MSNBC: The Network America Turns to for Irresponsible Speculation About News

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You can call Chris Matthews anything you want — “dimwitted political hack” would be entirely appropriate — but please don’t insult an entire profession by calling Chris Matthews a “journalist.”

On March 30, Kaufman County, Texas, district attorney Mike McLelland and his wife were shot to death at their home. Five days later, Chris Matthews invited Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center onto MSNBC to promote speculation that McLelland’s murder was committed by the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang.

In other words, the important thing about this crime — the thing that made it worth eight minutes of national network air time — was that it gave Chris Matthews a chance to stoke the paranoia of MSNBC viewers with the bogeyman specter of dangerously violent racists who (as all MSNBC viewers know) are the core constituency of the Republican Party.

Fast-forward 11 days, and Chris Matthews is completely discredited by the latest headlines:

What? It wasn’t scary white supremacists highlighted in an eight-minute MSNBC segment? Nobody that Mark Potok warned us about? Not even a Tea Party member? No, a disgraced lawyer with a personal grudge:

A former justice of the peace who had been prosecuted for stealing computers was arrested Saturday on charges of sending threatening e-mails to officials in Kaufman County, Texas. Authorities are reportedly prepared to charge disgraced lawyer Eric Lyle Williams, 46, with three murders that had inflamed fears that members of a white supremacist prison gang were targeting law enforcement officials.
Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland, 63, and his wife, Cynthia McLelland, 65, were shot to death two weeks ago at their home, two months after Assistant District Attorney Mark E. Hasse, 57, was shot to death in a parking lot near the county courthouse. Haase had prosecuted Williams last year, and McLelland had told investigators that they should focus on Williams as a suspect in Haase’s murder.
Williams’s law license was suspended after he was convicted of the theft charges. He was arrested early Saturday and is being held in the Kaufman County jail on $3 million bond. Williams will be charged with three counts of capital murder, Dallas CBS affiliate KTVT reported, citing unnamed sources. . . .

Read the whole thing at Viral Read, and don’t ever try to tell me that Chris Matthews is a “journalist.” That’s an insult.

UPDATE: KFAA-TV in Houston reports the latest news that MSNBC and Chris Matthews will ignore:

News 8 has learned that 20 weapons were recovered from a unit at a Seagoville self-storage locker in connection with the unsolved Kaufman County murders.
Sources said the locker had been rented on behalf of former Kaufman County Justice of the Peace Eric Williams, who is curently jailed on unrelated charges.
A source tells News 8 federal investigators are conducting ballistics tests on the weapons, which are similar to those used to kill Kaufman County prosecutor Mark Hasse on January 31 and District Attorney Mike McClelland and his wife Cynthia, who were found dead at their home on March 30.
Sources said investigators also seized a Ford Crown Victoria sedan from the storage facility that was allegedly purchased by Williams back in February under a false name.
Sources said they have surveillance video of that vehicle driving into and out of the McLellands’ neighborhood on the day they were slain.

Remember: Murders are only important to MSNBC when they can be exploited to advance a political agenda.

Chris Matthews won’t say another word about this case — unless it can be proven that Eric Williams is a Republican.

UPDATE II: Ed Driscoll quotes Buffalo Springfield (a rock band from the Sixties, in case you youngsters were wondering) and I believe the word for this is, “Heh”:

UPDATE III: Headline by Doug Hagin at Daley Gator:

MSNBC: When you want your
news completely fabricated

Patterico is on the story, which is now a Memeorandum thread.

UPDATE IV: Linked by Moe Lane — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers!

Meanwhile, I’ve added a new post: How the Left’s Online Meme Machine Helped Create a Murder Myth in Texas

 

 


50 comments

  3. To be fair the fact these murders happened around the same time as the murder of the Bureau of Prisons guy in Colorado, speculation ran rampant. I was wondering if it was a Mexican Cartel myself. Hope they have the right guy on this case and that they nail him to the wall.

  4. Look at the picture the guy is white therefore he is racist. In future all white crime will be hate crime because all whites are racist thank you MSNBC.

