Political commentator and television host Roland Martin is going after NewsNation’s Dan Abrams. The two sparred the “defund the police” movement in the wake of President Joe Biden calling for the police to be funded in his State of the Union address during a segment on “Dan Abrams Live.”
Abrams displayed several tweets of Martin’s from recent weeks during the segment. One of them was a reaction to a Black transgender woman, Ju’Zema Goldring, being awarded $1.5 million by a jury after being wrongfully arrested for jaywalking and drug possession, in which he said, “Every cop should be fired.”
Another tweet cited in the interview was Martin saying, “Every cop should be prosecuted for murder,” a reply to an Al Jazeera+ story regarding the killing of Amir Locke by the Minneapolis Police Department.
The NewsNation host and Mediaite founder asked Martin about the tweets during their NewsNation interview. However, only Martin’s comments were shown when airing the tweets, not the stories that resulted in his response.
Martin could not see the exact tweets cited on-air since there was no monitor in his remote studio and appeared not to recall the context of the remarks. Martin requested Abrams for the context of the tweets he responded to, asking, “in response to what?”
“It’s not a response, it’s your tweet, it was an original tweet, it wasn’t a response to somebody else,” Abrams said.
Martin tweeted screenshots of his tweet and what was shown on-air following the show. He called for Abrams to apologize, saying that the host took his tweets out of context.
Despite the screenshots and calling for an apology, Abrams argued the meaning of his and Martin’s comments remained the same.
Abrams provided further comment on the matter to Mediaite, with the two going back and forth on Twitter.
“If Roland didn’t mean ‘every cop should be fired,’ he can say that,” Abrams said. “Of course, I wish I had had the actual tweets in hand during the segment and then would have responded to him that his words were on top of a linked story about police misconduct.
“But those words were quoted accurately and still seem unambiguous and much broader than about a single story. But I am always open to criticism, and Roland can certainly come back on the show to do so.”
Martin also had a response to Abrams’ remarks to Mediaite on Twitter.
“So Dan Abrams-owned site Mediaite has this write-up of our segment, and he CONTINUES to lie about my tweets. He is disingenuous and sounds like a Fox News host,” Martin tweeted.
Eduardo Razo is the Assistant Content Editor for BNM, which includes writing daily news stories on the news media industry. He can be found on Twitter @eddierazo_ or you can reach him by email at eddie1991razo@gmail.com.
