Matthews, Chris

Chris Matthews, in full Christopher Matthews, (born December 17, 1945, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.), American journalist and political commentator best known as the host of Hardball with Chris Matthews, a nightly talk show on the television news network MSNBC.

Matthews was raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia and graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in 1967. He studied economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and served in the Peace Corps from 1968 to 1970. For the next 15 years, Matthews worked in politics and government, running unsuccessfully for the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat in 1974. During the Jimmy Carter administration he served as a presidential speechwriter and as a press-relations officer for the President’s Reorganization Project, a program to restructure various executive offices, agencies, and departments. In the 1980s he was the top aide of House speaker Thomas P. (“Tip”) O’Neill.

Matthews’s media career began in print journalism in 1987, when he became the Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner, a position he held until 2000. He also wrote a nationally syndicated column for two years for the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1997 Matthews began hosting his own talk show, Hardball, in which he interviewed public officials and political pundits. During the course of the show, Matthews routinely played “hardball” with his guests by entering into debate or pursuing a hard line of questioning. In 2002 The Chris Matthews Show, a weekend panel discussion program, began its syndicated broadcast on MSNBC; the show ended in 2013. Matthews also routinely appeared as a commentator on other programs on both MSNBC and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) television network. Following a series of controversial on-air comments and accusations of sexist remarks, Matthews abruptly resigned from MSNBC in 2020.

Matthews wrote a number of popular books, including Hardball (1988), which was the basis of his show; the biographies Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero (2011) and Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit (2017); and Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (2013). His memoir, This Country: My Life in Politics and History, was published in 2021.