With much of the political world tuned into CNBC for the first Republican presidential debate, MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews ran wild on Wednesday and fessed up to the fact that Hillary Clinton has “got allies in the media” and not “some evil forces” out to attack Clinton as some liberals believe.

Prior to Matthews’s admission, MSNBC political analyst and former Democratic Vermont Governor Howard Dean praised NBC News Clinton correspondent and MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell for her September 4 interview with Clinton that he dubbed “refreshing” because it “stop[ped] the pack journalism of all the e-mail stuff.”

Pressed by Matthews to elaborate, Dean expanded upon his backward blaming of the media for the candidate’s multiple scandals:

The pack journalism has to do with the e-mail fascination. There’s nothing to it. Never has been. It was a story that was covered for four straight months, mindlessly, based on a whole bunch of stuff printed not true in some of the most recordable papers in the United States.

Responding to Dean’s bloviating, Matthews had a few lines of his own by owning up to the true intentions of the liberal media that “there are a lot of force groups” out there “working for Hillary” and thus there’s little to the notion that “there’s some evil forces out there against them.”

Instead, Matthews ruled: “There’s a lot of countervailing forces out there as well, right...She has allies. She’s got allies — in the media.”

The relevant portion of the transcript from MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews on October 28 can be found below.