The political analyst fired by MSNBC over his Charlie Kirk commentary says his former employer agreed with him that his remarks were being misconstrued as “insensitive” – but said “it didn’t matter” to the network, and they dismissed him anyway.
“I said: ‘I think you guys are making a huge mistake,’” Matthew Dowd recounted on Katie Couric’s podcast in an episode launched Friday that addressed his purported pre-firing discussions with MSNBC. “I said: ‘You know and I know that’s not anything what I meant. You know it’s been misconstrued,’ and they agreed with that.
“They agreed it had been misconstrued. But they said it didn’t matter. The decision’s been made.”
Dowd’s statements to Couric – who has previously worked for CBS, NBC and ABC – came a little more than a week after he became one of the highest-profile instances of people across the US either being fired from or disciplined at their jobs over commentary about Kirk’s shooting death in Utah on 10 September.
In the immediate aftermath of the killing, as a senior political analyst for the network, Dowd suggested on MSNBC that the far-right provocateur’s own rhetoric may have contributed to the shooting that killed him.
“I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions,” he said on the network. “You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have saying these awful words, and then not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”
Dowd also contended that at that point of the investigation, Kirk’s having been killed by a supporter firing off a gun in celebration could not be ruled out. Authorities have since said that the man they arrested as the suspect in the killing acted out of feeling sick of Kirk’s “hatred”.
MSNBC publicly condemned Dowd’s analysis as “inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable”.
Dowd’s remarks to Couric built on a Substack article he published on 12 September in which he accused MSNBC of caving to a “right wing media mob” which had taken to “a plethora of platforms” and dishonestly framed his on-air thoughts about Kirk. He said he spoke at a time when “the only thing known … was shots were fired and there was no reporting yet that Kirk was the target or had been shot at” during the event at Utah Valley University where he was killed.
In his conversation with Couric, Dowd also expressed confusion over what he perceived to be a greater degree of outrage among his former MSNBC compatriots with ABC’s decision to indefinitely suspend late-night talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel over commentary about the Trump administration’s response to Kirk’s death.
“All the shows are talking about how this is awful for America that Jimmy Kimmel was indefinitely suspended,” Dowd said. “And now … they’re talking … not an iota about what their employer just did to another employee.”
MSNBC didn’t immediately respond when given an opportunity to comment on Dowd’s interview with Couric.
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