Chris Matthews strayed from the liberal talking points today. But don’t worry, it only happened for a little while. Two hours, in fact, before he was back to his old self, lashing out irrationally at conservatives. We’re not sure where Matthews’ original bout of intellectual honesty came from, but we’re pretty sure that some sort of JournoListy Intervention occurred to get him back on message.
For those of you who don’t know (and according to the latest ratings, that’s most of you), Matthews does a 5pm “Hardball” on MSNBC that repeats at 7pm. Today, during the 5pm hour, Matthews had as his guests hardcore leftists Joan Walsh of Salon.com and former Governor Howard Dean. The issue at hand was Shirley Sherrod’s promise to sue Andrew Breitbart. Well, that wasn’t the real issue at hand. The idea was to beat holy hell out of Breitbart, but things didn’t exactly go according to the JournoListy Playbook.
Believe it or not, Matthews defended Breitbart.
In the early part of the 5pm segment with Walsh and Dean, there appears to be some confusion over whether or not Matthews was aware of the fact that Breitbart posted two excerpts of Sherrod’s speech as opposed to the whole 35-plus minutes. But later in the segment — and this is important — after this discrepancy is cleared up and the full excerpt in question has been aired for Matthews and the “Hardball” audience (this, according to Newsbusters), a fully informed Matthews still defends Breitbart making the crucial and oft-ignored point that…
Well, there you go. [Quoting Ms. Sherrod] “I opened my eyes. I realized it wasn’t about black and white. It was, but it was about other things, about poverty.” So, Joan, that part, that part in there about redemptive revelation was actually in the initial tape.
Watch this part of the exchange below, and remember that this occurs after Matthews has seen the full excerpt in question. Whatever confusion there might have been earlier, is completely cleared up by this time:
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Well, obviously this couldn’t have sat well with the left-wing Journolistas who are now in full Destroy Breitbart mode and therefore in no mood for independent thinkers not fully on board with today’s talking points.
So rather than accept the fact that a fully informed Matthews was still intellectually honest enough to make the point that the rest of the MSM is willfully ignoring — that Ms. Sherrod’s redemptive revelation was not cut from the excerpted video — something inexplicable happened between the 5pm and 7pm broadcast, and it’s not crazy to speculate that this something was probably a whole lot of angry phone calls, a flood of scathing emails, and a producer meeting or two that included any and all variations of the word apostate.
An international story that’s grabbed thousands of headlines over the last week, and Matthews did a 180… between shows? Someone got to him. The MSNBC Thought Police? The JournoList Thought Police? (Did I just repeat myself?)
What else could it have been? Something happened. Something so effectively transforming that it spun Matthews completely around enough that sometime before the 7pm “Hardball” rerun was set to air, he magically decided he wanted a redo. And so for what might have been the first time in the show’s history, Matthews re-taped an entirely new program for the 7pm hour — a program that would allow him to make up for his short but near fatal bout of intellectual honesty and put him safely back in line and on the record with his left-wing pals. See for yourself…
Remember, the video above represents Matthews’ 5pm opinion of the Sherrod excerpt Breitbart posted. The video below represents Matthews’ 7pm opinion of that very same excerpt:
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What a difference a couple of hours makes! And oh, yes, Joan Walsh was much, much happier with this Chris Matthews. And so was Mediaite. I’m sure a big teddy bear bouquet from Media Matters is already on the way.
As you can see from the 7pm clip, Governor Dean wasn’t able to return for the magic redo, so another hardcore left-winger, Politico “reporter” Ken Vogel, was brought in to complete the left-wing echo chamber.
My favorite part of Vogel’s reportering analysis is his having to finally face the unhappy fact that Ms. Sherrod’s redemptive moment was indeed included in the Breitbart excerpt. Grief-stricken that this fact is now out there for the world to see, Mr. Vogel enters the first stage of grief — denial — and writes this inconvenient fact off as a mistake, as though Breitbart would’ve removed the moment of redemption if only he had seen it.
Well, the one person who removed that moment of redemption was Vogel himself when he declined to mention its existence in this Politico piece (co-authored with Keach Hagey) from the 22nd:
[Breitbart posted] a video misleadingly edited to make it appear that a black Agriculture Department employee named Shirley Sherrod was boasting of discriminating against a white farmer.
Big Government’s Mike Flynn addressed this wildly incorrect statement later that very same day:
At the very end of one of the video excerpt’s, Ms. Sherrod begins to explain how she later realized her initial discrimination of the white farmer was wrong. In Andrew’s article about the speech he noted
Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help.
If we were trying to show that Ms. Sherrod was “boasting” of discrimination and were prone to editing the tape as evidence, wouldn’t we have cut that part out?
And yet this “journalist” has yet to correct the record.
Or should I call him a “JournoListo“?