I don’t know if Michael Matt would deny that I was the man urging him to take the Internet seriously when I wrote for his paper over 20 years ago. I remember the written discussions fairly clearly.  Suffice it to say he was very reluctant. A Print edition was enough for him, he told me several times.

But Matt is hardly dumb and he apparently pondered the matter over time and came to see things as I saw them. In fact he eventually plunged into “the virtual highway”, and, like everybody else,  plunged into visual media and sought to become a more cynical Catholic version of Walter Cronkite.

Matt is known for hedging his bets and getting just close enough to the serious issues of the day without owning many of them outright and explicitly (Remember the SSPX / FSSP controversies? The “neoCatholic” aggression?) — because he has always wanted almost everyone to like and agree with him, or at least to sympathize with him (he’s not a bad actor). It’s good for stacking up “views” and ratings. And he piles them up; he commissions others to do the dirty, nasty, work behind the scenes. He’s the good Cop.

When I helped to get Matt to take the Internet seriously back then, I hadn’t anticipated visual media where he has since become a real personality, a veritable lion of the “show” business. Visual media  barely existed back in 1995 or whatever year it was. But I inadvertently helped to unleash a real showman who is bound to please all, the good Christians, the Muslim-cheerleaders and the crackpots. –at least for a time until the winds change.