MSNBC star Lawrence O’Donnell tore into CNN and its corporate leadership for prominently featuring Scott Jennings on the air, calling the network “absurdly deranged” for employing a “rabid, lying Trump supporter.”
O’Donnell’s tirade against the rival cable news network comes as CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, is being targeted for a takeover by Paramount chief David Ellison, a bid that is largely bankrolled by his Trump-backing ultra-wealthy father Larry Ellison. Meanwhile, it has been reported that Donald Trump has all but approved Paramount’s merger proposal with WBD, despite no deal yet being reached.
During Monday’s broadcast of his primetime MSNBC (soon to be MS NOW) show, O’Donnell grumbled about media moguls looking to grow “richer” through massive corporate mergers, which he said showed how “they never cared about the news.” He then took aim at the corporate parents of CBS News and ABC News for settling “frivolous lawsuits” with the president.
“They might all be doing this because they fear Donald Trump’s interference with the next merger they want to engage in. But it wasn’t always that way,” O’Donnell huffed. “It used to be that Republican administrations allowed just about any corporate merger to go through as part of their so-called pro-business spirit. It turns out that was all a lie. They don’t believe in anything.”
The liberal host went on to accuse corporations of being afraid of taking the president and his administration to court, instead insisting that they are merely looking to placate Trump in order to win his approval.
“These greedy, cowardly corporate executives and billionaires of today don’t want to wait 204 days to get richer,” O’Donnell declared. “Not when the payoffs of the mergers could come immediately, just by paying off Donald Trump.”
This brought him to CNN, which he said was currently “owned by a right-wing Trump supporter,” seemingly referencing WBD shareholder John Malone. Claiming that the network has “compromised itself accordingly,” O’Donnell referenced the recent departure of anchor Jim Acosta as proof of CNN’s conservative shift under chief executive Mark Thompson.
“And everyone who remains has become much more careful in anything they might even think of saying about Donald Trump,” he stated before directly invoking Jennings. “And now CNN eagerly pays a Trump supporter to lie on CNN every day and night for Donald Trump.”
Claiming CNN “regularly paid Trump supporters to lie” about the president during the first Trump administration, O’Donnell added that the “CNN regime then realized that was a mistake” and stopped doing it. However, according to the MSNBC star, Thompson decided to bring back the MAGA defenders when he took over CNN three years ago.
“[Thompson] thinks paying Scott Jennings to lie about Donald Trump is money very well spent. Scott Jennings, who used to be an aide to Senator Mitch McConnell, was not always a rabid, lying Trump supporter,” O’Donnell exclaimed. “When he first started appearing on television, he was capable of criticizing some of the more extreme Trump positions, but Scott Jennings figured out where the money is and how he could get his own podcast and decided to become the ‘JD Vance of CNN.’”
Pointing to a recent interview that Thompson gave to Mediaite, O’Donnell accused the “lost in America Englishman” of saying the “single goofiest thing ever said by anyone in charge of CNN,” which featured Thompson directly comparing Jennings to one of the Three Musketeers.
“Scott’s like D’Artagnan, he’s got his sword out and he’s got about four Democrats against him, but he spiked them all off. That’s much more like it, I think. He’s a worthy opponent, as it were, for the Democrats in the room,” Thompson said earlier this month. “And it makes for not just good television, but also for in some ways, a slightly deeper testing of the ideas all the way around that table.”
Taking particular offense at Thompson’s claim that Jennings makes for “good television,” the MSNBC host noted that the right-wing pundit is prominently featured on CNN Newsight – which airs opposite O’Donnell’s show.
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“Good television? Here’s how bad that television is that they make over there. The show that Scott Jennings frequents the most is on opposite this program. And that show on a good night gets half of the audience of this show,” the Last Word host said.
“This program usually has an audience triple the size of the terrible, terrible television that Scott Jennings is delivering on the absurdly degraded version of CNN, presided over by the man who thinks lying for Donald Trump on TV is an honorable pursuit and should be paid for by CNN,” he concluded. “Scott’s like D’Artagnan, he says.”
While Ellison is currently looking to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery and potentially merge CNN with CBS News, Jennings recently visited with new CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, the “anti-woke” founder of The Free Press. Jennings’ meeting with Weiss comes as she is actively pursuing Bret Baier to anchor the network’s evening broadcast, though it is highly unlikely she will succeed in poaching the Fox News star.
Meanwhile, Ellison isn’t the only suitor looking to take over WBD. Comcast, the corporate parent of MSNBC – at least until the Versant spinoff is complete later this year – has expressed interest in purchasing all or parts of the media giant.
While the president has long railed against Comcast chairman Brian Roberts, calling him a “lowlife” while describing the company as “Concast,” the NBCUniversal owner recently ponied up cash to fund Trump’s East Wing demolition and new ballroom. That move has left many of the company’s journalists disgusted and mortified.
On top of that, one top media analyst has suggested that in order for Roberts to convince the president to approve a merger between Comcast and WBD, he should agree to install Erika Kirk – the widow of slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk – as the editor-in-chief of NBC News, MSNBC and CNN.
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