At the end of an interview segment tonight on Hardball, MSNBC host Chris Matthews and former Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) traded stories about their brushes with journalists who used goofy-looking photos of them as cover art to adorn magazine profiles.
Chris Matthews has voiced over a new MSNBC Hardball promo which, among other things, hails the late Ted Kennedy as a paragon of statesmanship, a "great" "leader" a "lion" who "keep[s] me going non-stop."
Discussing media scrutiny over unsubstantiated claims that Dr. Ben Carson has made in his memoirs, Hardball host Chris Matthews pontificated about the importance of fact-checking one's own book to make sure everything is kosher. But where was he when the veracity of President Obama's memoirs was brought up in 2012?
Earlier this evening, a federal appeals court affirmed a district judge's prerogative to block President Obama's executive order deferring action on the deportation of some illegal immigrants. When initially tweeting the breaking news, the Associated Press's Twitter account tweeted the following: "BREAKING: Appeals court rules against Obama's plan to protect about 5 million people from deportation."
As I blogged Monday night, MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews gave Virginia Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe a platform to urge liberal viewers at home who live in the Old Dominion to vote pro-gun control by voting for Democrats the following day. Of course, that didn't pan out like either hoped. Republicans retained control of the both houses of the state legislature, while Democrats had hoped to flip the Senate over to their control.
"Under President Obama, Democrats have lost 900+ state legislature seats, 12 governors, 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats. That's some legacy," tweeted Purple Strategies managing director Rory Cooper, a former Eric Cantor staffer and alumnus of the conservative Heritage Foundation. Of course, if you relied on the Nov. 4 edition of MSNBC's Hardball for your political analysis, you wouldn't have a clue of the dire straits that President Obama has steered his party into during his tenure as president.
Tomorrow marks one year to the day when Larry Hogan soundly defeated Martin O'Malley protege Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown in the Maryland gubernatorial contest. Yet with O'Malley in the hot seat on the November 3 edition of Hardball, host Chris Matthews failed to ask him how this embarrassing defeat -- and Gov. Hogan's healthy job-approval ratings to this day -- might be a signal to his fellow Democrats that he's a solid pick for leading their party forward.
Chris Matthews the politics and news junkie certainly knows better than to buy the melarkey that is the Dan Rather Memogate story as told in the new box-office dud Truth. But Chris Matthews the star-struck cinemaphile won out last night as the Hardball host treated guest Robert Redford with fawning adulation.
Of course, perhaps it was only fitting since the governor's wife donated a couple thousand to Kathleen Matthews's campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives.
Media bias can come in the smallest and most off-hand of quips, comments, and subheadlines. Take the Daily Beast's "Cheat Sheet" item, "Colorado Gunman ID'd as 33-Year-Old," bearing the editorial subheader, "Gun Epidemic."
"This got a little revolting tonight," MSNBC's Chris Matthews lamented to colleague Chris Jansing in a post-debate special edition of Hardball Wednesday night. Matthews was chagrined with Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Marco Rubio (Fla.) scoring points with the debate audience by attacking the liberal media.
With his "viral video" line about the liberal media being the Democrats' super PAC to his deft handling of Jeb Bush's attacks, Sen. Marco Rubio won the night, MSNBC analysts agreed in a special Hardball.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took CNBC debate panelists to task for their liberal bias: “The questions that have been asked so far at this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media....The contrast with the Democratic debate, where every thought and question from the media was, which of you is more handsome and why?...And nobody watching at home believes that any of the moderators has any intention of voting in a Republican primary.”
As I noted earlier this evening, in an early question in the undercard GOP debate tonight, CNBC's John Harwood pressed Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) on his staunch opposition to tax hikes. Well, later in the same debate, Harwood hit Jindal from the other side of the ledger as regards spending cuts, and the $1.6-million shortfall that the state treasury saw earlier this year. It, by the way, has since been closed.
Well, CNBC GOP debate moderator John Harwood didn't waste any time. Shortly into the "undercard" debate tonight, the journalist pressed Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal about whether he would "do for the federal budget what you did for the Louisiana budget" and citing "many Republicans are opposed to the approach that you've taken in Louisiana" by "tr[ying] so hard to avoid anything that can be called a tax increase."
Mollie Hemingway -- the winner of the first annual Noel Sheppard Media Blogger of the Year Award -- has an excellent piece at The Federalist detailing why "CNBC's John Harwood Has No Business Moderating A GOP Presidential Debate."
During a segment on MSNBC Tuesday evening devoted to the question of whether Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) has engaged in sexist criticisms of Democratic presidential primary opponent Hillary Clinton, anchor Richard Wolffe played for his audience a Clinton campaign ad centered on the issue of "equal pay," underscoring how the former first lady is running on feminist themes to fire up female Democratic voters in New Hampshire and Iowa.
Nowhere in the segment, however, did Wolffe -- or his panelists feminist writer Amanda Marcotte and Democratic strategist Tara Dowdell -- note that there's evidence that Clinton, both as a senator and as secretary of state, paid her male staffers substantially more than her female ones.
On the October 27 Hardball, anchor Chris Matthews and MSNBC contributor Michelle Bernard took turns denouncing GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee as an anti-Semite. Their sole piece of evidence for the claim: Huckabee lamenting that Hillary Clinton regularly corresponded via email to longtime confidant Sidney Blumenthal, but she didn't communicate with Amb. Chris Stevens prior to the Benghazi attack.
Sometimes the bias happens right under your nose. Here's to the folks at StandWithUs for their eagle-eyed observation of bias earlier this evening during CNN's live broadcast of the Benghazi hearing. "Palestinians shot boarding kids' bus," reads the header. In truth, the perpetrators shot were terrorists intending on harming innocent children.
"[T]he lead from the day so far is Hillary Clinton repeatedly offers false or misleading testimony, and journalists yawn," Stephen Hayes of the conservative Weekly Standard argued on tonight's edition of Fox News Channel's Special Report with Bret Baier.
Hayes then cited just one of many examples of evidence coming to light showing the then-Secretary of State was decidedly less-than-truthful at the very best in the aftermath of the fatal terrorist attack in Benghazi.





















