Samantha Bee: Why journalists are failing to call out Donald Trump on his lies

TBS's "Full Frontal" returned from its five-week hiatus on Monday and host Samantha Bee readily launched into ripping Matt Lauer for his performance during last week's "Commander-in-Chief Forum" with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

She summed up Lauer's qualifications for the forum with: "Its moderator was a man whose crack journalism skills include getting up early and asking tough questions about recipes."

After mocking Lauer's performance for the better part of four minutes, Bee really settled on the core issue concerning journalists in this election.

"The truth is Matt Lauer did a fantastic job at the meaningless campaign coverage we've come to demand from our media," she said. "At some point, networks decided that they can ask questions and the answers would just be someone else's problem."

She pointed to the lack of fact-checking in covering the election. For example, Trump said that he would've seized oil during the Iraq War. A panel of reporters and pundits wondered aloud if that would've been a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. One then suggested that viewers look up the definition of war crimes themselves.

"You heard her, average Americans," Bee said. "In your plentiful spare time, when you're not working your two jobs or not watching your screaming kids, why not spend 20 or 30 hours studying the Geneva Conventions, so you know whether or not it's okay to steal another country's oil. That's so much easier than asking reporters and moderators to do their f---ing jobs."

Yet just as Bee decided that journalists aren't preparing themselves for the issues that have come up in this presidential election, she also identified why that may be.

"The problem is news organizations are simply not equipped to cover a candidate whose entire being is a lie," she proposed, referring to Trump. "Maintaining the image of fairness requires them to portray Hillary and Trump as equally flawed candidates, even though they know that's incorrect."

Watch Bee tear apart Lauer, then explain how Trump's candidacy has handicapped journalists' ability to do their jobs below: