Rachel Maddow Rebukes Own Network for Airing Trump Victory Speech: ‘Irresponsible to Broadcast’
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow took her network to task for airing less than 10 minutes of former Donald Trump’s victory speech after he racked up a slew of wins on Super Tuesday.
Trump coasted to victory in Tuesday’s primaries and is heading toward a rematch with President Joe Biden, who also won big.
Maddow has repeatedly explained why she opposed airing live Trump speeches.
“We don’t consider that necessarily newsworthy and there’s a cost to us as a news organization of knowingly broadcasting untrue things,” she said last year, likely alluding to the $787.5 million defamation settlement agreed to by Fox News with Dominion Voting Systems after that network aired false claims about Dominion rigging the 2020 election. In January, she cut away from Trump’s speech after he won the Iowa caucuses. She reiterated the same line about airing “untrue” claims.
On Tuesday, Maddow went even further by explicitly scolding her employer for airing Trump’s speech. As the former president spoke, Maddow interrupted to say it was “irresponsible” of MSNBC to air his remarks. Fellow host Stephanie Ruhle pushed back, but Maddow was implacable:
MADDOW: Yeah, ok. You know, it is, ok. I will say that it is a decision that we revisit constantly in terms of the balance between allowing somebody to knowingly lie on your air about things they’ve lied about before and you can predict they are going to lie about. And so, therefore, it is irresponsible to allow them to do that. It’s a balance between knowing that that’s irresponsible to broadcast and also knowing that as the de facto – soon to be de facto nominee of the Republican Party – this is not only the man who is likely to be the Republican candidate for president, but this is the way he’s running.
RUHLE: Well, here’s how we balance it. Why don’t we fact-check the hell out of him?
MADDOW: Yes, and we do that after the fact and that is the best remedy that we’ve got. It does not fix the fact that we broadcast it, honestly.
Ruhle pivoted away from MSNBC’s editorial decision-making and toward the contents of Trump’s speech, which cast the U.S. economy in moribund terms.
Watch above via MSNBC.
