A painful four minutes

March 26, 2007

The Chris Matthews Show devoted four minutes to the prosecutor purge scandal over the weekend, which quickly worked its way onto YouTube. Glenn Greenwald called it “the most revealing” YouTube clip ever. Before watching it, I thought he was probably exaggerating. Then I saw it for myself.

I know a lot of readers can’t watch online videos from their desks, so I’ve included a full transcript below. I think it’s worth watching/reading, in part because it offers so much insight into how cliquish, myopic media personalities consider political events, and how their misguided perceptions shape news coverage.

It’s a four-minute segment, televised nationally, featuring prominent media figures. Matthews wasn’t chatting with obscure correspondents from minor news outlets — the roundtable featured Norah O’Donnell, chief Washington correspondent for MSNBC; Richard Stengel, editor of Time magazine; Gloria Borger, national political correspondent for CBS News and a columnist for U.S. News and World Report; and Patrick Healy, a political reporter for the New York Times.

The problem wasn’t just that over the course of the four minutes, the panel literally ignored the seriousness of the controversy, though it did. And it wasn’t just that the panel managed to gab about a major scandal without even a hint of a substantive comment, though it did that, too.

The more startling problem was that these five, to varying degrees, expressed a certain contempt for the story itself and those who deign to believe the administration deserves scrutiny.

Glenn explained:

Whatever one thinks of how convincing the available evidence is thus far, nobody who has an even basic understanding of how our government functions could dispute that the accusations in this scandal are extremely serious. Presumably, even those incapable of ingesting the danger of having U.S. attorneys fired due to their refusal to launch partisan-motivated prosecutions (or stifle prosecutions for partisan reasons) at least understand that it is highly disturbing and simply intolerable for the Attorney General of the U.S. — the head of our Justice Department — to lie repeatedly about what happened, including to Congress, and to have done so with the obvious assent and (at the very least) implicit cooperation of the White House. Even the most vapid media stars should be able to understand that.

And then we watch the four-minute video from The Chris Matthews Show and know better. None of them even wanted to consider whether the controversy matters or whether the allegations surrounding the scandal had merit. The panel and its host appeared outraged, not at the administration’s conduct, and not at the officials who’ve lied about it, but at Democrats who keep asking pesky questions about obstruction of justice.

This comment from Time’s Richard Stengel stood out:

“I am so uninterested in the Democrats wanting Karl Rove, because it is so bad for them. Because it shows business as usual, tit for tat, vengeance.”

It’s rather startling. The president’s chief political advisor is implicated in a massive scandal. Members of Congress — from both parties — believe he should answer questions about the controversy. But the editor of the nation’s largest weekly magazine is “so uninterested.” The questions are “bad” for Democrats. This is “business as usual.”

What on earth is Stengel talking about? It’s “bad for them” to hold the White House accountable for possibly criminal conduct? It’s “business as usual” to have White House oversight for the first time in seven years? If this whole matter is about “vengeance,” then why are some Republican lawmakers approving of subpoenas and calling on Gonzales’ ouster?

And why is Stengel “so uninterested”? Again, from Glenn:

Journalists are supposed to be, by definition, eager for investigations of government misconduct. That is supposed to be their purpose, embedded in their DNA. Yet virtually across the board, the prevailing Beltway conventional wisdom has become that — as always — investigations are “bad for Democrats,” that Americans don’t want their Leaders investigated, that it’s all a terrible distraction from the oh-so-important business of legislating.

On what do these media stars base these constant, emphatic claims about what Americans want and don’t want? On nothing other than their own personal desires, which they cowardly and misleadingly attribute to what “Americans believe,” even though such claims are baseless and false.

Watch the clip. It’s an example of everything that’s wrong with political journalism.

Update: Here’s the transcript I promised:

MATTHEWS: Welcome back. The legend of Karl Rove has been over a decade in the making, ever since he teamed up with George W. Bush in 1994 in a down-and-dirty defeat of Governor Ann Richards. And of course, continuing with the wins over Gore and Kerry. The Bush-Rove team has developed a reputation for ruthlessness that’s earned them the hatred of a lot of Democrats, and also some grudging respect. When I interviewed Joe Biden on “Hardball” in 2005, he admitted there’s envy.

(Clip from July 12, 2005)

MATTHEWS: Do you think the Democrats wish they had a guy as good as Rove?

