Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Lawrence O’Donnell, right up there with the most shameless Axis media hacks in captivity even compared to the rest of MSNBC, usually goes his merry way slamming Republicans, conservatives and President Trump, avoiding inconvenient facts, objectivity and balance at all costs, appealing only to American who don’t want news or fair analysis, just confirmation of their own world view. When people decry the harsh division in American society today, O’Donnell is one of the prime villains, in part because he has been championing “advocacy journalism” ( as in unethical journalism) for so long.

Here’s his Ethics Alarms dossier. The last time I bothered to mention him at all (he’s always biased and unethical: The Julie Principle applies), was last year when I elevated him from mere Unethical Broadcast Journalist to Ethics Corrupter. Yes, I defended O’Donnell once…for being caught on video screaming at the MSNBC staff and shouting “fuck” among other epithets. I don’t think anyone’s most embarrassing private moments should be made “viral.”

However, this time attention should be paid, as Willy Loman’s widow says at the end of “Death of a Salesman.” O’Donnell snapped on the air yesterday and began denigrating Scott Jennings, the articulate, restrained token conservative and Donald Trump advocate on CNN’s on-air team. Jennings does a superb job vivisecting the usually emotional, knee-jerk, woke Trump-Deranged fury that he encounters on the various panels and in the numerous discussions he participates in, providing a much-needed counterpoint on CNN, which has evolved into MSNBC lite: reliably unethically biased, but with occasional outbreaks of non-partisan reality.

For some reason a sole voice of non-Axis perspective on a rival network is deeply offensive to O’Donnell. How dare Jennings defend President Trump? How dare he undermine the perpetual efforts of the news media to destroy him and defeat his policies? The Unethical Rant of 2025 was the result. Here is the whole amazing thing:

“And now CNN eagerly pays a Trump supporter to lie on CNN every day and night for Donald Trump. CNN did this during the first Trump presidential campaign and presidency. CNN regularly paid Trump supporters to lie about Trump on CNN. But then CNN got a new head. 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. Scott Jennings, who used to be an aide to Senator Mitch McConnell, was not always a rabid, lying Trump supporter. 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 J.D. Vance of CNN. 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 – 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.”

Yikes. The fascinating part is that Jennings provides analysis and opinion, backing them up with facts, and if he ever has deliberately misled or used false facts, I sure haven’t witnessed it. He does his job, which is to provide a counterweight to the otherwise progressive/Democratic Party-supporting CNN news commentary, does it well, and does it ethically.

Ironically, O’Donnell’s freakout stooped to one of Donald Trump’s favorite and most juvenile go-to delusions: Jennings is inferior because his appearances don’t get as high ratings as O’Donnell’s, as if popularity measures merit.

O’Donnell, unlike Jennings, twists facts into pretzels to fit his favorite anti-Trump narrative. Here’s how I decided he was an ethics corrupter, an apt example because commenter jdkazoo and I have been exchanging comments about Trump’s disgraced and disbarred fixer, Michael Cohen. During last year’s “hush money” trial in which Cohen testified against Trump, I wrote,

“I am shocked at the degraded character and shame-free embrace of ethical relativism O’Donnell displayed yesterday.

“The big news coming out of the “Get Trump!” fiasco in Manhattan was that the prosecution’s star witness Michael Cohen, already a disbarred lawyer and a convicted perjurer, further enhanced his credibility by admitting that he had stolen $30,000 from his employer and client, Donald Trump. Here is how O’Donnell described it:

‘It did not really sound like stealing $30,000. It sounded a lot like Michael Cohen doing the little that he could within that calculation to rebalance the bonus he thought he deserved, and it still came out as less than the bonus he thought he deserved and the bonus he had gotten the year before.’

“Nice. This statement, in a sane world and on any responsible news network, would instantly disqualify the speaker from ever being taken seriously again.”

As indeed it should have, but O’Donnell’s latest is a helpful reminder of what an unethical hack he is. And this time, it may do the trick. MSNBC has been bought by Comcast, and a re-branding begins on November 15. If I were in charge, O’Donnell wouldn’t be the first biased hack on my hit list: that would be Al Sharpton. Symone Sanders-Townsend would probably be next, then O’Donnell. He may have snapped because he sees the proverbial writing on the wall.