Chris Matthews

Today is the 40th annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., a day that is likely to pass with limited, if any, notice from a national news media which is hostile to the pro-life cause. While the abortion issue has divided Americans for the past four decades, journalists have consistently come down on the pro-abortion side of this debate.

It’s a bias some reporters freely admit. “I think that when abortion opponents complain about a bias in newsrooms against their cause, they’re absolutely right,” Boston Globe legal reporter Ethan Bronner told the Los Angeles Times back in 1990. “Opposing abortion, in the eyes of most journalists...is not a legitimate, civilized position in our society.”

Ah, that obsessive devotion to facts remains rigorous and unshakable.

Anchoring her network's coverage of President Obama's second inauguration, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow describes an aspect of the event that few people notice, aside from keen observers like her. (video clip after page break)

It was a metaphysical certitude that America's media were going to gush and fawn over Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's testimony before Congress Wednesday as they mercilessly attacked any Senator or Representative having the gall to ask her tough questions about what happend at our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last year.

Playing his part was MSNBC's Chris Matthews who on Hardball moments after the hearing ended said of Senator Ron Johnson's (R-Wisc.) exchange with Clinton, "That was kind of a pissant performance" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Yesterday was a historic day. Sure we had presidential inauguration but it was also perhaps the first and only day when loudmouth MSNBC host Chris Matthews actually shut his yap for a few seconds.

The cat that got Matthews’s tongue was being reminded by fellow MSNBC host Martin Bashir of his inane 2008 remark that he gets a “thrill going up my leg” when hearing Barack Obama speak. Watch below for the video.

Chris Matthews, infamous for throwing out outrageous attacks against Republicans, has chosen President Obama’s second inauguration as a perfect opportunity to slam the GOP as a party of cheaters.  Speaking with the all-liberal MSNBC inauguration panel, Matthews suggested that in future elections, the only way Republicans can win election is if they rig them in their favor. 

Matthews’ rant began when he groused that the Republican-controlled state legislature in Pennsylvania could change the way the state allocates electoral votes for president to one based on winning congressional districs rather than the present winner-takes-all model. Of course, Nebraska and Maine have similar ways of apportioning their electoral votes. In fact President Obama won one electoral vote from the Cornhusker State in 2008, but now that Republicans in a blue state are considering it,  “There's so much of this willingness to rig the election by the Republicans now.”  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]

It's been almost exactly four years since George W. Bush left the White House, yet liberal media members still can't resist taking a poke at him when the opportunity presents itself.

On Thursday's Hardball, MSNBC's Chris Matthews accused the former President of "speaking English as a second language" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Perhaps, it would be easier to ask Chris Matthews what isn't like being an old segregationist? Two weeks ago, the Hardball host compared anti-tax conservatives to "being the most segregationist guy in the south." On Thursday, Matthews suggested it was pro-Second Amendment conservatives who fit the description.

The cable anchor opened his show by blasting, "It used to be that the only way to get elected in the old Dixiecrat south was to be the farthest out there in backing segregation. Anyone who showed moderation was seen as soft." Making his comparison clear, Matthews sneered, "Well, to win in today's Republican Party, which began displacing the Dixiecrats a half century ago, you have to be the farthest out there backing guns." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, best known for constantly attacking the Republican Party and conservatives in general, made the laughable claim on Wednesday that he's a "really conservative guy." Scarborough appeared on Hardball to receive the adulation due any member of the GOP who attacks his own party. The comedy began when Matthews, who famously got a "thrill" up his leg from Barack Obama, mildly asserted, "I'm sort of somewhere over to the left."

After Matthews wondered where Scarborough was on the ideological spectrum, the Morning Joe anchor seriously asserted, "I'm a really conservative guy, especially fiscally." He then began attacking his own party, bemoaning "the extremism that has taken over my party on certain issues." Scarborough lectured, "I think I'm a very conservative guy, but I think my party has gone in a direction that's deeply disturbing to me on a lot of issues, especially [guns]."

On his January 10 program, pro-gun control Hardball host Chris Matthews was utterly perplexed at the very notion of gun shows themselves, going further than the call to close the so-called gun show loophole regarding background checks. " I'm a suburbanite city mouse. I generally have lived in urban -- suburban areas, but I don`t know why you need a gun show. I mean, if you want to buy a gun, you buy a car, you go to a dealer. Why do you have to have a show?" Matthews griped.

Well, now it turns out that Matthews's employer, NBC Universal, is actually sponsoring a massive three-day-long gun show in Las Vegas. The Washington Free Beacon's C.J. Ciaramella reported shortly after 6 p.m. Eastern on Friday:

As the gun-hating media encourage Democrats to push for tighter firearms restrictions, most of them have ignored the political realities inherent in such legislation.

