Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Chris Matthews sucks bad

Turned on the TV in my home office, hoping to watch Michelle Malkin on the Glenn Beck show, but the old portable TV my kids hooked up doesn't get Fox News.

So I switched over to MSNBC just to try to get an update on the non-Carrie Prejean nude news -- just in time for "Hardball" with Chris Matthews.

He completely sucks, doesn't he? I remember for years how the liberal bloggers were always ranting about the wretched awfulness of "Tweetie" Matthews. I didn't get it, because I never watched his show. (I'm not a big TV watcher, period.)

I'd occasionally be switching channels, catch small doses of Matthews and not really think about it But . . . OMG!

To try to sit in a room where the TV is tuned to "Hardball" for a full freaking hour! Now I get what the liberal bloggers were complaining about. The man seems congenitally incapable of framing any argument except in the most superficially stereotypical terms.

Chris Matthews is to coherent discourse what Johnny Rotten is to fine jazz -- which is to say, he's never even attempted it. What is so annoying about Matthews is his utter lack of curiosity. He doesn't ask questions in search of information, and he routinely mischaracterizes the scope of any controversy.

Matthews begins an interview with an antagonist -- a guest who represents the "other side" -- by expressing the most ludicrously pejorative caricature of the antagonist's position. So, before the guest can begin to engage, he must first clear away this misleading distortion. Then, predictably, while the guest is attempting to clarify his own position, Matthews interrupts with some sarcastic idiocy.

He's a much worse TV interviewer than either Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly, and I'm not a great admirer of either of those guys. The whole point of having a guest do a TV interview is to hear what the guest has to say, but Matthews is infinitely more interested in hearing his own voice than in letting the audience hear his guests.

At least when Hannity starts the bully-boy routine on a liberal guest -- hectoring and interrupting -- it's entertaining in a pro-wrestling sort of way. O'Reilly has his own trademark brand of obnoxiousness, but it is arguably entertaining obnoxious.

What's the difference? Hannity comes out of a talk-radio background, and O'Reilly has been doing TV all his life. Both of them are professional broadcasters, who have some basic concept that they are on TV to attract and engage an audience.

Matthews, by contrast, is a lifelong Democratic Party hack, who got hired for TV as a "political analyst" and parlayed that (via the DC schmooze circuit) into his anchor role. But because he was hired for his politics, he didn't have to be any good at the audience-attraction part of the job, and never bothered to learn it.

Before anyone can yell "hypocrite" at me, I am well aware of my own bad rhetorical habits. But I do this in writing. The written word and broadcasting are very different media. You can skim through the written word and turn the page any time you want, so an article you disagree with doesn't have the intrusive feeling that you get being stuck in a room with Chris Matthews on your TV. (This old 13-inch portable TV doesn't have a remote.)

With TV, however, you can't "skim." There is a temporal linearity to the TV-viewing experience, from which the viewer can only escape by changing the channel. And the ability of Chris Matthews to inspire viewers to change the channel is the most obvious explanation for MSNBC's persistently low ratings over the years.

It's not about Matthews' politics. Ed Schultz comes on right after "Hardball," and Ed rivals Keith Olbermann for obnoxious liberalism. But Ed is entertaining. He's a good interviewer who brings on the guest, asks questions, and lets the guest answer.

Matthews has been on MSNBC forever and has never attracted an audience. There is no evidence that he even has the capacity to learn how to be good on TV. If the executives at MSNBC cared anything about building an audience, they'd cancel "Hardball" immediately and negotiate a buyout of Matthews' contract.

Somewhere out there in America is a good TV newsman -- liberal in his politics, but skilled at his craft -- who is being deprived of a career opportunity because the stupid suits at MSNBC can't see what anyone with two eyes and a brain can see: Chris Matthews sucks beyond hope of redemption, and he's clogging up a perfectly good hour of cable TV time.

9 comments:

  1. Two hours. MSNBC inexplicably broadcasts Hardball at 5pm and again at 7pm.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Matthews is becoming the Charles Johnson of cable news. Two Republicans on lately, Pence and Tancredo, and one of his major concerns seems to be whether they believe in evolution. If they happen to be the kind of Christian who believes the Bible, of course, they are automatically disqualified from public office.

    I know that Matthews is nominally Catholic, but I wonder if he thinks abortion should be freely available. And I wonder how he feels about that whole papal authority thing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I will always remember watching Matthews right after Zarqawi was killed. That great brain actually asked his guest the following:

    "Lisa, bottom line, is Zarqawi‘s death a plus or minus for the West, for our forces?"

    Matthews is only alive for comic relief to rest of us.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I wouldn't be surprised if Matthews' gig was some sort of payback to the Ted Kennedy.

    Dig around in the cable-channel licensing records.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hardball was the #1 political show before FOX.

    Chris was an good host in the late nineties. I know nobody believes it today.

    It's too bad. I think he felt guilty for defending Carter all the time, only to find out President Carter whacks off to Ahmadinejad speeches.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I think that if Charles Darwin were a live today, appeared on "Hardball", and Chris asked that question...confronted with that evidence across the table, even Darwin himself would say "No."

    ReplyDelete
  7. I watch Hardball every evening. Have for a long time. I don't think Matthews is at all rotten.

    He crafts robust arguments. He pursues a question. He has unique angles of approach to top issues. He has a fine repertoire of trivia. Guy's a true political geek -- I love that.

    Sure, Matthews is openly liberal, and damn proud of it, but he can and does come down hard on Democrats, including Obama.

    But I guess you'd know better, having seen A SINGLE SHOW...

    Phil

    who-whom.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  8. Oh really? To be honest, that is what I sense about most media. That Chris Matthews takes it to the very obvious makes little difference. Some one has to offer a baseline. Pick your host, they all do the same thing. I guess the difference might be the difference between elementary school and sophomoric efforts. I cannot quite go for most media hosts quite making it to even a senior (high school) effort.

    With you, yeah, you can be sophomoric, but that is when you dip, not at your best. Doh!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Matthews used to be entertaining, and balanced. Heck, Rush Limbaugh even had him as a guest host back in the 90's.

    Now he's as watchable as the San Francisco Chronicle, where he used to be the Washington burea chief, is readable...or viable,for that matter.

    ReplyDelete