Part of my job is to monitor CNN and MSNBC. So, 14 to 16 hours a day, wave after wave of The Stupid and The Corrupt washes over me. One benefit, though, is that after doing this for a few years, you get a sense of the rhythm of the programming and the various talking heads start to become familiar faces. Forever now, the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis (a respected conservative columnist) has been a familiar face on MSNBC, a regular guest three to five times a week on Dylan Ratigan, Morning Joe, Jansing and Co., Now with Alex Wagner… But over the last few weeks he’s disappeared from the network completely.

After MSNBC’s purging of Pat Buchanan, I wondered if something was going on and reached out to Matt via Twitter. He emailed me this afternoon:

My last appearance on the network was around Valentine’s Day (should I be offended that it took two months for you to catch on?) In all seriousness, I wouldn’t read too much into this. My experience with cable TV is that producers and networks go through phases. One month you’re hot, the next month you’re cold. And as I said on Twitter, they are under no obligation to give me (or anyone else) on their air time. I’ve been keeping quite busy with my many other endeavors.

I don’t mean any offense to Matt (we’ve never met, but we’re friendly on the Twitter-nets), but if I was blackballed by a powerful cable network and didn’t want to burn a bridge, this is the statement I would make. Regardless, Matt’s not going to complain because he’s a conservative and we don’t whine.

But Matt’s email actually sent my spidey-sense into higher gear. Valentine’s Day was over two months ago and if you remember mid-February at the Daily Caller, you remember that was Expose Media Matters for America month. In a series of damaging articles that published right around Valentine’s Day, the Daily Caller revealed the dirty dealings of that organization, including their influence on, yes, MSNBC.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but Lewis says he hasn’t been invited to MSNBC since Valentine’s Day, February 14th, and this is the exact time the Daily Caller was hitting MSNBC’s pals at MMfA with a series of exposés.

There’s also the fact that Pat Buchanan was purged from MSNBC, thanks in large part to a massive pressure campaign launched by the anti-Semitic, Soros-funded Media Matters. Moreover, Buchanan was booted off right around this exact time, as well.

So what we have here is Matt Lewis’s regular and frequent appearances on MSNBC going from 60 M.P.H to a screeching stop at a time that cannot, in my opinion, be coincidental.

The irony, of course, is that if I’m correct and Lewis is being blackballed at MSNBC, all the left-wing cable network is doing is proving the Daily Caller’s assertion correct that they’re in bed with Media Matters.

If this is indeed what’s happening, this is an even more sinister act of conservative blacklisting than what we usually see from Media Matters and their allies. In the past, Dana Loesch, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, and others have been targeted in open blacklisting  campaigns — the kind of thing one can fight back against.

But how can Matt Lewis fight back if he’s on the kind of blacklist no one will acknowledge?

Finally, this is an election year and if Media Matters or whomever is involved in some sort of underground crusade to remove the very few conservative voices heard on major cable networks like MSNBC, this is not a small deal. MSNBC has every right to have or not have on whomever they want, but let’s at least be honest about what’s going on and not cover it up.