MSNBC'S Matthews Slams 'NBC Nightly News'

Moving into the same building as NBC doesn't seem to have made MSNBC's Chris Matthews any more of a team player. The Hardball host was a phone-in guest last Thursday on Morning Joe, where a discussion of Hillary Clinton's performance in the latest debate abruptly gave way to a Matthews monologue about the declining value of NBC Nightly News:

MATTHEWS: Now you have to understand that this program we're on right now and the program I'm on in the afternoon and especially Keith, we are financing this network.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: I hear ya.

MATTHEWS: Get the message. We are the future...

MIKA: Yeah!

MATTHEWS: And if you think the future is Nightly, fine, because it's a brilliant broadcast and Brian does a brilliant job-

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Oh my god, here we go...

MATTHEWS: ...but the ages of the people that watch those shows are primarily concerned with pain relief, okay? Pain relief. So if you want to go into the pain relief business, that's sure going to be your deliverance from what we do and that's going to be where you want to be. Well, that's fine, but that is in fact going into an area that's not profitable.

And Matthews's rant, which prompted uncomfortable looks and nervous laughter from Scarborough and Brzezinski, wasn't his first riff on the subject. Back in 2004, on his own program, he panned all three network news broadcast, saying, "It seems like pain relief is the No. 1 theme of the nightly news... They're beyond Cialis and Viagra. They don't even bother."

Network envy, anyway?