That's why it was surprising to see Politico editor-in-chief John Harris say on Sunday's syndicated Chris Matthews Show, "Among the dynamics that President Obama is battling is not just the NRA’s opposition but the real nervousness among some influential Democratic consultants here in Washington who feel that he is risking the opportunity to retake the House in 2014" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The media's hatred of the Tea Party knows no bounds.

On Sunday's syndicated Chris Matthews Show, the Huffington Post's Howard Fineman said, "The Tea Party people are not here to legislate. They're here to demonstrate" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The hyperventilating over gun restrictions by the liberal media is getting absurd.

On Friday, MSNBC's David Corn appearing on Hardball actually said that conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh is "calling for John Wilkes Booth" by discussing on his program the possibility that the government in the wake of the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, might take away people's firearms (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Chris Matthews on Thursday smeared Congressman Steve King as a racist, declaring that the Republican representative is "prejudiced against Latinos." The liberal cable anchor came to the conclusion while discussing King's attempts to change the 14th Amendment to exclude so-called "anchor babies."

Matthews played a 2011 clip of the congressman asserting that illegals "sneak into the United States for...the purposes of having the baby" and then " they get the little birth certificate with their little feet prints on there." The host pounced, "And the derogatory way he talks, you got the sense he might just be prejudiced against Latinos. Just a guess. Just a guess." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] Guest Michael Steele retorted, "I know Steve well and I don't get that sense from him."

Is it the media's responsibility to worry about Barack Obama's legacy?

The Huffington Post's Howard Fineman seems to think so, and told MSNBC's Chris Matthews Thursday that gun control is "legacy material" for the President (video follows with LexisNexis transcript and commentary):

Liberal MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews and his guest lobbied for aggressive gun control on Monday. Matthews wasn't very subtle when he interrupted Joy Reid of the Grio.com to wonder, "You mean kill these gun shows? I'd love to see that."

Lamenting the existence of part of the Bill of Rights, Matthews ranted, "We've got a Second Amendment. I don't know what other country has anything like the Second Amendment but we darn well have it." The host continued, "How do we live with it and also live through it?"

On New Year's Eve, Chris Matthews got off one last sneering shot against conservatives. In a special 2012 retrospective, the Hardball anchor connected fiscal conservatism to segregation. After guest Howard Fineman insisted that Mitt Romney's aversion to tax increases during the primary doomed him in the general election, Matthews snorted, "It's today's politics! It's like, they used to say, you have to be the most segregationist guy in the south." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

He continued, "You can never be an inch away from it because somebody would always go to your right on that issue." Go to the "right?" Perhaps the history-challenged Matthews is unaware that segregationionist south was run by Democrats.

As 2012 winds down, we're reliving some of the worst media bias of the year with our Best Notable Quotables of 2012. Yesterday, I recounted some of the nastiest barbs journalists threw at the GOP ticket; today, a look at some of the most egregious favors committed on behalf of Barack Obama's campaign.

While conservatives like Rick Santorum were often cast as radical or weird, journalists lovingly fawned over President Obama as if he was still the rock star of Campaign 2008. Sherri Shepherd, co-host of ABC's The View, won our "Let Us Fluff Your Pillow Award," for obsequious Obama interviews, after a September 25 encounter in which Shepherd seemed intent on casting the President as the Romancer-in-Chief.

I'm in New England this week, and this afternoon caught Ann Coulter on the Howie Carr show.  She spoke of the amazing ignorance of liberals when it comes to firearms.  Just a couple of hours later, Chris Matthews provided a perfect case in point.

On this evening's Hardball, speaking with Illinois Dem Senator Dick Durbin, Matthews proposed that Congress "outlaw" semi-automatic weapons.  Does he not realize that doing so would render illegal virtually every hunting rifle in production?  View the video after the jump.

"The blame America crowd has come back, but it's become far more militant. It's the hate America crowd," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted on the December 17 edition of Hannity. Bozell was reacting to a now infamous clip from her eponymous July 1 program when MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry trashed the Founding Fathers. "The land on which they formed this Union was stolen. The hands with which they built this nation were enslaved," she noted. 

Perry's "footnote for the Fourth of July" was judged by a panel of media bias experts to be the 2012 Quote of the Year. Bozell, the founder and president of the Media Research Center, was in studio with Sean Hannity for a special year-ending "Media Mash" segment devoted to the worst in liberal media bias from this year. Naturally, Harris-Perry's MSNBC colleague Chris Matthews made the cut for his openly admitting that he was glad Hurricane Sandy gave President Obama a much needed boost at the tail-end of the campaign, a remark for which he later apologized on air. [see video below the page break]

There has been no shortage of deceptive ads, factually-distorted statements, and outright fabrications from the political left over the campaign year to choose from, but leave it to the Tampa Bay Times's PolitiFact to give its "Lie of the Year" award to the Romney campaign. The now infamous "falsehood" in question was Romney's claim that Jeep was planning on moving production of some of its vehicles to China. This was in fact technically true, but PolitiFact trademarked it as its "Lie of the Year."

