Marble Composition

Sputter and Spin

The Leftest Blogotarians have started this little gem to confront Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball: Open Letter To Chris Mattews. Pretty sweet, and I admire the effort. Does anyone actually watch that show? Not really. Here's my take on it anyway (as dumped over in Digby's comments section):

This is off-topic, but I'm now convinced that Chris Matthews deliberately has commenters that skew to the right because of Keith Olbermann's show that follows directly after Hardball. Tonight he had on a reporter from the NY Daily News, Byron York from NRO, and Tony Blankley from the Washington Times. That makes one person who's supposed to be objective, and two conservatives who have no qualms about letting everyone what their opinions are. I would score that 2.5 to .05 (conservative v. liberal). This has become par for the course for Matthews. On Fridays he holds his MSNBC All Stars jag-fest and has yet, to my knowledge, had Keith on his show. We can bitch all we want about Tweety being an unplugged, sputtering shitmouth, but this really appears to be by design. As Atrios has pointed out, we can all watch for the moments when Matthews can be good, and they do occur, but his feigned ignorance to everything that goes on in Washington provides him with a ready-made cover for his supposed objectivity. He often asks questions which you, the viewer, know he knows the answers to, but he plays it off as if he's providing you with unvarnished information. This from a man that is totally connected inside the Beltway, and someone I would argue is more popular among the powerful elite than Tim Russert because Tim tends to ask those "gotcha" type questions.

Chris knows he's got Keith on the backside of his show, and was Matthews ever really interested in keeping us informed? Right, not so much. He's intersted in "staying in the game", keeping his cushy job, and making sure politics can be played at his level, i.e., who got laid at the prom?

Last I checked, Hardball pulled TV ratings that would attract .05% of the poulation. Yes, I used .05 twice in one post. No one cares, so, bite me.

posted by FuzzFinger @ 2/15/2006 08:42:00 PM