Senator JOE BIDEN: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. But I hopefully–yeah, yeah.

MATTHEWS: OK.

(End of clip)

MATTHEWS: Joe’s honest. Democrats are frustrated that Rove wasn’t indicted in the CIA leak case, but now that he’s been implicated in the firing of those US attorneys, it looks to some people as though Democrats are smelling blood.

Gloria, are they after Rove?

Ms. BORGER: Sure. You know, he’s the cross between Ahab and Darth Vader for them, for the Democrats. And honestly, they would love nothing more than to get him up before a congressional committee.

MATTHEWS: OK, OK.

Ms. BORGER: But they want to change the subject, Chris. They don’t want to talk about how they’re doing on the war in Iraq or where they’re…

MATTHEWS: You’re with me on that. They divide over the war and fund-raising, but this makes it simple. It’s good for fund-raising.

Ms. BORGER: Right.

MATTHEWS: Guess who’s making this case? Chuck Schumer, who’s the chief fund-raiser.

Ms. BORGER: Of course.

MATTHEWS: Rick, here’s the question. When the dog catches the car, what do they do? They want a confession, like on “Perry Mason,” where Rove just says, `You’re right, I’m no good.’ Do they want him to show his horns and be really nasty? Or do they want him to get into a perjury rap? What’re they after with this guy?

Mr. STENGEL: Well, as Joe Biden implied, it looks like the car would run over the dog in that case. And there are no–there are no “Perry Mason” moments except for “Perry Mason.” I am so uninterested in the Democrats wanting Karl Rove, because it is so bad for them. Because it shows business as usual, tit for tat, vengeance.

MATTHEWS: (Unintelligible).

Ms. BORGER: Mm-hmm.

Mr. STENGEL: That’s not what voters want to see.

MATTHEWS: So instead of like an issue like the war where you can say it’s bigger than all of us, it’s more important than politics, this is politics.

Mr. STENGEL: Yes, and it’s much less. It’s small bore politics.

O’DONNELL: The Democrats have to be very careful that they look like they’re not the party of investigation rather than legislation in trying to change things.

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

O’DONNELL: But yes, they want a public flogging of Karl Rove up on Capitol Hill, to draw him up there when all of the cable networks cover that live, and to just beat the heck of him out there…

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

O’DONNELL: …and to put him under fierce questioning. The reason that the White House is resisting is not only on what they believe is grounds of, you know, executive privilege and etc., but also because they believe if they give on this issue, Karl Rove will be up there every other week on Katrina…

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

O’DONNELL: …on CIA leak, on a whole number of other things.

Mr. HEALY: And they’ve also had several years out of power, where they saw, you know, Dick Cheney come swaggering onto the Senate floor and cuss out, you know, Democratic senators, swear in their faces. This is their time for levers of power, and the Democrats say they want to use them.

MATTHEWS: What do they want?

Ms. BORGER: They want the American public to see their public enemy number one. You know, Karl Rove is one of the people, like the guy pulling the strings, the wizard, you know, and…

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

Ms. BORGER: And the American public doesn’t really know Karl Rove, and for some reason they think that it would help the Democrats to get him out there. I’m not so sure.

MATTHEWS: I think we’re all on–we’re not sure of the Democrat strategy here once again. We put it to the Matthews Meter, 12 of our regular panelists. Will the attorney general Alberto Gonzales keep his job? This one’s close. Seven say he’ll stick to his job, hold on to it, and five say he’s on the way out. Gloria, you say he’s toast.

Ms. BORGER: Eventually. Not now.

MATTHEWS: After he testifies?

Ms. BORGER: After he testifies and maybe a little bit while after that. Little bit longer after that.

MATTHEWS: That’s what I think. I think they’re going to let him skewer for a while.

Ms. BORGER: Yeah.

MATTHEWS: Norah, you say he’s not toast.

O’DONNELL: Well, I think that the president wants him to stay on in the job. I think that they realize replacing him would be just as difficult because then he’d have to be confirmed by a Democratic Congress, and I think that there is a degree of loyalty to this man that has worked with the president for a long time.

MATTHEWS: I think there’s going to be some sympathy for this guy, he’s Latino, he’s not a real politician. If those guys trash him up there, it’s going–it could backfire.

