Media Objectivity

For all his tough questioning of interviewees and remarkable insight he sometimes displays, Chris Matthews periodically blurts out something ludicrous or disturbing.

And so Matthew appeared on his network's Morning Joe two days after the election, discussing the likelihood of Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D.- Ill.) accepting the offer from president-elect Obama to be the latter's chief of staff. Credit should go to Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel for their defense of journalistic integrity. The intriguing portion of the discussion begins at approximately 2:25 of the video and continues, off-and-on, till the end at 6:40.





Watch the video yourself, but here are the portions of the discussion I think were most significant:

Matthews: I want to do everything I can to make this work, this new Presidency work....yeah, that's my job....how can you not root for the succcess of a new president?

Scarborough: As Americans, Chris Matthews, we're all rooting for the success of Barack Obama... but you just talked about being a journalist your job is not to question motives and two seconds later, your job was to make this presidency a success. I think this is curious.

Matthews: I think we need a successful presidency.

Stengel: As journalists, we have to hold his feet to the fire.

Matthews can get swept up in the excitement of an event. For the last several years, he has been an eloquent opponent of Gulf war II, just as he opposed the American invasion before it was launched. But characteristically, he was a supporter, arguably a cheerleader, of the effort in those early weeks of the war following what at the time looked like a successful strategy.

Perhaps this is the instinct that led Matthews yesterday to forget (or, less likely, misunderstand) his journalistic responsibility during this period, all the more dramatic and hopeful with the election of the first black president in the U.S. But it is precisely the honeymoon period during which the media must be most skeptical (though not cynical) of a new President/President-elect. As Stengel reminded the audience, Walter Cronkite said "journalists are skeptical so the public doesn't become cynical."

There will be plenty of time for journalists to support Barack Obama- not directly, but indirectly by closely questioning his critics, maintaining a healthy skepticism of the Republican opposition. The website NewsHounds ("we watch FOX so you don't have to") described a conversation between Karl Rove and Allan Colmes on the November 5 "Hannity and Colmes" in what is an impressive demonstration of trying to have it both ways:

Rove also said that Obama ran “a center-right campaign.”

Colmes was astounded. “Center right? Center right? He was accused of being a radical socialist!”

“Well, if you dug in,” Rove said.

President Obama may set forth an aggressive, progressive agenda or a cautious, "post-partisan,"one reflecting his risk-averse nature. Either way, the Repub meme in the new Administration probably will be: He promised us centrist, bipartisan policies and instead he's giving us a polarizing left-wing agenda. At that point, it will be the role of the mainstream media to support the institution of the Presidency- not by blind obeisance to one man but by reasoned skepticism of the oppositions's extremist agenda masked by sloganeering and tired rhetoric.