Chris Matthews was caught doing the MSNBC two-step during his show on a recent night – a little to the left, a little more to the left and once more to the left — when suddenly he bumped into a… well, a mistruth.
He was attacking The National ENQUIRER – as MSNBC hosts will do — and making fun of one of our front pages.
“The National ENQUIRER is not where I get my news!” said Chris, sounding more as if he were denying an accusation than stating a fact.
“There was a picture of Jack Kennedy, a picture for a high school play, dusted over to make him look old. Jack Kennedy is alive in Poland. This was their front page story. They’re not reliable.”
Only, there’s a small problem. The cover Chris referenced didn’t belong to The National ENQUIRER, was never printed in The National ENQUIRER. Has, in fact, nothing to do with The National ENQUIRER.
We checked. The story ran in the Aug. 21, 1990 edition of The Weekly World News — that bastion of Yeti and UFO sightings. “JFK IS ALIVE!” proclaimed the cover. Alas, we did the fact checking Chris clearly couldn’t be bothered to do.
This has become something of a running problem with MSNBC hosts, of late. (We get it. We understand. They’ve been so exposed as clueless and tone deaf to America by Donald Trump’s victory that they’re a bit out of sorts.)
Rachel Maddow recently ran another 14-minute hatchet job on The ENQUIRER that proved she hadn’t even bothered to read the issue she spent so much time attacking.
We understand where Rachel — and Chris, too, for that matter — are coming from. They just rely on producers to write the copy they parrot on TV, like gussied-up macaws. Chris is particularly like “Anchorman’s” Ron Burgundy in that way, only smelling of old man rather than leather bound books.
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But that doesn’t excuse Chris from doing his job, from doing basic fact-checking and reporting before going on TV and spouting nonsense to millions of viewers. (Oh, wait, there aren’t millions of viewers watching. That would be Fox News. Maybe this shouldn’t be such a big deal to us, after all.)
And none of this even begins to address the ridiculousness of being so truth-challenged when you are calling US out for being truth-challenged… the irony is both Shakespearean and sad. And it’s hypocrisy at its worst.
Come on, Chris. If you’re going on national TV to make claims a competing media outlet is printing lies, shouldn’t you, at least, take the time to make sure the drivel you spout is true?
So, here’s what ENQUIRERMAN is going to do. After Maddow exposed herself as an empty, vacuous, read-anything-off-the-teleprompter talking bobble head doll, we sent her a free subscription of the ENQUIRER to 30 Rockefeller Center so she could actually read the magazine next time she decides to attack it.
We’re going to do the same for you, Chris. We’d include bifocals, but we know you don’t need them — because you’re never wearing glasses on your show when you read off that teleprompter just fine!
