Thanks to Eric Boehlert for this:
"More than six years ago, long before Hillary Clinton began running for president, the Philadelphia Inquirer magazine reported that, according to an MSNBC colleague, Matthews had said of Clinton: "I hate her. I hate her. All that she stands for."" https://www.mediamatters.org/legacy/media-matters-jamison-foser-121
‘’The media's apparent belief that it is acceptable to say any damn thing they want, true or false, as long as they say it about the Clintons, has become known as the "Clinton Rules of Journalism."’’ http://mediamatters.org/items/200802220015?f=h_column
‘'Why had the Times granted anonymity to the ''New York Democrats''? The Times didn't say -- and Chris Matthews didn't give a damn; he was just thrilled that the paper had issued its ''warning.'' Of course, back then, the targets of the Times' article were the Clintons, and Chris Matthews very much does not like the Clintons.
Now the subject of a Times article relying on unnamed sources is McCain, who Matthews thinks ''deserves'' to be president. And so Matthews now righteously denounces the same sourcing techniques that he didn't mind at all when the subject was Clinton.'' http://mediamatters.org/items/200802220015?f=h_column
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW (11/00): To “moderate,” according to Webster's, is to “keep within bounds.” That definition, however, can hardly be applied to the performance of NBC's Tim Russert in his role as moderator of the September 13 televised debate between the Democratic and Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate from New York.
Twenty minutes into the hour Russert pitched a question to Hillary Clinton that was breath-takingly out of bounds. Confronting her with a replay of her interview on the Today show in January 1998 - an interview in which the first lady had loyally backed her husband's initial denials of an affair with Monica Lewinsky and suggested that right-wing enemies were orchestrating the scandal - Russert first asked the senatorial candidate,“ Do you regret misleading the American people?” then went on to challenge her thusly: “In that same interview you said that those who were criticizing the president were part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. Amongst those eventually criticizing the president were Joe Lieberman. Would you now apologize for branding people as part of a vast right-wing conspiracy?”
So gratuitous was the exhumation of an incident that most of the American people had long laid to rest; so specious was the logic of lumping together “critics,” “Joe Lieberman,” and “vast right-wing conspiracy”; so inappropriate was the question to the event at hand, that a viewer could only puzzle over Russert's judgment in raising the issue. In any case, whether Clinton or Lazio won that debate was anybody's guess. Far more obvious was that Russert - and journalism - lost.
