The
Chris Matthews profile in the New York Times Magazine
is a fast-paced, entertaining, devastatingly accurate disgrace that
is beneath its talented author, Mark Leibovich, who should be
ashamed of himself. Readers cannot help but feel sorry for Mr.
Matthews, cringing each time he brags about how many honorary
degrees he’s earned, or upon reading lines like, “If Matthews has
an overriding professional insecurity, it is being confined to the
pigeonhole of cable blowhard. The insecurity is well founded, since
this is how many people view him.”
Reading all the scenes where the subject talks to his profiler
on the phone or invites him into his house, I couldn’t help but
think of Janet Malcolm:
Every journalist who is not too stupid or to full
of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is
morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on
people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and
betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes
up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone,
so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns
— when the article or book appears — his hard
lesson.
Generally I think that Janet Malcolm is wrong — that the
journalist’s craft is morally defensible insofar as it is accurate,
informs the public about matters of importance and doesn’t
embarrass its subject more than is necessary. Sometimes that
justifies writing pretty stern stuff. Two instructive examples are
recent devastating takedowns of Tim Russert, a colleague of Mr.
Matthews at NBC.
My colleague
Matthew Yglesias and
Paul Waldman make overlapping points.
Here’s Matt:
Viewers watch a candidate getting grilled by
Russert not to assess the candidate’s views but to assess his or
her ability to withstand the grilling. And, when this sort
of toughness and sparring becomes its own reward, the vacuity of
the questioning is almost guaranteed. After all, if you asked a
politician a serious, important question and got a perfectly good
answer, then maybe, for a moment, you couldn’t be tough. Instead,
Russert relies on his crutch of confronting politicians with
allegedly contradictory statements they’ve made-to highly
monotonous effect.
And Waldman:
I have a fantasy that at one of these moments, a
candidate will say, “You know what, Tim, I’m not going to answer
that question. This is serious business. And you, sir, are a
disgrace. You have in front of you a group of accomplished,
talented leaders, one of whom will in all likelihood be the next
president of the United States. You can ask them whatever you want.
And you choose to engage in this ridiculous gotcha game, thinking
up inane questions you hope will trick us into saying something
controversial or stupid. Your fondest hope is that the answer to
your question will destroy someone’s campaign. You’re not a
journalist, you’re the worst kind of hack, someone whose efforts
not only don’t contribute to a better informed electorate, they
make everyone dumber. So no, I’m not going to stand here and try to
come up with the most politically safe Bible verse to cite. Is that
the best you can do?”
So why do I abide
that level of excoriation
but feel repelled by the Chris Matthews profile? I think it’s
because the Tim Russert pieces are important to public discourse —
they present plausible, substantive and useful arguments for why
the style of a man who presides over our presidential debates is
harmful to our politics. Chris Matthews is a similarly powerful
figure who holds sway over American political debate, you might
say, and that’s true enough. I wouldn’t object to every critical
piece about him.
But the NY Times Magazine piece goes to great pains to
show that Matthews is arrogant, insecure, boorish — actually, it
revels in each supporting detail — not to make some useful point
about how cable news might be better, or some other arguably useful
point, but merely for the sake of an entertaining profile (or less
charitably because the writer dislikes Matthews). I suppose one
could argue that as an influential public figure it’s somehow
useful that we all know Mr. Matthews better, which brings me to the
most damning detail of all — at profile’s end, for all the
excruciating detail Mr. Matthews has suffered, I don’t actually
feel as though I’ve learned very much useful new information about
him.
After all, who can watch even a few minutes of Chris Matthews
without understanding his persona — the rough around the edges
smarts, the occasional boorishness, the ego, the insecurity, etc?
Why embarrass and shame someone for the sake of revealing what’s
obvious to everyone already?