  6. […] NBC’s Chris Matthews once responded to an incident involving Rand Paul by saying that “it reminds me of the ’30s in another country.” But then, everything reminds Chris Matthews of the 1930s in another country, a mindset which recently led to wild on-air speculation, fueled by the help of  — who else? — the Southern “Poverty” Law Center, as Stacy McCain writes: […]

  9. The reality of the matter [which the Left will never tell you] is that if you read the manifestos of groups like the Aryan Brotherhood you will find they are Leftists.

  15. They certainly live in their own little world at MSNBC. I’ve come to the conclusion that liberals rationalize their lives away. They’re pathetic.

  18. Maybe they should just change the name of his show from Hardball to Nutball. Truth in advertising, you know.

  20. Ask for Chris Matthews and his show to be moved from MSNBC to SyFy. It seems to be a better fit.

  21. The story might have been fake, but it was accurate. The facts MIT have been wrong, but the narrative was right. We need to stop blaming Islamists and drug cartels for everything when the real threat are the Aryan Nations and the Jesus freaks.

  22. apparently, he did run as a Republican: “No Democrats faced contested primary races, but Sarah Whitaker was re-elected as party chairman while incumbent Precinct 1 Justice of the Peace Johnny Perry and County Clerk candidate Sophia Clemon each earned their party’s nomination for the general election. In November, Perry will face a challenge from Republican Eric Williams while Clemon will seek to unseat incumbent Laura Hughes, a Republican.” http://www.kaufmanherald.com/news/article_b9db40e5-806a-5880-a7f4-80261945c17d.html

  23. WFAA (8) is the Belo station in Dallas. KHOU (11) is the Belo station in Houston. Never heard of KFAA before.

  25. Simple misunderstanding: Chrissie isn’t a “journalist” in the traditional sense, he’s a “journ-o-list-er” par excellence. Of course, the goals of the secret media cabal founded by Ezra “The Poor Man’s Goebbels” Klein have nothing to do with facts or truth, but only in twisting them to fit the political needs of the left.

    Similarly, no rational and informed person takes the raving of the likes of Deese shill Potok seriously, they understand it is just another complimentary infomercial for SPLC. Since they were still raising the specter of the KKK to raise money for more than a decade after the Klan was effectively dead, they’ve had to move on to work in the “Aryan Nation”/White Supremacists/Militia Movement angle on every appearance.

    It’s all about scaring loose the purse strings of rich white liberals, that’s all.

  27. So what is the connection/relationship between Eric Williams, Chris Matthews, and the SPLC? Just asking questioons here!

  28. you punch him I’ll chop his head off and then we can piss on him and pour some manure on his dead body, then take him out to a field where some vultures are and dispose of the body that goes for the entire network of bsnbc even rich madcow the commie whore bitch

  32. […] was behind the shootings which is something that MSNBC and The Southern Law Poverty Center have been pushing pretty hard.  Doesn’t matter for SPLC because they probably reached funding goals after spreading that […]

  33. Thufferin’ thuccotash!

    Slobbering Chris Matthews lets the contents of his tiny little “mind” out on the American public, and once again his demented fairy tales turn out to be nothing but paranoia and character assassination. Once again he’s proved to be a demented, lying guttersnipe.

    On the Southern Poverty law Center, I recommend the current issue of the Weekly Standard, with their article “King of Fearmongers.” They basically say, Morris Dees is and was more interested in money and the main chance than law or justice.

  34. You didn’t even mention that NPR spent an hour of national radio time blaming the prison gangs for the murder on their “Talk of the Nation” show.

  35. Can’t say it often enough, the left is insane, more so Matthews & Mark Potok. No evidence at all penetrates their shrivelled, diseased, remnants of a brain. Sick and dangerous because LittleLeftists, looney themselves, take them seriously.

  40. I knew the moment they started talking about the Aryan Botherhood that it was just an attempt to sensationalize the story. And of course it has to be a far right racist group that instantly gets fingered as the culprit.

  44. Facts are not important to Matthews and his ilk. According to Homeland Security’s own report, from 1970 to 2008, there were 58 terrorist attacks in the U.S. linked to right wing groups. However, there were 364 linked to left wing groups in the same time period. But the liars and criminals who masquerade as the mainstream news media willfully and maliciously suppress that fact.

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