Below are some of MSNBC’s most memorable falsehoods that have appeared on its “sacred airwaves.”
Much of the Trump presidency was plagued by the Russia collusion narrative that ultimately withered on the vine. Stemming from allegations peddled behind the scenes by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, the narrative that the Trump campaign coordinated with the Kremlin to win the election snowballed into a years-long investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose report concluded there was no evidence of a conspiracy.
But for more than two years, MSNBC became the go-to network for the anti-Trump Resistance to gobble up the Trump-Russia narrative. And no one at the network personified the media’s Russia obsession more than its biggest star, Rachel Maddow.
Like the vast majority of legacy news organizations, MSNBC was quick to dismiss the bombshell revelations of Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election as “Russian disinformation.”
“Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough declared the story “false” and later claimed it was “so obviously” Russian disinformation, asking, “Why are we spreading the lies here?”
Co-host Mika Brzezinski cited multiple reports about intelligence agencies investigating Rudy Giuliani’s dealings with “alleged Russian agents,” as well as whether emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop are “linked to a foreign intel operation.”
Notably, two MSNBC contributors, former CIA Director John Brennan and former CIA and Defense chief of staff Jeremy Bash, signed the infamous open letter from former intel officials pushing the Russian disinformation narrative, which was later promoted by a pre-MSNBC Jen Psaki on social media.
It wasn’t until May 2022 that NBC News verified the authenticity of the laptop.
MSNBC jumped on the bandwagon in automatically believing disgraced actor Jussie Smollett, who staged his own hate crime in the dead of night during Chicago’s historic polar vortex in January 2019. He alleged that two Trump supporters donning red Make America Great Again hats assaulted him and hurled racist and homophobic slurs at the “Empire” star shouting “This is MAGA country!”
It was later revealed that he had hired two Nigerian brothers to orchestrate the attack. Smollett was convicted of disorderly conduct in 2021.
But when Smollett first came forward with the hoax, an emotional Ruhle called it a “horrible story.”
“It gets worse,” Ruhle told viewers at the time. “One of the offenders wrapped a rope around Smollett’s neck.”
Another hoax from 2019 involved the smear campaign leveled at a group of students from Kentucky’s Covington Catholic High School who had visited Washington D.C. for the annual March for Life.
A video had gone viral showing one “MAGA” hat-wearing student, Nicholas Sandmann, smiling at Native American elder Nathan Phillips beating a drum and singing a chant as he was surrounded by Sandmann’s peers, who all had joined in on the chant in front of the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
During the 2020 unrest in Kenosha, Wis., following the police-involved shooting of Jacob Blake, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse fatally shot two people and injured a third person while acting in self-defense. He was later found not guilty following a dramatic trial that received national attention.
But despite what a jury concluded, MSNBC found him guilty right from the beginning.