Lawrence O’Donnell addressed the HRTS before joining Larry Wilmore for a moderated discussion. A transcript of his opening remarks follow.
Event Coverage is available HERE.
Transcription courtesy of Chris Davison
This I think is maybe my second Zoom event, my first was a high school reunion, which I have to say went much better because it was on Zoom, for a bunch of reasons.
I’m so glad that Marc mentioned those reporters who were killed doing their job and that story which for me remains the single most horrible domestic event in our recent history of the struggle of press freedom. And that so-important day after, that that paper went out the next day, that paper never, never failed to continue to deliver. And for me, that was the part of the story that had as much bravery in it as was present in that workplace the day before that terrible tragedy.
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. The only issue on the President’s mind was whether there was some kind of financial deal that we might be able to announce with Saudi Arabia involving selling arms or anything else that we might be able to announce to in effect, for him, make this go away as a story.
What worked in the White House management of that story, the only thing that worked in the White House management of that story was the attention span that is allowed to stories like this. And I think that this administration has been betting from the start that every story has a life that every story has a lifespan and we will get to the other side of the lifespan of that story, that’s been their strategy. It’s made journalism, the practice of journalism around the world, much, much, much more dangerous than it was just 4 years ago. 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.
And so that is a license now that has been granted worldwide. And as we saw the Saudis have used it more grotesquely than anyone else, but that is a clear and present danger worldwide that can only change with a change of regime. There’s nothing, nothing’s going to change in the Secretary of State.
And nothing’s going to change in the current president about any of this. So that worldwide threat has zero chance of muting or reducing in any way, as long as this administration remains in power.
I want to, as important as that is, and I’m sure we’re going to discuss it in question and answer, and I very much want to discuss it in the question and answer. And I’d like the most of this to be a discussion with you because I’m much more interested in what is on your mind than is on mine.
I get to, you know, say a few things that are on my mind every night. So I’m much more interested in hearing what other people have to say. I would like to focus on something that most of the news media doesn’t really consider and has never really considered, and has kind of struggled with without ever having a kind of organizational meeting about ‘what do we actually do about this?’ And that is the phenomenon that Donald Trump introduced into our politics, which is this relentless form of lying that we have never seen before.
Politicians used to fear getting caught lying and they used to fear getting caught changing their stories, that used to be called a flip flop. And if a politician had his name or her name and a headline with ‘flip flop,’ that was the worst thing that could happen to them. And then came Donald Trump.
And Donald 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. And as soon as he did that, the very first time that he lied about that, I went on television that night in 2011 and I called that a lie, and I called Donald Trump a liar.
Now, I had never met Donald Trump, but I knew he was a liar because I watched the way he behaved in New York and I read about the things he had to say in New York and it was pretty clear what kind of a liar this guy was. And so I went on my show and I called that a lie and called him a liar and exactly no one else did. And one reason why no one else did, and this is literally true: They did not know that you could use that word, ‘lie’. They did not know that in political coverage you could use the word lie that was not in the style manual of the New York Times or of any news organization.
And so I was the only one saying it for quite a while, I was the only one saying it for years, as a matter of fact. Because the news media didn’t know what they were encountering, they thought this was some kind of thing that was going to go away. And then when Donald Trump decided not to run for election, not to run for president in 2012 – his first threatened version of it – I think the news media just thought, ‘okay, well, we’re done with that weirdness, we don’t have to deal with that anymore.’
And they never stopped to figure it out, and Donald Trump kept talking about the birth certificate and he kept building a following by doing that, he kept building a racist following that’s attracted to that particular line of accusation about President Obama. And he built a following of people who were capable, it turns out, of believing anything. They were capable of staring at a Hawaii birth certificate and not believing that. And believing, as Donald Trump said, that he was sending detectives, private detectives, to Hawaii to check this out. And the day he said that I went on television and said he is a liar, he is not doing that, he’s not sending anyone to Hawaii. And I knew that because I knew he’s a liar, and I knew he is cheap.
And so I just asserted that without doing all the journalistic homework that’s required to say things like that on television, or had been required to say things like that on television, and then that turned out to be true, years later. Now, I was, you know, using a lot of the franchise that I get by running a show in which opinion is allowed, and so those things that I were saying fell within the realm of the opinion that is allowed to me in that particular forum. But I had to wait five years, five long years to see American journalism in the main begin to make this adjustment. And in September of 2016, long after Donald Trump was the Republican nominee for president, in what was the final weeks of the presidential campaign, in September of 2016 for the very first time, the New York Times used the word ‘lie’ in a front-page headline about Donald Trump. And the story was about Donald Trump lying about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Five years it took for the New York Times to catch up to being able to accurately describe what was going on there.
