MSNBC's Joe Scarborough bashed his own network for carrying President Donald Trump's daily coronavirus briefings without real-time fact checks.
The "Morning Joe" host worked himself into a shouting rant against MSNBC and other cable news networks that broadcast the president's news conferences without correcting the false claims until the briefings are over.
"The president lies so much in these press conferences, I still for the life of me don't understand why the networks, including our own, allow Donald Trump to lie for two hours to the American people," Scarborough said. "If he were giving good information, that would be one thing, but it is a lie. So if this network or CNN or Fox is going to run him lying for two hours a night, they need a real-time fact checker."
"I think some of the networks are figuring this out and adapting," he continued. "I know we come out of it and our anchor, whoever it is that day, runs down a list of what the president just said and sort of debunks if it needs debunking those facts. So there is some evolution there, I think that's a good thing."
But that's just not good enough, he said.
"We don't need glibness when we come out of a press conference with the president, 'Oh my god, he said this,'" Scarborough said. "They get distracted sometimes. I'm not just talking about our network, all the networks, they get distracted by the ground noise — can you believe the president said this? Can you believe he tweeted that? No. Get the facts, get his quotes, get the death toll, get the people in his administration that warning him from early January, put up his words, not your words."
"We don't care what you have to say, we don't care about your editorializing in April," Scarborough continued, his voice rising. "Get his quotes, get his words! Get his statements! Get the fact that he's trying to stop Americans from voting in the election by mail, and then get when the president says, 'Yeah, I voted by mail because I'm allowed to do it but you're not! Right now but these can't continue unless they have a serious fact checker that cuts in while the president is lying to the American people!"
"If he gives facts, great, I'm all for it," he concluded. "I said from the beginning of this we're all in this together. I said from the beginning, I want the president to succeed because when he succeeds, we succeed and Americans don't die! But he's not succeeding, he's not trying to succeed. In fact, he's spreading disinformation, he's trying to cover up all the mistakes he's made over the past two months instead of looking forward trying to save senior citizens lives in Florida and Arizona and Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Ohio and North Carolina, and all these states he actually gives a damn about."
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