Hideously illuminating.

  • i can’t recall where i saw it, but in some comment section recently someone made the remark that “the new media has a memory.”

    exactly.

    you would think that these asswipes would bear in mind that jay carney already embarassed himself sneering at the seriousness of the case; they are now permanently on the record with their shallowness.

    will time warner fire stengel for being an obtuse idiot? unlikely.

    but will the credibility of time, and msnbc, and all the rest continue to erode thanks to performances like this?

    you bet, and not a moment too soon.

  • Noron O’Donnell is simply a low-class harlot from Cleveland Ohio, the product of a broken home, who probably looks at Rove and Bush and Cheney as daddy figures in her life because she probably felt her father did not grant her sufficient attention growing up.

  • The Washington Press Corps in general bears a striking resemblance to the animals looking in through the farmhouse windows at the end of ‘Animal Farm’.

    The problem is that they develop their ‘unnamed sources’ and massage them and coddle them until they (the press) become invested in their source’s well-being. The individual status of the press corps members is tied up in their source’s ability to stay in power.

    It’s not a coincidence that Bernstein and Woodward were young and relatively unestablished when they broke Watergate.

  • Wow, that was fair AND balanced!

    Truly an educational clip, and its ramifications are fairly obvious. The disdain I think is due to the fact that the New Media (that’s us!) is now able to rub the Old Media’s nose in the fecal “news reporting” that the Old Media provides on a routine basis.

    But still the Old Media keeps spewing its filth, smugly knowing that they are the primary information stream for the majority of us. Since the drug companies and other corporate crooks keep pumping millions into this stream, I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon. Imagine TPM with a budget like ABC “news”!

    And as bad as Tweety rips on Bush for the war, he still throws a party for the whores who support Bush as he pisses all over the constitution.

    I don’t get that guy.

  • “I am so uninterested in the U.S. citizens wanting Osama bin Laden, because it is so bad for them. Because it shows business as usual, tit for tat, vengeance.”

    Why Stengel has a problem with seaching out justice is beyond me. His statement would have been more truthful if four years ago he said the following, “I am so uninterested in the White House wanting Saddam Hussein, because it is so bad for them. Because it shows business as usual, tit for tat, vengeance.”

    One day the ledger will come out and we will all see how much these folks have been paid by the White House to say what they are saying. Armstrong Williams was just the guy that got caught. But these idiots all speak like they have thirty ieces of siver in their pockets as well.

  • Holy cow. That’s bad. Not even a moment of passing, formalistic lip service to the idea that there might actually be some crime involved, and that the Democrats might be pursuing what was good for our country, not merely what is good for Democrats politically.

    The voters don’t want to see Rove get his come-uppance? Which voters would that be, the ones who voted Democratic in November? Democrats need to be careful to be seen to avoid being seen as the party of investigation, as opposed to the party that wants to change things? Um, investigating IS changing things? Hello? Could you repeat your RNC talking points more expressively next time; that reading was a little flat?

    If the President lets Karl Rove go up there now, ‘he’ll be up there every other week, on Katrina, on CIA leak, on a whole number of other things,’ like that would be a bad thing?

    My god, what an embarassing display of the worst Washington insider-ism.

  • This is coming from the guy who copped out by proclaimed out of intellectual laziness that all 6.6 Billion human beings are “People of the year.”

    At this point, I doubt I’ll ever read Time ever again (and I once read the magazine voraciously for 26 of my 36 years.)

    I think most of us here have said many times many ways. The MSM as we know it is are only the chroniclers of the court and courtiers. They take great satisfaction in telling us what we should think and feel and do anything to protect the privileges they’ve alleged earned. To pooh pooh Bush’s Grima Wormtongue would mean they would be cast from the pathetically shallow clique and those lose all that they hold dear (which apparently isn’t worth shit.)

    That is why they could not understand why many ordinary folks cheered on Stephen Colbert’s harsh rant and not marvel at the wondrous Bush imitator at the WHCD.

    One of the wonderful things about the internet is that it is slowly democraticizing the news and thus driving jackasses like Dickie Stengal into oblivion.

  • We watched that yesterday morning and we both just sat there stunned, wondering when if ever Chris Matthews will get a clue. How do these people keep their jobs? Their intellectual laziness is the kindest thing that can be said of them, prostitution is probably closest to the true answer.