Now, the New York Times is the greatest newspaper in the world. It is, it is our best. It is imperfect like every other human institution. And so I could go on and on about the greatness of the New York Times, but it also is useful as an example of how slow the institution of journalism moves when reacting to a completely new phenomenon that defies its toolset.
And 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.
The slowness of those adjustments in a moment in history when history is moving faster than the adjustments, it has been very dangerous to the way we have been able to frame for America what’s actually been happening here, and so it’s encouraging to see where the Times is now.
I mean, I think the Times coverage, for example, of this President, is excellent and it calls a lie a lie, it is fair in every single journalistically measurable way. But we paid an enormous price, a gigantic price for the kind of astonishingly slow learning curve of the American media and figuring out what it was dealing with when it started dealing with Donald Trump at the political level.
I think we’re going to see another huge adjustment that has to be made by the American media if there is a Biden presidency, which seems increasingly likely. And that 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? And is actually going to try to discuss the issues as honestly as he possibly can, of course, trying to shade it politically in his direction as everybody does. How is that going to be done?
And how is the establishment news media going to cover the Washington opposition to a Biden/Harris administration, if there is one? For example, on Day One of the Biden/Harris administration, by the time we get to Day One, we will already have had several weeks of Republicans, elected Republicans in Washington, complaining about the budget deficit and the national debt. And they’ll be doing that for the very first time since Donald Trump was elected. And they will be looking at their flash cards from five years ago and using exactly the same talking points as five years ago.
The question for the news media is going to be: How much of that do you let them traffic in without anchoring them to the very fact that every single elected Republican in Washington voted specifically, willfully for a $2 trillion increase in the national debt when they voted for the $2 trillion in Trump tax cuts? They voted for the $2 trillion in tax cuts and debt went up two trillion to the dollar, exactly.
And the news media’s memory on these kinds of things is generally terrible, and so the question becomes: What kind of anchoring should we do with politicians – who we don’t right now – who if Biden is elected are going to completely change their story? And many of them will be changing the story about how much they supported Donald Trump or didn’t support Donald Trump. And how much do we allow them to do that? And the conventions of Washington journalism allow them to do that in a pretty unlimited way.
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? What’s an outrageous thing? In the next administration, if there is a next administration, what would qualify for outrage? I think that’s a challenge. I also think that there’s a kind of semantic infiltration that the Washington press corps is always unaware of and has to be very, very careful of.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan the Senator, I worked for the Senator from New York who was a Harvard professor and is very is famous for the line “we’re all entitled to our own opinion but we’re not entitled to our own facts.” He used to say that once or twice a year in finance committee hearings, but he’s also coined the phrase ‘semantic infiltration,’ by which he meant 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. Semantic infiltration in Washington is so constant that many reporters are not even aware of it. So they think they’re asking you a neutral question when they say ‘are you in favor of court packing?’ And so there’s a lot of that that the Washington press corps is going to have to work through in a new way.
In a way, covering the Trump administration has been the most difficult challenge they’ve ever faced. That’s kind of obvious, you can see that on the surface. In another way, it’s been the easiest thing they’ve ever had to do. You don’t have to master any policy to cover the Trump administration. You don’t have to know anything about Medicare, the tax code, you don’t have to know anything about international trade. All you have to do if you’re one of the people who gets to throw a question at Donald Trump is ask him who he is going to pardon today or ask him something about why he didn’t take hydroxychloroquine when he was in the hospital, things like that. You don’t have to do any serious homework about governing and government at all. And you don’t have to know anything to be able to ask the question within the Trump administration that will produce the video that everybody wants to use on the news that night. So it’s been the easiest, in many ways, the easiest administration they’ve ever had to cover because the outrages have been so extraordinary and endless and multiplying on top of each other.
And so there’s a way in which the Washington press corps is completely out of shape. It’s kind of like a baseball team that hasn’t played in four years, and they’re gonna have to go back to a whole different approach. And while they’re doing that, ask themselves what is the valid approach? What is the correct approach to covering this successor administration to the most corrupt, the most irrational administration that they’ve ever had to cover? And that’s a meeting that no one even knows how to organize, they don’t even know how to begin that conversation.
