Media Bistro: Tuesday Apr 08, 2008
NYT Mag On Matthews: The Excerpts
We've got an advanced copy of Mark Leibovich's piece on Chris Matthews, entitled "Chris Matthews, Seriously. (O.K., Not That Seriously)," which will appear in this Sunday's NYT magazine. Not only is it a great read (typical for Leibovich), but if you're into media gossip...man. This has got good stuff on Matthews rivalries with David Gregory, Keith Olbermann, Tim Russert...and that's just scratching the surface of the gems this piece unearths....
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"People are a little impressed with themselves," (MSNBC chief Phil) Griffin went on to say, continuing his commentary about the scene. "It's a bit of an echo chamber." Matthews is central to that echo chamber -- at the (Ritz-Carlton Cleveland), as in the 2008 presidential campaign. He is, in a sense, the carnival barker at the center of it, spewing tiny pellets of chewed nuts across the table while comparing Obama to Mozart and Clinton to Salieri. At one point, Matthews suddenly became hypnotized by a TV over the bar set to a rebroadcast of "Hardball." "Hey, there I am -- it's me," he said, staring at himself on the screen. "It's me."
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There is a level of ubiquity about Chris Matthews today that can be exhausting, occasionally edifying and, for better or worse, central to what has become a very loud national conversation about politics. His soothing-like-a-blender voice feels unnervingly constant in a presidential cam-paign that has drawn big interest, ratings and voter turnout. He gets in trouble sometimes and has to apologize -- as he did after suggesting that Hillary Clinton owed her election to the Senate to the fact that her husband "messed around." He is also something of a YouTube sensation: see Chris getting challenged to a duel by the former Georgia governor, Zell Miller; describing the "thrill going up my leg" after an Obama speech; dancing with (and accidentally groping) Ellen DeGeneres on her show; shouting down the conservative commentator Michelle Malkin; ogling CNBC's Erin Burnett. And he has provided a running bounty of material for Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog, which has devoted an entire section of its Web site ("The Matthews Monitor") to cataloging Matthews's alleged offenses, especially against Hillary Clinton and women generally.
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Yet for as basic as he has become to the political and media furniture, Matthews is anything but secure. He is of the moment, but, at 62, also something of a throwback -- to an era of politics set in the ethnic Democratic wards of the '60s and the O'Neill-Reagan battles of the '80s. And he is a product of an aging era of cable news, the late-'90s, when "Hardball" started and Matthews made his name as a battering critic of Bill Clinton during the Monica saga.
Cable political coverage has changed, however, and so has the sensibility that viewers -- particularly young ones -- expect from it....
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Matthews's contract expires next year, and NBC officials clearly would like to renew it for considerably less than the $5 million a year he is making now. Whether it's a formal talking point or not, NBC officials seem bent on conveying the message that they could get the same ratings, or better ones, for considerably less money....
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/television/nyt_mag_on_matthews_the_excerpts_81956.asp
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