NY Times' Leibovich does hatch job on Chris Matthews

I have been on Matthews' show only four times, but he always struck me as a basically nice guy. Even though he obviously disagreed with me on the gun issue, I remember the first time I was on his show he mentioned how his brothers had given him a hard time to get me on the show and during a break he leaned over and told me that he thought that I was doing a good job. He was just a nice, decent guy each time I was on the show.

In any case, NY TImes reporter Mark Leibovich is a vicious guy and really must have had an ax to grind against Matthews.

When I asked Matthews about the bloviator stigma, he dismissed it as jealousy or at the very least ignorance among those who don’t know him or who don’t regularly watch his Sunday show or who have not read his books or who are not aware that he is a student of history and film or that he is on the board of trustees of the Churchill Center or that he has received — did he mention? — 19 honorary degrees. (Breaking honorary-degree news: Matthews told me in late March that he expects to be up to at least 22 later this spring.) . . .

Other times it just makes Chris appear like a sad figure:

[Matthews] urged me repeatedly to call the Pennsylvania governor’s office and “talk to Eddie Rendell about me.”

Making it appear as if he was trying to use the NY Times reporter to ingratiate himself with Rendell.

Matthews has an attuned sense of pecking order — at MSNBC, at NBC, in Washington and in life. This is no great rarity among the fragile egos of TV or, for that matter, in the status-fixated world of politics. But Matthews is especially frontal about it. In an interview with Playboy a few years ago, he volunteered that he had made the list of the Top 50 journalists in D.C. in The Washingtonian magazine. “I’m like 36th, and Tim Russert is No. 1,” Matthews told Playboy. “I would argue for a higher position for myself.”

So much of how this comes off depends upon context and tone. If Matthews is saying these things with a smile and as a joke, it doesn't have anywhere near the level of desperation implied by the reporter. A good friend of mine noted the possibility that the reporter was probably telling Matthews what a good pall he was of his in order to get Matthews to open up. I have seen reporters do this all too often, and it is quite believable to me.