The following exchange occurred outside during an audience participation segment:
Amy Goodman: "Well, I just wanted to say one thing before I answer that question. You said, since you said all the executives are up at the top of the Rock. I want to congratulate you, Chris, on 10 years of MSNBC. But I wish standing with you was Phil Donahue. He shouldn't have been fired for expressing an anti-war point of view on the eve of the election. His point of view and the people he brought on were..."
Matthews: "I don't know what the reasons were, but I doubt it was that."
Goodman: "Well, we have the NBC memo that was a secret memo that came out that said they didn't want him to be the face of this network, an anti-war face at a time when the other networks were waving the flag....Phil Donahue is a great patriot."
After Matthews' other guest, Michael Smerconish answered an audience member's question Matthews defended his network's stance on anti-war hosts:
Matthews: "Well, if being against the war was a problem here, I'd have been out of here about four years ago, because I`ve been against this war from day one, and that didn't cost me a job."
Goodman: "Yeah, I congratulate you, Chris."
Matthews: "So let me just say, they're not against anti-war people. But there's always conservative tendencies in corporate America. You know that."
