MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell unloaded on CNN CEO Mark Thompson and his network’s right-wing pundit in a brutal criticism over its coverage of President Donald Trump.
“CNN is already owned by a right-wing Trump supporter and has compromised itself accordingly,” O’Donnell told viewers Monday on his show “Last Word,” claiming that everyone who remains at the network after anchor Jim Acosta left earlier this year is “much more careful in anything they might even think of saying about” the president.
The MSNBC host went on to say the network “eagerly pays a Trump supporter to lie on CNN every day and night for Donald Trump,” claiming the network did so during his first presidential campaign.
He specifically attacked Scott Jennings, a pundit known for his conservative takes on “NewsNight with Abby Phillip.”
“The head of CNN for the last three years, hired by the Trump-supporting owner and operator of CNN, is an Englishman who thinks paying Scott Jennings to lie about Donald Trump is money very well spent,” O’Donnell said.
Jennings has been at the network since 2017, starting during the first Trump administration and working under different CEOs. Thompson, the “Englishman” O’Donnell references, was put in charge of the network in 2023.
O’Donnell lambasted Jennings, saying he “was not always a rabid, lying Trump supporter,” noting how the pundit used to criticize some of Trump’s more “extreme” positions. But he “figured out where the money is and how he could get his own podcast and decided to become the JD Vance of CNN.”
The MSNBC host told viewers the “single goofiest thing ever said by anyone in charge of CNN in that network’s history” was “the lost-in-America Englishman who heads CNN” comparing Jennings to a character in “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 told Mediate 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.”
CNN declined to comment on O’Donnell’s remarks when reached by HuffPost, but a source at the network told Mediate’s David Gilmour: “Wonder if Lawrence’s audience knew he resented immigrants this much. He may be interested to know ‘the lost-in-America Englishman’ is an American citizen.”
O’Donnell insulted CNN’s programming while boasting about his own, claiming the show “Jennings frequents the most is on opposite this program, and that show, on a good night, gets half, half of the audience of this show.”
“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,” O’Donnell concluded.
Jennings fired back at O’Donnell in a post on X, formerly Twitter, saying, “No, Lawrence, I do not have time to save your show.”