While hosting MSNBC's "The Last Word," Lawrence O’Donnell has never held back about the danger Donald Trump poses to our democracy, or how he feels about him. Several times on his broadcast, O'Donnell has referred to Trump as the stupidest person to ever run for president.

But it’s another matter entirely to scrutinize one’s industry in full view of the TV audience, which O’Donnell has done regularly. For those wondering why most campaign reporting doesn't yield much light or information, O’Donnell is a sanity check. It's because both candidates have been covered by some terrific reporters, he tells his audience, and a lot of terrible ones too.

“This is my least favorite subject,” O’Donnell told me on Friday, referring to his criticisms of his peers in journalism. “When I do it, I'm trying not to be holier than thou in every way that I can. And I fail at that a fair amount.”

“I just don't want to pretend that I'm, you know, smarter than other people about how to handle this,” he said. “I just kind of have publicly embraced and acknowledged the difficulty of doing it.”

He added, “And I try to always say there are brilliant reporters out there.”

Election night is when the coverage mission is clearer and gets easier. On Tuesday, O’Donnell will be contributing to a team led by Rachel Maddow that includes Nicolle Wallace, Ari Melber, Joy Reid, Alex Wagner, Stephanie Ruhle, Chris Hayes, and Jen Psaki, with Steve Kornacki piloting the channel’s iconic “big board” as the vote counts roll in.

Nevertheless, in the months leading up to the election he’s joined us in watching establishment media outlets make the same mistakes as they did in 2016 and 2020, including trafficking in false equivalencies, sane-washing Trump, and failing to construct useful questions for candidates and their surrogates. We can all see the stumbles. O’Donnell is simply one of the few bothering to call them out.

“It's a field that I would say lacks imagination and lacks real perception about human beings, about characters,” he said. “You know, I know many dramatists who understand Donald Trump in this moment far better than people working at newspapers and news organizations do.”

O'Donnell's career spans entertainment, journalism and politics. Before working in cable news, he was the senior advisor to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and served as the chief of staff on two Senate committees. He joined MSNBC in 1996 as a political analyst, and was a writer and executive producer for “The West Wing," which won the 2001 Emmy for best drama series. O'Donnell went on to create the TV drama “Mister Sterling” as well as playing a recurring role in HBO's “Big Love.”

He has hosted “The Last Word” since 2010 and has had a role in MSNBC's election coverage since 2000. In that time, and certainly since Trump came on the scene, he’s drawn some conclusions about what’s ailing TV news. In the final days of an election season that has felt interminable, he shared a number of them with Salon in a wide-ranging interview.

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The following interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you feel are the main reasons that the media hasn't changed the quality and insightfulness of its political coverage since 2016?

So, when I do criticize the coverage on my show, you are seeing something on the order of 1% of my dissatisfaction with the coverage . . . it's just in the most egregious moments that I just feel compelled to say something. What I don't like about it is the notion that I have somehow figured out how to cover Donald Trump. No one has. That's the problem. And the only distinction that exists........

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