Lawrence O’Donnell Gets Snippy After Previous MSNBC Show Overruns By 1 Minute
Lawrence O’Donnell was not happy about his showing being delayed by a minute on Wednesday night (August 28) and let his MSNBC colleague Ayman Mohyeldin know about it.
O’Donnell, who hosts The Last Word at 10 pm ET, was kept waiting after Mohyeldin went a little overtime on his final segment. As reported by Mediaite, Mohyeldin wrapped up his final interview with his guest at around 10:01 before tossing to O’Donnell.
“Good evening, Ayman, thanks. We’re about a minute over time with that one. Thank you,” O’Donnell said. While the long-time news anchor was smiling, there was certainly an air of awkwardness in the exchange.
“Sorry about that,” Mohyeldin replied before the camera cut to O’Donnell, who began his show.
Fans reacted to the icy segment, with one X user writing, “I saw that. Lawrence will get over it. His show did just fine in fact. Besides, I would have been pissed if that last segment was cut off short. I was interested.”
Another added, “Lawrence sounds like a genuine a**hole.”
“I think Lawrence O’Donnell is superb. I watch his show practically every night. So I felt a little discomfort when he publicly criticized the previous MSNBC host last night for running his own hour-long broadcast a minute into O’Donnell’s time slot. Please — mistakes happen,” said another.
As some viewers pointed out, O’Donnell regularly shares conversations and banter with Rachel Maddow during the live toss, so they felt it was harsh that he was so curt with Mohyeldin.
“It shows what Lawrence thinks of his colleague: Rachel can hang out on air for 10 minutes into his show. Ayman’s guest- who just so happened to be passionately pleading for humanitarian aid… Lawrence forces Ayman to nervously say “sorry” on air. I wonder why that is,” wrote one fan.
“Complete punk move by @Lawrence. @maddow goes five minutes into his show and he doesn’t say a word, but when @AymanM goes one minute into O’Donnell’s show Lawrence decides to go all Real Housewives on him,” added another.
O’Donnell recently grabbed attention when he ranted on air against MSNBC and other networks for their coverage of former president Donald Trump‘s press conference on August 8. He blasted the networks for airing Trump’s speech without fact-checking his lies.
“It would be hard to find a sentence in what Donald Trump said today that did not include at least one lie,” O’Donnell said. “Some of the networks tried to play catchup with fact-checking after Donald Trump finished speaking, but that, of course, is way too late and utterly useless. No network even attempted to fact-check every lie Donald Trump told.”
He also complained about MSNBC not airing Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech live. “This network brought you the last few minutes of Kamala Harris’ speech live, but was actually doing Olympics coverage when the speech began and kept doing it,” he stated.
The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Weeknights, 10/9c, MSNBC