Lawrence O'Donnell tore apart Rolling Stone Wednesday night for its coverage of Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The MSNBC host was expecting author Janet Reitman to appear on his show, but according to O'Donnell, Rolling Stone "is running scared" after the backlash and pulled her.
Many believe the controversial Rolling Stone cover glamorizes Tsarnaev, and some stores have refused to sell the magazine.
Beyond the cover, O'Donnell ripped into the article itself, saying that it does not live up to its promise of revealing "how a popular, promising student was failed by his family, fell into radical Islam and became a monster."
Instead, he argues, "It spends most of its time in romantic reminiscence of what a great kid Jahar was, as described by many of his friends. Now, I talked to many of those kids myself on the streets of Cambridge, and I found them -- as the article does -- completely mystified about how their nice guy friend could possibly have been involved with the bombing. I, therefore, found them ultimately rather uninteresting people to talk to once that point was made."
O'Donnell adds that the friends "offered absolutely no insight into how their friend could have become a terrorist bomber and they offer no such insight in the article."
He later suggests there were holes in the coverage of Jahar's relationship with girls, concluding "we never discover anything in the article that we didn't already know."
In response to the cover backlash, Rolling Stone issued a statement expressing their condolences for the bombing victims while defending their decision to run the suspected bomber's image:
Our hearts go out to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, and our thoughts are always with them and their families. The cover story we are publishing this week falls within the traditions of journalism and Rolling Stone's long-standing commitment to serious and thoughtful coverage of the most important political and cultural issues of our day. The fact that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is young, and in the same age group as many of our readers, makes it all the more important for us to examine the complexities of this issue and gain a more complete understanding of how a tragedy like this happens.
This is not the first time that O'Donnell has been enraged by people's actions after the bombings. In May, he criticized NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre for "exploiting" the bombings.