In a fit of glee, multiple left-leaning news outlets have promoted the proclamation, including of course, MSNBC. [video below, MP3 audio here ]:

Chris Matthews has found the problem with how the media covered the 2012 election: Unbiased journalists were simply too focused on being "even-handed" and treating Republicans fairly. Yes, really. The Hardball anchor on Wednesday began his program by declaring, "Did you get the impression during the presidential campaign that the press was trying too hard to be even-handed?" [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Matthews continued, "Did you think the people delivering the news were pushing what we call balance at the expense of the obvious facts, that the day-to-day stories never got across the obvious big fact, that the Democrats in this election were like Democrats going back to Jack Kennedy?" Matthews, who previously compared the GOP to Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan, declared himself the arbiter of media fairness: "So tonight we're going to nail it. We go to the truth, and why was the truth that dared not be reported in the mainstream media?"

An unhinged Chris Matthews on Tuesday berated a representative of Americans for Prosperity with the same question 13 times. Talking to Scott Hagerstrom, the Hardball anchor didn't seem to hear the answer, despite Hagerstrom repeating it over and over. Matthews fumed, "Well, who's paying your salary?" [See a montage video below. MP3 audio here.]

A calm Hagerstrom appeared on the show to discuss the just-passed right-to-work law in Mighican. He explained, "I work for Americans for Prosperity...This is about freedom for everybody." Matthews repeated over and over: "Who's paying your salary?...No, but who's paying your salary to do it? Who's paying your salary to do what you're doing right now?...Who's paying your– to do this today?"

Chris Matthews' affinity for Bill Clinton is well known. But on Wednesday's Hardball, Mathews argued that the Democrat would be the best lobbyist to get one into heaven. [See video below. MP3 audio here.] Talking to journalist Joe Klein and GOP strategist David Winston, Matthews lauded the former president's campaigning for Barack Obama.

The liberal host enthused, "...I have to tell you, who would you rather have make your case to Saint Peter than this guy?" Clinton, of course, was accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick, of sexual assault by Kathleen Willey and by Paula Jones of exposing himself.

Chris Matthews is not one to let a pesky thing like facts get in the way of a favored liberal narrative. That's why, for example, on the Oct. 22 edition of Hardball he insisted the 9/11 assault on the Benghazi compound was "all about" the YouTube video "Innocence of Muslims," when by that time it was most clearly established that it was a premeditated terrorist strike.

Well, yesterday, Matthews's obsession with painting a significant minority of Republicans as loony secessionists colored his cherry-picking of a Public Policy Polling survey. The Hardball host glommed onto a statistic in a December 4-released PPP poll that found some 25 percent of Republican respondents said they favored their state seceding in light of President Obama's reelection. "What do you want to bet these are the same people who say that President Obama is a Muslim?" huffed Matthews in a tease for a segment entitled "If at First You Don't Secede." But a look at the cross tabs in the poll shows that 27 percent of Hispanics, 29 percent of voters aged 18-29, and even 12 percent of African-Americans favor secession. Those demographics, of course, are all ones which the president handily won. At no point in his segment on the poll, however, did any of these facts come up. [MP3 audio excerpts here; video follows page break]

Despite Chris Matthews having worked for former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, his grasp of how the United States government works is tenuous at best.

On Monday's Hardball, the host repeatedly said current Speaker John Boehner (R-Oh.) "lost" on Election Day despite the Congressman winning 99.9 percent of the votes in his district while his Party retained control of the House (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Chris Matthews' detractors have for years alleged that he's sometimes drunk when he does his program on MSNBC.

His gas attack on Friday's Hardball will certainly add to this speculation, especially as it ended with the host actually saying, "Excuse me - I'm burping here" (video follows with commentary).

"There were moments where you were slightly objective."

So marvelously said former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele to MSNBC's Chris Matthews concerning his reporting of the just concluded presidential campaign (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

In an exchange with MSNBC Harball host Chris Matthews on Wednesday's NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie pondered the possibility that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice lied about Benghazi: "...should she have been more direct that the information she was providing to the American people was at that point, not just preliminary, but incomplete? I guess the bottom line is, did she mislead?"

Matthews replied by wondering: "...was she a flack...just out there mouthing the words that somebody told you, or is she a thoughtful cabinet minister – to be a potential cabinet minister?" He then laid the blame entirely on the intelligence: "But from what I'm told, she got the facts directly unchanged, unspun by the White House, nobody changed anything. If anybody's at fault here, it's the intelligence community, for giving her incomplete information for their own purposes."

As the media push Republicans to raise taxes, anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist has been taking a pounding.

This may have reached a high point Tuesday when MSNBC's Chris Matthews and former Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY.) actually joked about Norquist drowning (video follows with transcript and commentary):