    Nora O’Donnell is S-T-U-P-I-D and completely out of touch. She is so partisan that she is no journalist, just a hack. Perhaps we should all e-mail MSNBC and encourage them to watch what their so called chief correspondent has to say about such a grave matter as the corruption of the justice department. I guess it’s fine as long as no one investigates MSNBC or Chris Matthews. It was a truly disgusting show.

  • See, this is why many ‘third-world’ nations just skip the media antics and depose their leaders in military coups (And, quite frankly, most of the successful coups are against the worst regimes, so it’s not a bad thing overall)… Maybe we could learn something from them (and, before anyone eviscerates me, please note that all of our Officers in our military swear an oath to the Constitution – NOT the President- and swear to defend the Constitution against all enemies, both Foreign AND Domestic. If the President chooses to make himself an enemy of the Constitution, then he becomes an enemy of the country).

  • With apologies to Ed and a h/t to Tom Cleaver, these guys are all Twits with Tenure. They supply long stretches of self-serving conventional wisdom interupted by (very) occassional insights. I watched this on Glenn’s blog yesterday and missed the obnoxious laughter of Noron. She acted like an ex-boyfriend was across the room and she wanted him to know she was having a raucous, good time.

    Gloria Borger is dumber than a bag of hammers and she is in the company of peers. Matthews practices punditry the way W plays at governing – all from his gut and without a lick of common sense. What a dolt fest.

  • Seventy years ago, they’d be laughing at those who tried to point out what Josef Goebbels was doing.

  • I’m not sure why anyone’s surprised by someone from Time magazine being uninterested in actual news — just look at this post from Eat the Press over at HuffPost to see how far a once great magazine has fallen.

    I think it also speaks to something else — how the GOP’s Clintonian witch hunt has effected the thinking of many people. The entire Starr investigation was based 100% on politics. Since then, there are folks who now see ANY investigation as based on politics, no matter what it’s about — the war, Purgeatory (my preferred name, since I’m sick of tacking on “gate” to every scandal), Katrina response, global warming, etc. etc. etc.

    It truly is sad, and yet another reason blogs are so important. After all, can you imagine what this administration would/could get away with if it weren’t for the blogosphere keeping stories alive and doing the dirty work (ala TPMMuckraker and the Purgeatory document dump)?

  • One other thing:

    They want the American public to see their public enemy number one.

    Um, actually, the American people want little things … like ACCOUNTABILITY … and HONESTY … and GOVERNMENT THAT WORKS.

    That’s what the last election was all about, you twit.

  • Shit, I’m not a Democrat, and I see everything that is going on. Scandal upon scandal perpetrated by a cabal of politcos in the WH, and Matthews et al. can only muster a smarmy gab fest on how they don’t see what any discerning common American has been seeing a long time now. After witnessing the utter forfeiture of their journalistic instincts, I was even more unimpressed in the panel’s banality in regard to our political heritage and the rule of law. -Kevo

  • Kudos to petorado for raising the payola issue.

    It’s a safe assumption that Richard Mellon Scaife slips Rush Limbaugh wads of money. Of course, Rush reports it all to the IRS, so it’s all “legal.” But, who sees his tax return to see what other rich RW bastards are financing Rush?

    In regard to (so-called) real journalist, I’ve come to believe that the only way that their integrity of a can be verified is through the release of their tax returns (and those of their spouse and children–and for twenty years beyond their death).

    David Broder’s lunacy is usually explained as some form dementia. How do we know that Broder’s not “on the take.” Has anybody outside of Broder and his accountant seen his tax return?

    And what about Tony Snow? How did “Snowball” give up those strong Fox dollars to be a spokesman for that listing ship (a.k.a. – the Bush White House) for about 150K a year? Murdoch et al surely set up a Swiss bank account for him for after January 2009.

    Bottom Line: Without seeing the tax returns of today’s journalists, their integrity is in doubt. Has the time come for citizens to organize a project that asks journalists to prove their integrity with full financial disclosure? Until then, the Chris Matthews of the world can’t be trusted.

  • just up on msnbc………..”Monica Goodling, a Justice Department official involved in the firings of federal prosecutors, will refuse to answer questions at upcoming Senate hearings, citing Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, her lawyer said Monday.”

