As I said at Politico’s Arena earlier today, Chris Matthews certainly has as much right to compete for a U.S. Senate seat as Al Franken, Jim Martin, or any other individual who wishes to inject him or herself into national politics as both candidate and legislator.
As a former aide to Tip O’Neill (and former candidate, having run for the House of Representatives in 1974 and lost by a landslide) and longtime “news” man, Matthews is far from being a stranger in the world campaigns and inside-the-beltway politics.
However, Matthews’s apparent decision to begin laying the groundwork for a Senate run in 2010 while still hosting a “news analysis” program on MSNBC, which purports (despite all evidence to the contrary) to be a “news” network, is a problem.
According to Roll Call, Matthews is “meeting with top Democratic fundraisers as well as statewide officials” and has made “an informal agreement with Philadelphia-based Democratic media consultant Neil Oxman to work for his campaign, should he decide to run.”Matthews’s political proclivities have, of course, been clear for years, though his vocality during the Bush years and the presidential campaign of 2007/8 cast them into still sharper relief. From openly raving about the fact that watching then-candidate Barack Obama speak sent a “tingle” up his leg, to calling the former Illinois Senator’s campaign “the New Testament,” to, just after the November 4 election that saw Obama chosen as the nation’s 44th president, claiming that his new “job” was to “do everything [he] can to make this thing work, this new presidency work,” because “this country needs a successful presidency,” Matthews’s pro-Democratic, pro-Obama agenda has been in full view of the public, despite the fact that he has been propagating that agenda from behind a supposedly objective “news” desk.
Of course, for all the bellyaching on the part of the Left about Fox News’s journalistic tilt, MSNBC has set a high bar indeed for political advocacy and activism disguised as news. The presence of Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, among others, in the MSNBC lineup has doubtless pushed Matthews to up his anti-Bush and pro-Obama/Democratic advocacy in an effort to simply retain MSNBC’s core viewers.
However, advocacy from the “news” desk — as deplorable and utterly counter to all journalistic ethics as it is — is one thing; using that desk as a bully pulpit from which to campaign for national office is another. Though I applaud Matthews for actually providing an honest voicing of his views and political leanings — something very few do in journalism, preferring instead to hide behind the false veneer of “objectivity” — the fact that he remains on the air while openly negotiating terms for his candidacy for the U.S. Senate gives the lie to any and all claims by MSNBC to be a “news” organization, and instead reveals it to be the real version of what the Left has spent years claiming that Fox News is: an faux-news outlet which attempts to cover its partisan advocacy with the veneer of “objective” reporting.
