Josh Marshall

It's always interesting when liberals disagree on something because each one believes he or she is always 100 percent correct on any issue, a stance that often leads to fiery confrontations and personal attacks.

The latest example of this concept is the angry Twitter debate between Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith and Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall over an article entitled “7 Things Democrats Would Have Freaked Out About if Bush Had Done Them.”

Chris Matthews has yet to condemn Democratic Wisconsin State Representative Gordon Hintz for yelling "You're f–ing dead!" at Republican State Representative Michelle Litjens during a legislative session on Friday, but the Hardball host did find the time, on Tuesday's show, to slam Speaker of the House John Boehner for engaging in "Glenn Beck talk" about guns.

Matthews, initially teasing a guest for using the word "lethal" in a discussion about recent poll numbers on the Wisconsin budget battle, chided: "In the media world, I think we all agreed...after the horror in Arizona that we weren't gonna...use ballistic terms." The MSNBC host then segued into a clip of Boehner making a gun reference, after which he railed: "What is this Glenn Beck talk?...That's how Glenn talks. 'I'm gonna put a gun to your head' and all this!" This led Huffington Post's Howard Fineman to tag in: "Well when John Boehner back slides, he really back slides."

However, according to Newbusters' own Noel Sheppard, Matthews, Fineman and most mainstream media outlets, other than Fox News, have been largely silent about the Hintz threat.

To review, a Democrat man cursing at a Republican woman "You're f--ing dead" isn't worth mentioning in Matthews' mind, but if you dare make a political metaphor referring to weapons (something Matthews himself has done) that's objectionable.

(video, audio and transcript after the jump)

Chris Matthews on Thursday attacked Sarah Palin for making what appeared to be a hip double entendre concerning President Obama's oft-used State of the Union slogan "Winning the Future."

Even less surprising, the "Hardball" host also went after Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's (R-Minn.) slavery remarks - for the third night in a row (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Chris Matthews on Thursday got another thrill going up his leg, but this time it wasn't for President Obama.

During a "Hardball" segment dealing with Sen. Joe Lieberman's (D-Conn.) announcement to not seek reelection in 2012, Matthews told Josh Marshall, the editor and founder of the perilously liberal website Talking Points Memo, "I'm falling in love with you" (video follows with transcript):

A frustrated Chris Matthews, on Tuesday's Hardball, chided the left for being disappointed in Barack Obama as he essentially told them, he's the best they've got and are going to get. During a segment in which the Salon's Joan Walsh and Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall wondered why Obama and Joe Biden were admonishing their base to stop whining, Matthews took up for Team Obama as he tried to calm down the lefties: "This president has done what we were all taught in graduate school to do, what progressives have believed in from years and years, decades ago...You compensate for the loss of consumer spending and business investment with government spending...No one has had a better idea since the 1930s. Number two, The Wall Street crowd needed governing. They didn't have any, now they've got some. Number three, he's pushed for progressive taxation, he's going after the rich. He's not giving them their tax cut." [audio available here]

At the end of his program, a desperate sounding Matthews listed a bunch of races Democrats still had a chance in,  and then pleaded to the left to unify behind those candidates because "the bad guys are gaining." (video & audio of "Let Me Finish" segment below the fold)

The following exchange was aired on the September 28 edition of Hardball:

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller penned a letter to the New York Review of Books, in reply to a Michael Massing article on the Internet and the news business. After defending his paper's Internet presence, Keller found a blog he actually likes, praising left-wing blogger-journalist Josh Marshall, who operates the Talking Points Memo blog. 

I've long been an admirer of the best practitioners of Web journalism, including many of the familiar faces Massing introduces to the Review's readers. My respect for Josh Marshall, to cite everyone's favorite example of a serious journalism venture born online, is all the greater because his success remains, so far, a rarity and a struggle.

At least one media outlet is bucking the field's bleak economic outlook: The left-wing blog Talking Points Memo. On Monday, Noam Cohen reported in the New York Times that TPM has received funding from outside investors that will result in a doubling of staff, and may include some veteran mainstream journalists.

The political news Web site Talking Points Memo this weekend completed a round of investment, of $500,000 to $1 million. The move is intended to increase the number of employees, to roughly 20, from the current 11, in the next 10 months.

The financing is the first part of a three-year plan to increase the site's staff to 60 employees, Joshua Micah Marshall, the site's founder, said in an interview at his offices on West 20th Street in New York.

Marshall, who in TPM's early days (the blog was launched during the Florida recount fight of Election 2000) was less reflexively anti-Republican than today, has beefed up the once-humble blog to include TPM café, a discussion site, and TPM Muckraker, an investigative site almost exclusively devoted to conservative scandal-mongering.

Although the established media often rails against bloggers, Marshall is an exception. As Cohen reported back in February 2008, Marshall won the media's George Polk Award for legal reporting for his work on the Bush administration firing eight U.S. attorneys under what TPM and other liberals claimed were politically motivated circumstances -- a perfectly legal effort that was nonetheless considered scandalous by mainstream media.

UPDATE at end of post: Dowd's employing the famous "I heard it from a friend" defense.

On a regular basis, NewsBusters has warned readers of the infiltration into traditional media outlets content written by left-wing bloggers.

On Sunday, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was accused of plagiarizing a piece posted a few days prior by Josh Marshall of the liberal website Talking Points Memo.

Dowd has now admitted her mistake.

As Marshall wrote Thursday (h/t Hot Air):

So much for any pretense of balance. Looks like David Shuster has taken a page from Keith Olbermann's playbook: play exclusively to your crowd; exclude any alternative voices.

Announcing this evening a new regular feature focusing on the blogosphere on his 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue show, Shuster made it clear that conservatives need not apply.

DAVID SHUSTER: Every day at this time, we're going to bring you a key issue in the progressive blogosphere.