Socialist MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell on Wednesday night kicked off his prime time show by snarling that competitor Fox News is “endangering your life” with Coronavirus “lies.” The Last Word host, who has himself politicized the virus, insisted that “Fox now takes the pandemic seriously.” But “the sudden switch to taking the pandemic seriously at Fox proves that Fox was lying about it deliberately for weeks and weeks when they were lying in the way they believed Donald Trump wanted them to lie.”
O’Donnell attacked, “And when they were doing that every single day they were doing that, they were endangering millions of people's lives and endangering your life because we are all in this together.”
The MSNBC host repeated the false claim that Trump called the Coronavirus a hoax, saying, “and now [the President] falsely claims he always knew it would be a pandemic even when he said it was a hoax.”
He didn’t. Even the liberal Washington Post pointed out that Trump didn’t say this. On Sunday, O’Donnell used the Coronavirus to claim that any move by the Supreme Court to strike down the Coronavirus would end up killing more people.
On March 7, MSNBC's Joy Reid said that children of Trump supporters are a threat to “your kids.” Sounds like it's MSNBC that has a problem with partisan hackery and falsehood spreading.
A partial transcript is below. Click “expand” to read more.
Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell
3/18/2020
10:02 AM ET
LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Eight senators vote against the Coronavirus Response Act. They are all Republicans. And today, the first two members of Congress to reveal that they have tested positive for covid-19 are Republican Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida and democratic Ben McAdams of Utah. Donald Trump stopped taking the pandemic lightly and now falsely claims he always knew it would be a pandemic even when he said it was a hoax. And Fox now takes the pandemic seriously. That is a very sudden switch for Fox where one Fox host said that the coronavirus hoax as the President called it was the latest attempt by the Democrats to impeach Donald Trump.
The sudden switch to taking the pandemic seriously at Fox proves that Fox was lying about it deliberately for weeks and weeks when they were lying in the way they believed Donald Trump wanted them to lie. And when they were doing that every single day they were doing that, they were endangering millions of people's lives and endangering your life because we are all in this together, this the risk pool for coronavirus. We're all in that same risk pool. With Republican Congressman Devin Nunes who is encouraging people to go to restaurants and show their public defiance of a virus this weekend. That is what Republicans and Trumpism and Foxism was. We're all in the same risk pool. As the Republican Governor of Oklahoma who proudly tweeted a picture of himself and his young children this weekend at a busy restaurant in Oklahoma where he was encouraging people to gather to gather, because he still believed Fox.
