Before I give you the downpayment on the bridge, can you provide an example of when Morning Joe, Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O'Donnell obviously and knowingly lied? You can say that they spend a lot of time bashing Trump and the GOP, but that's not the same as lying about Trump. On the other hand, Fox News kept pushing the Big Lie and bringing on guests such as the pillow guy when they knew that the election was not rigged. They intentionally deceived their audience, and all for propping up their ratings, as their own communications show.
I think generally MSNBC’s biggest issue in recent memory is how far they went with the claims of Russian influence in the 2016 election. You would have thought Russia determined the outcome of the election through social media manipulation and that Trump was a Manchurian candidate.
What is true is that Russia did try to meddle in the election. They were successful in hacking Podesta’s email- to which MSNBC responded with a campaign saying the WikiLeaks dump not only could contain fabricated material, but was in fact “obviously” fake despite not having evidence to suggest that- same strategy used with the H. Biden laptop. Trump did publicly ask Russia to ask Hillary and whatever happened with the whole alleged Trump tower meeting situation- but I don’t think there was some intimate relationship as MSNBC and particularly Maddow entertained. And while Russia tried to influence social media, it has been found many times over not to have had anything remotely touching a significant impact. Manafort was receiving information from a Russian spy,
And if you look into what voting statisticians and experts (ie Nate Silver) consider to be the determining factor in the 2016 election, it’s James Comey and her server scandal. Clinton seems to agree with this as well (though she’s also blamed everyone and everything).
She also ran with the Steele Dossier despite it originally being known to the intelligence agencies as fabricated and to the media as well. I’m assuming she never reported on the extensive sanctions Trump placed on Russia or that Trump approved military aide to Ukraine.
I think what happened with Maddow in particular was not necessarily conventional lying, but reporting based on some legitimate facts, but ignoring pertinent information and bolstering with circumstantial or low quality information and speculation and opinion and presenting her conclusion as indisputably factual when the evidence was not there to support it. And then when finally there is strongly conclusive evidence against the narrative she has created, she does not accept it and does not report it.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Trump is squeaky clean and soliciting dirt from Russia is disgusting, but the degree to which any conspiracy took place and direct intimate collusion occurred is nowhere near what Maddow and others implied in their reporting.
And don’t get me wrong, Maddow has done some very good, very thorough reporting in her career, especially touching topics not often ignored. But in this case she went too far. And AFAIK she never made a statement correcting the story. It’s also worth mentioning this is not a unique phenomenon to MSNBC. Take the Obama birth certificate nonsense for instance.
I think the Kyle Rittenhouse coverage was dramatically misreported by much of the left leaning media too. There was an awful lot of ignoring of evidence, ignoring of laws on the books, and ascribing of motives despite not having supporting evidence- to the point where many people thought he had shot black people. That said the right wing media often ignored any culpability he may have had for putting himself in that situation. For both sides of the media, the circumstances weren’t relevant to the story, the story was almost entirely a commentary on gun rights and playing up themes of either white conservative racism/oppression or BLM/Antifa/liberal violence.
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