploitation of all of this, which launched his career, was the lie about President Obama’s birth certificate.”
There has been significant change in the years since Trump’s first birther tweets in 2011, O’Donnell noted, saying that “you now have, last weekend, the most historic editorial that the New York Times has ever published since its founding. Which is a 10-page editorial editorializing not just an endorsement of Joe Biden – which is what the Times historically does, it picks a candidate and endorses the candidate. This was a condemnation of the very candidacy of Donald Trump. And it was 10 pages long, and in that, you see the New York Times has made major adjustments, gigantic adjustments to the Age of Trump. We may never see an editorial like that again, we can hope that we never see an editorial like that again.”
So what happens next? If in fact there is a Biden presidency, O’Donnell predicted that “we’re going to see another huge adjustment that has to be made by the American media,” which is “the adjustment to: How do you now cover someone who is actually going to obey the rules of civil discourse and actually isn’t going to blatantly lie?” As a result, “Washington journalism I think has to rethink itself about what fairness is and how you define fairness and how you apply fairness. And what Washington journalism’s own standard of outrage is, after the outrages of the Trump world, how do you measure outrage?”
Fighting Words
The hidden dangers of semantic infiltration. O’Donnell said that “if I could get you to use my language then I am halfway to winning the debate. An example of that is today. Today, the New York Times, not in an editorial form, in a straight reporting form, today the New York Times uses the phrase ‘court packing.’ Now, if you use the phrase ‘court packing’ in your straight reportorial journalism instead of the phrase ‘expanding the court’, you have chosen sides.”
Moderator Larry Wilmore joined in, saying “I have a question that’s been in the air since last week”, adding that people were upset by the town hall that NBC gave President Trump, and going on to ask “what is the duty of the network news in your mind, is that a proper thing the way it was done?”
O’Donnell acknowledged that many people inside NBC had an issue with the Trump town hall going head-to-head with the Biden town hall, and particularly since the event only happened since Trump had backed out of a previously-scheduled debate. The issue wasn’t so much that Trump got a town hall, but rather the timing of it. O’Donnell did however note that the Biden town hall got higher ratings.
2016
Wilmore outlined how in 2016 the media “didn’t know how to cover Trump at all, I remember that the Republican primaries were a mess, and I wanted to get your take: Do you think Trump was a media creation during that time or do you think he manipulated the media?” O’Donnell said that it is both, that Trump was a media creation by NBC, which created a fictional version of him on THE APPRENTICE. He added that NBC executives were looking to fill an hour with a reality show and no one knew that they were creating a monster, that it was totally innocent.
Objectivity
As for being fair and balanced, Wilmore asked “should news organizations continue to say they are objective? What’s wrong with them saying that they are biased?” O’Donnell said that being objective is an ideal, one that news organizations should strive toward, but they should not try and claim it. He went on to note that he values op-ed pieces every bit as much as front-page news.
And what of both sides, asked Wilmore in follow-up, do we need to hear both sides or should we hear the truth? O’Donnell said that there used to be a lot of issues where both sides were discussed, such as the death penalty. And there used to be a fundamental ‘both sides’ to government, where Democrats had more confidence in government and Republicans had less, and they could have reasonable discussions with each other. O’Donnell noted that times have changed, that the discussions today are more about angry people thinking that’s there something wrong with the way that other people think.
Event video is available now on the HRTS Channel.