Tuesday’s edition of Hardball on the ratings-challenged MSNBC featured host Chris Matthews bailing out Florida gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink just one day after she was caught cheating during a commercial break in a televised debate.
As most politically savvy folks have heard, candidate Sink violated the debate rules when she was shown an electronic message from a now fired aide, during a break, via a smart phone. The message contained a tip for the Ms. Sink to help her parry an attack from her competition, GOP candidate Rick Scott.
Initially it appeared as if Matthews was actually going to be “fair & balanced” when he opened up the questioning portion of the segment by asking; “Did you know the rules and did you know you were breaking them?” Great questions, right? They would have been if Alex Sink had answered them, or if the usually strident Mr. Matthews would have pretended that he was grilling some GOPer and persisted until he received an answer to these rather simple but pointed queries. But no.
Well, what happened last night was, Chris, the makeup artist (her personal makeup artists, by the way) held up her phone – I just got this message, I don’t know who it’s from… I looked at it because I’m a mom, my instinct is, my daughter’s in Europe… I don’t know who it’s from, I glanced at it… I didn’t even understand what it was… I just ignored it.
Matthews’ fantastic follow up to that dodge?
“FAIR ENOUGH.”
Fair enough? A truth-hungry journalist might press further, repeating with emphasis, his initial question – something like; Did you or did you not know you were breaking the rules of the debate? However we are not dealing with any such journalist. Jovial host Chris Matthews decided to go another direction, almost as if he knew there was not going to be an admission of guilt by Ms. Sink.
Instead of pushing for the real story, Old Tingly-legged Matthews wanted to deconstruct the illegal text message and critique it. He states; “Let’s look at the message now because the message is badly written, even in terms of messages we get on our phones. It comes from an advisory named Brian May, who you’ve dumped now apparently.” Matthews went on to evaluate the information in the rule-breaking text, by saying it was of little or no worth, “it’s not like feeding you the unemployment rate in Florida.” (So it wasn’t even good cheating? And was Florida’s unemployment info a tightly held secret?)
Again, my brain screams, WAIT! WHAAAT? You cannot be serious. But wait, there’s a bonus scoop of crazy headed your way. Chris Matthews tees it up for Sink to use the old Second Grade excuse of “he did it first!” Seriously, he posed the question:
“What would you have done if you looked up and saw Mr. Scott do exactly what you did?” Ms. Sink said, “Actually something like that did happen in the very first Univision debate. He walked into the debate with three or four pages of notes which was clearly against the agreement, and I didn’t make a big deal out of it.”
This is the point at which an MSNBC Executive Producer would probably have suggested that Ms. Sink’s opponent, Mr. Scott be invited to join the discussion and face the belated accusation. No sign of Rick Scott or fairness. But this only 3:00 into a segment that ultimately lasted 6:37, including Matthews bringing up every negative talking point he could find about Scott and then wondering about Ms. Sink’s opponent; “Why is he ahead in the polls?”
Rick Scott is ahead in the polls for the same reason that MSNBC is regularly challenging CNN for dead last in the news ratings. Because the people watching the media and the government are not afraid of the truth.
Follow-up: Today on his program, Mr. Matthews was caught with his hand in the Talking Points jar, but still saw no need to point out that Alex Sink was a liar and a cheater. Perhaps it was just too obvious for him. I know it was for me.