    “The potential for legal jeopardy for Ms. Goodling from even her most truthful and accurate testimony under these circumstances is very real,” said the lawyer, John Dowd.

    somebody’s feeling awfully guilty for an event that these bozos think is really funny……

  • Stomach-turning. Anybody left out there who sees the MSM as anything but a bunch of overpaid Heathers is deluding themselves. They aren’t going to defend our democracy; they’ll just swoon at how macho and take-charge that Man on the Horse is.

    There’s no patriotism, no integrity, absolutely no sense of public duty. They’re just the suckups to the cool kids at the high school party, wetting their pants if Karl Rove blows them a kiss.

    Dating back to 2000 at least, it seems that the more authoritarian a Republican is, the more gooey these asshats get. If Rudy’s the nominee, they’d better start putting Maalox in the water.

  • Just wanted to mention I pointed out this little exchange on the Matthews Show this morning in Comment 2 of CB’s post “Seeing the forest for the purge trees.”

    I was aghast when I saw the exchange yesterday, though I don’t really know why. It is exactly the sort of dumb as a post thinking I expect from Tweety Matthews and many in the Washington MSM.

  • What I cannot figure out – for the life of me, I can’t figure – WHY the smarmy members of the press, who tend to go where the wind blows, cannot see that the American People are turning against this government. Turning against Bush, Karl Rove, etc.

    Why, then, is the Press still continuing to suck up to those in power? You’d think, maybe, that these Press members would begin to turn against Bush, do some actual REPORTING, and maybe even some exposes, for their own futures, if not for the country’s. It’s really very counterintuitive.

  • When we change the head of the White House, can we get new commentators too? Clean sweep sounds good to me.

    And Darth Vader is not Karl Rove. It’s Dick Cheney, bionic heartless.

  • It’s not so hard to imagine the right wing leanings from this group when you consider the sources. Gloria Borger writes for U.S. News & World Report which is owned by Mort Zuckerman who never met a Republican he didn’t agree with, Richard Stengel who runs Time mag which has been shilling and whoring for the Bush misadministration since Sept. of 2000, Patrick Healy of the NYT who is one of the Times’ designated water carriers for W and his minions and last but not least is Norah O’Donnell, who after applying her makeup with a concrete masons trowel in the morning, rushes to her computer to download the RNC talking points for the day and rushes off to MSNBC to get them on the air to act as a counter balance to whatever Keith Olbermanns show was about the night before.

  • This struck me. A moment of truth. But the weird thing is that this is a bad thing:

    “The reason that the White House is resisting is not only on what they believe is grounds of, you know, executive privilege and etc., but also because they believe if they give on this issue, Karl Rove will be up there every other week on Katrina…

    Yeah.

    …on CIA leak, on a whole number of other things.”

    It’s almost as though O’Donnell simply doesn’t get that the reason Rove would be up there every other week is that he’s done a lot of bad things!

  • The mainstream media have become so cynical and enomored of viewing everything through a frame of tit-for-tat politics that they can no longer see underlying real problems when they exist. It’s just not “cool” to report on reality. This is the corrosive fallout of Rovian politics–and the media are too knee deep in it to smell the stench they’re in.

  • You know, ever since Greenwald and CB started mentioning this episode, I tried and tried not to watch it. Didn’t need the heartburn or heartache. Finally I did. Just now. And all the comments are correct. “the most revealing” YouTube clip ever.

    The more I see of political journalists, the less I see in them. Permanently stuck in a junior high school mentality. Shallow, obsessed with trivial externalities. Ralph Nader was right that getting Bush into the White House would show how astonishingly bad the reThugs could be (that doesn’t mean I forgive him for 2000). The last six years have also shown how astonishingly bad the political msm often is.

    Simply staggering.

  • Gloria Borger was the reporter who got completely bamboozled by VP Cheney who said he ‘never said’ his infamous claim about 9/11 plotter M. Atta visiting with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. He denied it several times to her face and she let him go on with his talking points rather than smash Cheney with the verbatim quote.

    It will be sad if this job is a promotion from her CNBC gig where she got snookered by Cheney.

  • What an appalling video.

    Corporate political news product, in all its smirking banality.

    These courtiers need their powdered wigs and satin bows ripped off and trampled upon.

    Shameless and pathetic, but most of all appalling.

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