Famed television host and journalist Chris Matthews was brought to campus by the Foreign Affairs Symposium Monday to discuss the way media affects the war. Matthews is a former congressional aide and presidential speechwriter who currently hosts MSNBC's "Hardball" and NBC's "Chris Matthews Show."
He began by noting that "everybody who is American should have a strong view, a perspective" on the war in Iraq; his opinion, he continued, most often leads him to ask the question of "whether it was smart -- a question which drives a lot of people crazy." This inquiry, however, serves as the driving force behind his contemplation of the media's role in the war in Iraq.
Matthews, who entered the Peace Corps for two years and worked as a teacher in Africa before going into journalism, noted the importance of both a formal education and "a life's education" before entering into the field.
"That's your instinct, what drives you. c9 You do it because you want to catch the bad guys. You want to be a crusader, an exposer," he said. "You want to expose the truth when people in power don't want it exposed." This desire was lacking, Matthews felt, in most journalists before the war in Iraq was begun.
Of equal importance, Matthews said, is a journalistic perspective which is based in knowledge of colonial history. Matthews said, "Journalists themselves, column writers, never really questioned the historic argument being made here: that we as a Western, white country should go into a third world country and take it over and change it. No one wanted to take that debate based on simple history c9 based on the entire pattern -- 200 years of experience in colonialism and decolonization. Is there any evidence that another country is going to let a Western power go into their country and change them by force and leave pleasantly?"
It was the "lack of good ideological contention" which caused the media "to never really come to the front and say 'It's time to debate the war, the consequences of the war, the costs of the war, and where it's going to take us when we get there.'" Such a debate would have lent more perspective, Matthews noted, who added that debates shouldn't be seen as arguments against the war, but rather as the job of a journalist.
Instead of debate, discussion, or inquiry, there was, according to Matthews, "a relentless push, push, push to go to war. They [Congress] gave a blank check. And he [President Bush] used it. Who doesn't use a blank check?"
The tying-in of 9/11 paired with the fear of nuclear weapons was, Matthews said, "the background music for the war," and journalists, rather than questioning, were eager to be involved. The war "is not a sports event," Matthews said. "It's not about getting the best tickets." Eighty journalists, he noted, have been killed covering the war.
Recalling his own early experiences as a journalist abroad, Matthews considers himself "so lucky [to] cover things like the fall of the Berlin Wall, to actually be there. I was walking around in the rain, interviewing people, asking what freedom meant to them."
In 1994, Matthews was in South Africa at "the amazing election of Nelson Mandela." He described watching a man vote for the first time at the age of 66, and the people who waited in "biblically long lines" to cast their vote.
Today, as in the case of the beginning of the war in Iraq, "journalists are not as skeptical as they should be. But it's not just skepticism of the kind I love, but a historic sense of Western history in dealings with the third world."
