http://mediamatters.org/items/200703050006During a discussion of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's strengths in the Republican presidential primaries, on the March 5 edition of NBC's Today, Chris Matthews listed among Giuliani's strengths that he "cleaned up the streets of New York so you could walk in the subways without smelling urine" and "made the city safe and clean and smell better."
Media Matters for America has noted previous examples (here and here) of Matthews, host of MSNBC's Hardball, touting the alleged progress Giuliani made in improving olfactory conditions in New York subways when he was mayor, saying that "
ou don't smell the urine in the subways when he was mayor" and asking, "How did he get the pee smell out of the subway?" Matthews also previously claimed that Giuliani "got the pee smell out of the phone booths" in New York.
But Matthews' apparent fascination with the "pee smell" in New York's transit system started even before speculation about Giuliani's presumptive run for president in 2008. Eight years ago, on the February 9, 1999, edition of Hardball, then on CNBC, Matthews said to Michael Tomasky, then of New York Magazine and now of The American Prospect, "The smell that you always got on the subway of urine seems to be gone for some reason," and added, "Even the phone booths smell better." Matthews and Tomasky were discussing whether Giuliani could beat then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in a U.S. Senate race in New York. In an interview with Giuliani on the March 3, 1999, edition of Hardball, Matthews said that "he subway doesn't smell of urine anymore for some reason," and asked, "How did you stop that smell?"
However, in a July 30, 1999, interview, actress and comedian Janeane Garofalo strongly disagreed with Matthews. Matthews asked, "How come that pee smell is gone from the subway that used to be there for the last century?" and added, "He must have done something to clean -- it doesn't smell like that." Garofalo responded by noting that "the urine stench is in full effect in this city," and added that "in the heat wave, it has -- it seems to be exacerbated." When Matthews, a resident of the Washington, D.C., area, insisted that the urine smell was gone, Garofalo, who lives in New York, flatly stated: "You're living in a dream world. It's all over the place."
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