The Chris Matthews Hardball-in-Mouth Apology Tour

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By Lloyd Grove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 20, 2002; Page C03

Our friend Chris Matthews awoke Monday morning to find some extremely unpleasant remarks he made about Ted Koppel and Jim Lehrer quoted in Post reporter Howard Kurtz's media column. By day's end, the MSNBC "Hardball" host had written an abject letter to Koppel, the anchor of ABC's "Nightline," and paid a visit to Lehrer at Arlington's WETA-TV, where the PBS anchor presides over "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer."

Among Matthews's choicer quotes, uttered last week during a Cable Television Public Affairs lunch:

• On Koppel and "Nightline": "I think we in the cable business have overtaken them. I'm already rerun twice before Koppel's got his act together." On the recent flap involving David Letterman: "Koppel, if you can't make it in the market, go work for public television for 200 [thousand] a year instead of $7 million."

• On Lehrer's hour-long nightly show: "What is it -- eight hours long? I never sat all the way through it."

Around 1 p.m. Monday, "NewsHour" staffers were surprised when Matthews showed up seeking an urgent meeting with Lehrer, who was just waking up from his afternoon nap. Lehrer and his grim-looking petitioner disappeared behind closed doors. "He apologized and I quickly, without hesitation, accepted his apology," Lehrer recounted yesterday. "I was quite struck that he came to my office unannounced. I told him, 'This is water under the bridge, don't worry about it.' "

Koppel, meanwhile, told us: "He wrote me a lovely letter. As far as I'm concerned he has made a sincere and, I'm sure, genuine apology, and the apology is accepted."

Matthews sighed: "I felt it was not just my professional but my personal responsibility to show my respect to real guys who are ahead of me and certainly have accomplished more. I wanted them individually to know how I felt. I've always felt that I am trying to be an iconoclast and to sail against the wind. But sometimes the establishment is right. I was wrong. I clearly shouldn't have done it."

© 2002 The Washington Post Company