CHRIS MATTHEWS PONDERS FACT-CHECKING…. Over the weekend, on “The Chris Matthews Show,” the host and his panel pondered the importance of journalistic fact-checking. It led to this exchange between Matthews, Gloria Borger, and Joe Klein.
Matthews: Who’s going to fact check for you?
Borger: We fact check, our editors…
Matthews: Online who’s going to fact check?
Borger: There are still, it depends.
Matthews: The bloggers don’t fact check.
Klein: Nobody fact checks. We still do, the print magazine and Time Magazine still has elaborate fact checkers…
Borger: We fact check.
Klein: …but Time.com, no.
Jamison Foser noted that Chris Matthews “is the poster child for the punditocracy’s habit of endlessly repeating falsehoods that happen to mesh with their worldview…. Is a television reporter who is wrong so often he has to admit ‘I keep saying it, and I keep being wrong on this’ really in any position to complain about anyone else’s fact-checking?”
It is an odd complaint for Matthews to raise. How often do either of Matthews’ shows — “Hardball” or “The Chris Matthews Show” — run corrections? Or even clarifications? Is there anyone — outside the blogs, that is — who checks the accuracy of Matthews’ work?
Indeed, as Matt Corley explained, “It’s ironic that a cable news host such as Chris Matthews would attack bloggers for supposedly not checking their facts, considering the amount of falsehoods and factually inaccurate statements he regularly utters on the air — which have all been fact-checked by bloggers.”
