Lawrence O'Donnell

Lawrence O'Donnell ( 2017 )

Lawrence Francis O'Donnell Jr. (born November 7, 1951 in Boston , Massachusetts ) is an American political functionary, political commentator and television presenter.

Live and act

Youth and education

O'Donnell is the third son of Lawrence Francis O'Donnell Sr., who was a noted lawyer in New England in the 1970s and 1980s, and his wife, Frances Marie, nee Buckley. In his youth he attended St. Sebastian's School, then studied at Harvard University , which he left in 1976 with a degree in Political Science . After he had already written for the university's own satirical magazine The Harvard Lampoon during his studies , he worked as a freelance writer since the late 1970s.

Activity as a freelance author

In the 1980s, O'Donnell wrote numerous articles in non-journalistic categories such as "Style" or in the opinion sections of numerous newspapers such as the New York Times .

O'Donnell's greatest success during this period was the 1983 book Deadly Force . In this, he reconstructed a high-profile case of criminal involvement by the police in his hometown Boston, which had caused a sensation in the 1970s: In 1976, some Boston police officers had mistakenly killed an innocent man they suspected of armed robbery and then tried to confess their mistake cover up by stating false incriminating evidence on the dead person. O'Donnell's father, Lawrence O'Donnell Sr., took up the matter at the request of the widow of the man who was killed and finally managed to prove the innocence of the man and the misconduct of the detectives in court. In 1986, O'Donnell's book was filmed under the title A Case of Deadly Force by the television station CBS, with Richard Crenna playing O'Donnell's father and Tate Donovan O'Donnell.

Activity in the US Congress

In the late 1980s, O'Donnell was accepted into the staff of Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan , where he soon assumed a leading position. He was appointed Chief of Staff of the Senate's Environmental Affairs and Public Works Committee in 1992. The following year he moved to the post of Chief of Staff of the Senate Financial Committee . In this role, which he held until 1995, he was responsible for the technical development of the bills passed on the initiative of the Clinton administration during Bill Clinton's first term in office to increase various taxes, in particular income tax , which were often a major contributor to the economic boom Attributed to the Clinton Years.

From 1999 to 2006, O'Donnell worked as a writer and producer on the NBC television series The West Wing . From 1994 to 2013 he was married to actress Kathryn Harrold .

O'Donnell has worked for cable news broadcaster MSNBC since it was founded in 1996 as a political commentator and analyst. In particular, he has recently been a regular panel guest on the breakfast program Morning Joe and commentator / interview guest on the shows by Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on the station's evening program. In 2009 O'Donnell was the permanent substitute presenter of the daily prime time show Countdown with Keith Olbermann , which he presented more than twenty times in 2009 and 2010 instead of Olbermann, while he was on leave, sick or prevented.

Since September 27, 2010, O'Donnell has hosted the political news program The Last Word , which is broadcast on weekdays at 10 p.m. East Coast time on MSNBC. The title of the program alludes to the fact that, due to its airtime - it ends immediately before the start of the night program - it gives the final comment on the day's events before the viewers “go to bed”.

Politically, O'Donnell often describes himself as a “socialist” in order to differentiate himself from the American - relatively far “right” oriented - political mainstream. By European standards, he would usually be considered a moderate leftist. Through his platform as the presenter of his own political information program (“talking head” or “pundit”), O'Donnell is among other things one of the prominent and resolute opponents of the death penalty in some US states and of the American one, which is characterized by a small number of regulations Gun law emerged. In the health care sector, he advocates a “single payer” system modeled on the UK with compulsory insurance. Furthermore, O'Donnell has repeatedly called for the legalization of marijuana and the end of the so-called war on drugs , i.e. the line advocated by all US governments since the early 1970s of a rigid persecution of all drug users, even those who use comparatively harmless drugs. and the advocates of this policy have been accused of destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and continuing to destroy them by imposing longer prison sentences on harmless people for consuming soft drugs and socially stigmatizing those affected by criminal record and drastically reducing their chances of getting a job.

Fonts

• Deadly Force. The True Story of How a Badge Can Become a License to Kill , New York 1983.

Web links

• Lawrence O'Donnell in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ politico.com (English), accessed on November 21, 2012.
2. ↑ huffingtonpost.com: Lawrence O'Donnell , accessed November 21, 2012.
3. ^ Examiner.com: MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell delivers some jaw-dropping criticisms , accessed November 21, 2012.
4. ↑ 'Last Word': Lawrence O'Donnell MSNBC Show Gets Name.