On MSNBC, Angelo Carusone explains how the media privileges the Trump campaign’s misinformation “in an attempt to inoculate themselves from cries of bias”
Carusone: “If they have not adapted yet to sort of be the vanguard, they can at least be the laggard by covering the effective work that the campaign is doing and because they can't ignore it”
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From the August 9, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Throughout Donald Trump's time in our politics, there has been an added responsibility, a burden really, placed on anyone opposing him and everyone covering him. The responsibility to fact check the barrage of lies he spews at an alarmingly high and growing rate. Trump lies about things big and important and small and meaningless.
The size of his crowds, the results of the 2020 presidential election, immigration statistics, COVID statistics, economic indicators, the fact that Mexico would pay for his wall, his knowledge or familiarity with Project 2025, crime rates, and what actually happened on January 6th. You get the picture. The Washington Post counted that Trump lied more than 30,000 times while he was president, and the rate of those lies, as we said, increased as the years went on.
Trump's lying has, of course, continued since he's been out of office, defeated by Joe Biden. At the debate against President Joe Biden in late June, he lied more than 30 times in 90 minutes, and it was barely mentioned in the coverage that ensued.
And there was yesterday's incoherent, rambling, nonsensical, grievance-filled press conference yesterday at Mar-a-Lago that garnered wall to wall media coverage. In it, Trump uttered more and more lies, including the outrageous false claim that more people attended his January 6th insurrection in Washington DC than were at Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.
He said that. Our network fact-checked him immediately, which is no easy feat, considering the shear volume of lies. And very soon after, the networks did their fact-checking, came the fact-check to end all fact-checks from the Harris Walz campaign. A thorough, itemized, pithy takedown, not just with the facts, but with the evidence and the receipts and a bit of cleverness and humor, an epic and important trolling of the ex-president that we can only assume made his blood boil.
The list the Harris Walz campaign provided, we read most of it on the air, was 31 fact-checks. It was important for a lot of reasons, not just because it got the truth out immediately, but it's a really important and healthy display of this campaign's competence and strategy for the next 88 days. Be quick, be straightforward, be accurate, mix in a little bit of humor, and wouldn't hurt to be a little sharp-edged while you do it.
They called it, "Donald Trump's Very Good, Very Normal Press Conference" and proceeded to say things like this: "We work to pin down reality so Donald Trump, bless his heart, doesn't have to."
Here are a few of their fact-checks again: "People have spoken to bigger crowds than Donald Trump, Obama, Clinton, literally anyone at Lollapalooza, Coachella, or the World Cup. Trump said they have commercials at a level no one else does. He's being drastically outspent on the airways. Governor Josh Shapiro is actually a great guy. Trump said he was not complaining. He, in fact, very much was. Trump does not know the difference between asylum seekers and an insane asylum. After-birth abortion does not exist. Minnesota and Virginia are not the same. There are no polls that say Donald Trump is going to win in a landslide."
This afternoon, the campaign pushed their fact checking endeavors even further, putting out a second press release on what they called "Trump's Temper Tantrum." This time, with many visuals and many quotes from publications further correcting and pushing back against his copious lies.
As we take stock of that powerful display by the Harris Walz campaign, begs a question, has Trump finally met his match as a liar? Questions where we start the hour with some of our favorite experts and friends.
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Angelo, my colleague, Lawrence O'Donnell, did so -- let me just show you what he did. Did something rather extraordinary on his broadcast last night. Let me play a little bit of it.
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I play that because Harris actually did answer questions yesterday. She walked to the press before she got on the plane. She answered all of their questions. I don't think they were shouting at her, when she walked away. And, I don't know that everyone even sitting in her live events.
We were, because we heard they were -- they were happening when we were on the air. But just explain to me, in any way you want to, anecdotal, systemic, why the press is still struggling with how to cover Donald Trump?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): I mean, in part, I think, at the few reasons. One, I think in part it ties in with what Anne was talking about before that this is what happens when you're confronted with this avalanche of lies. You just, you flood the zone, and then they drown. They haven't adapted, and that in some ways is a failure of the industry to sort of figure out a new approach that is professional but is also responsive to that moment.
There's also another part that's just basic muscle memory, which is that I think it's worth keeping in mind that this is the first election in 30 years, first election in 30 years, where Rush Limbaugh is not the single largest get out the vote operation. And by that, I'm not I mean -- I'm using that as an illustration to point out the fact that we've been dealing with, for decades, a massive right-wing media echo chamber that has not just been an amplifier of lies and false narratives and misinformation, but has also repeatedly beaten up the press such that they, in an attempt to inoculate themselves from cries of bias, have actually started to privilege all kinds of misinformation, false narratives, and worse, have sort of adopted a double standard as a matter of course.
And, you know, there's all kinds of examples of that. I mean, in the weeks after Donald Trump became the presumptive nominee, he didn't do any sit down interviews except for one with Fox. You know, he sat with Fox. But he didn't do a real interview with a reporter. There wasn't any clamoring in the press asking why he wasn't doing interviews. Yet, there have been clamoring this weekend, attacks and criticisms of Harris that somehow she's not doing something from major publications by not sitting down for an interview. That's a double standard.
Or how about back in May when Donald Trump made it, you know, reportedly made an offer to oil executives to spend a billion dollars on ads and in exchange he would roll back a whole bunch of environmental policies. The only network, national network, that covered that was MSNBC.
And then if you look on social media, every single major news channel and news operation that week on their social media channels cover the fact that that Vice President Harris said the "f word," but not a single one of them talked about that deal and that report about Donald Trump. So, I think that's really what's going on here.
It's the -- they're confused and disoriented, and there's also some muscle memory here that has been built up over decades.
WALLACE: The asymmetry, Angelo, has been, I think, the biggest dynamic that has aided Donald Trump. And I remember talking about it on The Today Show in the 2015 Republican primary. The asymmetry, and I think it was Mitt Romney who wrote it up and called on Trump to release his taxes. Maybe that was in the beginning of 2016. But, this -- the double standard that the press either accepted or didn't know how to sort of find the strength to push back and require the same standard for Trump as everybody else.
Do you see any signs? I see signs in this fact-check that happened yesterday, that the Harris campaign, it may be, the first institution to try to push back against that asymmetry.
Do you see any signs that make you think maybe this gig is up for Trump?
CARUSONE: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, usually when we talk, it's always about something sort of a little bit depressing and unsettling, but this a green shoot. This is a positive thing, and it's real. I mean, this is a real positive thing because one of the things that the right-wing has is that their audience has baked in this amplification imperative.
So, not only do their people lie, but then they reflexively, they'll go ahead and repeat that. They amplify it. They saturate it. And then you have the media that's not playing this referee. What the Harris campaign has done, really effectively so far, is they understand that these packages are not only for news outlets.
They're also for their audience, their people who then go and can take that content and amplify it. They want to amplify it. It's designed in a way to actually empower individuals to share it to others. It's fun to share, not just to stick it to them because it's actually truth. And this is -- you know, there's that famous saying about how, you know, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on. And the only way to sort of counteract that asymmetry is that they -- because lying is a cheat code. It is an advantage, is to actually do this not only because it allows our people to spread it, but it actually then generates a backward effect on actual traditional news outlets. If they have not adapted yet to sort of be the vanguard, they can at least be the laggard by covering the effective work that the campaign is doing and because they can't ignore it because their people are helping saturate it.
So, I think it's a really positive thing.