'Hardball' & dumbed-down US politics

This past week, grappling with the twin top stories of Haiti's earthquake tragedy and the Massachusetts Senate race, MSNBC's Chris Matthews personified the strange mix of puffed-up self-importance and total lack of self-awareness that has come to define America's media punditocracy. During "Hardball" programs of recent days, Matthews has veered from pontificating about how the killer earthquake in Haiti might finally cause its people to get "serious" about their politics to explaining how Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley deserves to lose, in part, because she called ex-Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling "a Yankees fan." Not only did Matthews's remarks about Haitian politics reflect a profound ignorance about that country and its history, but he seemed blissfully clueless about his own role as a purveyor of political trivia over substance in his dozen years as a TV talk-show host in the United States, as demonstrated in his poll-and-gaffe-obsessed coverage of the important Massachusetts Senate race. Indeed, Matthews may be the archetype of what's wrong with the U.S. news media, a devotee of conventional wisdom who splashes in the shallowest baby pool of American politics while pretending to be the big boy who's diving into the deep end.