On his Wednesday radio show, conservative talker and Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity elaborated on an argument about MSNBC “Hardball” host Chris Matthews’ willingness to play the race card against conservatives and Republicans, saying that NBC News — through its cable network MSNBC and, notably, Matthews — coordinates with the Obama White House and other liberal outfits to spread a lie that conservatives are racist.
“I want to deal with Chris Matthews here because Chris Matthews represents something that, frankly, like everybody else at NBC News, he’s just basically become an extension of the Obama press office,” Hannity said. “Let’s be honest, it’s all it is at NBC News. They meet with the White House, talk with them. Media Matters also brags about writing their [MSNBC’s] prime-time news scripts, etc., etc. So let’s just deal with what we’ve got on the table here and I would say that this — this is a coordination effort that’s been going a long time and I’m a little bit sick and tired of it. And we’re going to have a pretty long debate on this later in the show today, but it is frustrating to me that some of this false narrative about what it means to be a conservative has stuck because a lie has been repeated often enough.”
Hannity contended that it was a lie for the Democratic Party to use Matthews to further the message that President Barack Obama is a victim of hatred because of the color of his skin.
“[I]t is not just the Democratic Party that’s doing it,” he said. “Their willing accomplices, in this case NBC News, via Chris Matthews, is pretty much advancing a narrative that continues to leave impressions that conservatives in this country are racist, that criticism against Obama somehow is rooted in deep-seated hatred because of the color of his skin. And it is a lie.”
Hannity play a montage of Matthews’ racism accusations against Obama’s critics over the years on his “Hardball” program, and countered that the president’s critics weren’t motivated by race but by vetting Obama.
“He sees racism everywhere,” Hannity said. “Now, racism does exist and, thankfully, more and more Americans shun those that have racial views and racist views. The only one that seems racially obsessed here is Chris Matthews in making a false narrative, a smear campaign against good people — conservatives, Republicans in many cases — that just have different policy views than him. And so the knee-jerk reaction to smear, slander, besmirch and intimidate them and silence them is to label them and everybody and everything, apparently, racist, which is not true.”
“Now I would say that part of this narrative, unfortunately, has crept in the culture because it’s used so often by the Democrats and by their willing accomplices in the media,” he continued. “Let me explain to the Chris Matthews of the world where the criticism of Barack Obama is. We did the job here on this program, Chris. Maybe you should have done a little vetting of Obama in the past — his radical views, associations, etc. I would think you would have been concerned, but you weren’t.”