I would point out something that we’re going to see tonight, which I don’t think is going to be terribly effective, but it’s a very, very important thing. And that is the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has been running these things, you know, uninterrupted with every single nominee participating in them for decades upon decades until Donald Trump decided to drop out of one. They are a similarly kind of slow adjusting organization – I thought. And I thought that because they basically run these presidential debates kind of like the Catholic Mass. I mean, every one of them has been structurally identical over the years, with these little time limits and all these little rules that each side agrees to.
But after exactly one debate, one debate, this presidential debate commission – which is bipartisan, which is chaired by a former Republican Party Chairman and has former Republican senators on the commission – this debate commission after exactly one debate with Donald Trump said ‘we have to change our rules. We have to do something. We have to have an emergency meeting about how to handle what we just saw, this is completely out of control’. And they did what they could, which is to say in that first introductory two minutes of discussing a subject, each speaker will have their microphone on for those two minutes when they’re using their first two minutes, and then their microphone will be off when the other speaker is using those first two minutes. And it took them one debate to do that.
And no, it’s not going to be enough. No, it’s not going to change it completely, but they did something. They had one exposure to Donald Trump and they went into emergency mode and went to work and tried to figure out ‘what do we have to do, what’s the new guardrail we have to put here?’; and the American news media never did that.
They didn’t do it in 2011 when he started telling you that Hawaii birth certificates aren’t birth certificates. They didn’t do it in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015. Donald Trump starts running for president, the American news media didn’t have an emergency meeting and say, ‘what do we do?’ He started off at 3% in the polls, didn’t seem like you needed a meeting. I’ll never forget sitting on Morning Joe when Donald Trump went up to 12% in the polls in the Republican primary. And I said, with full authority ‘well, you don’t think he’s going to go any higher than that, do you?’ We never had the meeting. He went higher and higher in the polls, and we never had the meeting of ‘what do we do in the face of this? How do we handle this? What tools do we have that work in the face of this, what tools do we have that don’t work in the face of this? What do we have to do differently?’
Years and years went by and he got the Republican nomination, and we didn’t have the meeting. And he won the presidency and we didn’t have the meeting. We didn’t have the meeting that the Presidential Debate Commission had after exactly one encounter with Donald Trump. And so this is an ongoing challenge for the news media that we haven’t figured out. And by the way, I don’t sit here, claiming that I have figured out how to do this. I don’t sit here watching people handle Donald Trump in town halls like Savannah Guthrie did and think ‘oh, I could do a better job.’ I don’t think I could, I think this is an extremely difficult thing that we have never as a group talked about enough. There hasn’t been enough public discussion of it, and that public discussion of course would occur in the news media and it’s been the one that I think when history looks back at this period of journalism, I think it might say ‘why didn’t they ever stop and think and figure out some new approaches to how to handle this?’
[Moderator Larry Wilmore appears in split-screen]
And I’d love to discuss anything else that’s on your mind, including election night which I’ve been predicting for basically four years now of how Donald Trump can’t get re-elected. And I’ll do the shorthand version of it now and then we’ll go to Larry Wilmore to go to questions.
It’s very simple. You know, Richard Nixon won in 1968 by less than 1% of the vote and four years later, Richard Nixon won 49 states. What Richard Nixon did in the meantime, including in his victory speech – which happened the morning after Election Day because they were counting votes all night – in his victory speech Richard Nixon started reaching out to people who didn’t vote for him. And in his four years, he reached out to people who didn’t vote for him. Not the people who were extremely opposed to him, but people who are on the edges, people on the edges of our politics, on the edges of our political parties, on the edges of the Democratic Party, who he could conceivably find a way of reaching out to and getting them. And he did that. You know, Ronald Reagan won 49 states on re-election because he spent four years trying to talk to the people who didn’t vote for him, while of course talking to the people who did, while of course giving the base – as they call it – exactly what they wanted. But always trying to find moments when as a President knowing he’s going to run for re-election, he could speak to the people who didn’t vote for him. And I’ve been waiting since Donald Trump won on election night, I’ve been waiting for the day when he would speak to the people who didn’t vote for him – and he never did.
And so that’s really the only thing – I didn’t care about the policy, didn’t care what they were saying – the only thing I was watching was just, ‘show me the day when Donald Trump tries to speak to the people who didn’t vote for him because that’s who he’s going to need to win next time’; and he never did it.
So you know my prediction for election night has been the same for four years, and that’s what the polls are showing. But let’s get Larry Wilmore in here, so this can get really interesting.
Event video is available now on the HRTS Channel.