MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell shoots down article that attacked him and Palmer Report
Sometimes you find yourself in a strange place at a strange time. Four days ago I published a Palmer Report article laying out the circumstantial evidence which suggested Russia had orchestrated the Syrian chemical gas attack. Then MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell laid out the same premise on his show. Then today, just an hour after the Associated Press partially corroborated that premise, a Washington Post columnist suddenly accused O’Donnell and me of being conspiracy theorists. And now Lawrence O’Donnell is trashing the Washington Post article that trashed him and me.
If you’re confused, don’t worry, so am I. All I did to start this very public war of words between two corporate media figures was to publish a Palmer Report article on April 6th that had nothing to do with either of them. My article was clearly presented as an opinion piece, though I laid out quite a bit of evidence to support by theory, and I included supporting source links to all of it (ironically, one of those source links was to the Washington Post). I took it as a compliment that Lawrence O’Donnell ended up making the same case on his show, though I doubt he has time to read Palmer Report, and I’m sure his mind just happened to put the pieces together in the same way mine did.
But it wasn’t until today that the fireworks started. This afternoon the Associated Press published a report confirming that Russia knew about the Syrian chemical gas attack in advance (link), thus giving substantial corroboration to the premise that Lawrence and I had both laid out. But not so fast, because about an hour later, Washington Post opinion writer Dana Milbank decided to go on the attack.
The AP report appeared to have set off Milbank, who then quickly posted an online column today in which he ripped into Lawrence O’Donnell and Palmer Report as being mere conspiracy theorists (link). Milbank oddly took things even further, falsely labeling Palmer Report as “fake news,” and then he bizarrely included seven fake news headlines that are not from Palmer Report (we’ve sent a letter to the Washington Post demanding they clarify that the seven fake headlines in Milbank’s article are not from us). I suppose if Milbank was going to paint O’Donnell as a conspiracy theorist, then he had to falsely paint me as something even worse, to drive his phony point home.
Not surprisingly, Lawrence O’Donnell opened his MSNBC show this evening by ripping apart Milbank’s idiotic article, and then making fun of it again later in his show. And so now there’s an ongoing war of words between one of the most respected journalists on MSNBC and a strangely bitter columnist at the otherwise very respectable Washington Post. And then there’s me, inexplicably stuck in the middle of it all. The only mistake I made was having been right in the first place. If you want to read my original Palmer Report article on Syria and Russia that unintentionally started this corporate media war of words, you can find it here.
