Glenn Beck has expressed on-air desires to strangle Michael Moore with his own hands, beat Charles Rangel to death with a shovel, and once aired a sketch on his Fox News show that had him poisoning then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Appearing on the Today show this morning (1/19/11), responding to questions about his frequent murder fantasies (a specialty of Fox News personalities), Beck told host  Meredith Vieira that he was just being funny. Beck said the host should ask Jon Stewart and the Simpsons the same question. "Comedy is comedy," he explained.

Vieira did not point out that while Beck is a political commentator, the Simpsons is a cartoon, and Stewart is a comedian who is not known for fantasizing about the murder of people with whom he disagrees.

The reader can decide if continuous on-air fantasizing about the murderous deaths of one's political foes is okay, as long as one says he is joking.

I think it's a problem, not least because hateful jokes are not always harmless, and because it's often not clear when Beck is joking. After all, when one has just concluded a tirade against someone they portrayed as among the dark  forces trying to steal the country, with a whimsical fantasy about that someone's violent death--well, I think you get the point.

And sometimes Beck's violent fantasies are clearly not jokes.

In March 2003, Beck was one of the most energetic war mongers in the country. He was organizing and addressing pro-war rallies for his radio employer, Clear Channel, and using his national radio show to disparage and smear anti-war figures on a regular basis. In a program I heard on WABC-AM in New York City (3/16/03), Beck inveighed furiously against the anti-war activism of Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D.-Ohio), in a tirade that concluded with the host, in all angry sincerity, wishing to see Kucinich burned alive: "Every night I get down on my knees and pray that Dennis Kucinich will burst into flames."

But comedy is comedy, as Beck would say.

Last night on Fox News (12/22/10), Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly attempted to defend GOP opposition to the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010, which would provide health care for 9/11 Ground Zero workers.

In his final broadcast of the year (12/16/10), Comedy Central's Jon Stewart devoted the entire show to lambasting the Republican opposition. Stewart's attention to the issue seems to have pushed other media outlets to pay attention to this issue. (With any luck, we'll remember this the next time there's a "debate" about people watching a comedy show instead of "real" news.)

Rove and O'Reilly's defense of GOP intransigence is hardly worth recounting. What was notable was their suggestion that Jon Stewart suspiciously developed an interest in this story just last week:

ROVE: But look, where was Mr. Stewart earlier this year--

O'REILLY: He didn't know about it.

ROVE: --when they weren't doing voodoo diddly squat to move this through? Where was the president of the United States?

O'REILLY: Look, look, look--you know the answers to these questions. You know the answer to these questions. They're demagoguing the issue now.

ROVE: Absolutely.

O'REILLY: Because they've squeezed it into a corner where they want to pass it tomorrow.

This is, unsurprisingly, false. Stewart did a report on the health bill in August (8/4/10), when he blasted Congressional Republicans and Democrats for the failure to pass the bill--leading him to declare about the political process,  "I give up."  You can watch it here. And send it to Bill O'Reilly while you're at it (oreilly@foxnews.com).

The New York Times' David Carr (9/20/10) compares involvement by media figures in politics--exemplified by CNBC's Rick Santelli and various Fox News figures fueling the Tea Party movement, and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's dueling answer rallies to said movement--to "a football game where the reporters and commentators, bored by the feckless proceedings on the field, suddenly poured out of the press box and took over the game." Writes Carr: "In politics, it seems as if the media is intent on not just keeping score but also calling plays."

Regardless of what one thinks of any particular media figure's political advocacy, it should be remembered--in a nation that was basically imagined into existence by a political commentator named Thomas Paine--that there is nothing at all unusual or alarming about people writing and talking about politics in the hopes of affecting the course of political life. Indeed, that's the most obvious reason to become a political journalist, and the assumed role of journalism that underlies the First Amendment. It's only the corporate media tradition of trying to conceal the political opinions of journalists in the hopes of marketing the broadest possible audience to advertisers that makes it seem natural to think of journalists as people who ought to confine themselves to "keeping score" rather than getting directly involved in the sport of politics.

Eyeing a new poll that "revealed that one in four Americans now believe that the 'faux' news delivered by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is replacing 'real' news sources as viable outlets," Greg Mitchell (Editor & Publisher, 5/5/09) has to wonder "if the remaining (if relatively low) public respect for the press is gone for good":

Yes, the delivery platform of the future will change--the Kindle, iPhone apps or rubbery plastic may replace paper everywhere--but the content still has to be credible. And now it must be said: The media blew both of the major catastrophes of our time.

I speak, of course, of the Iraq war and the financial meltdown. I wrote a book about the first, calling it So Wrong for So Long. I could write a sequel on the second disaster, and maybe title it So Wrong Again.

Even though "individual reporters at certain papers did some fine watchdog work," Mitchell writes that their efforts were "to no avail" and that "defenders of the press in this matter are cherry-picking the good stuff, much like Bush with his intelligence on Iraqi WMDs."

See Extra!: "Busted Bubble: The Press Fell Down on the Job on Housing Prices" (11-12/08) By Veronica Cassidy.

Jon Stewart (3/17/09) has found Glenn Beck expressing his philosophy in what may be its purest form:

Believe in something!  Even if it's wrong! Believe in it!

Many observers praised the Daily Show's Jon Stewart for his hard-hitting interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer. Columnist Richard Cohen (Washington Post, 3/17/09) begs to differ.

Actually, Stewart was "wrong" to go after Cramer, Cohen wrote--it was a "cheap shot at business media." His main argument is that Stewart charged that Cramer "knew all the time what was happening" at game-playing financial companies, but Cohen has a list of CEOs at such firms who lost money on their own company's stock, so even they must not have known what was really going on: "When someone puts his money where his mouth is, you have to pay attention. The big shots believed." It's a variation on the "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" argument: If they're now poor, they must be innocent.

There are several things wrong with this line of reasoning. For one, it's really not so easy to take the money and run--or else Bernie Madoff would have made off with more of the $65 billion he stole. For companies slightly more legitimate than Madoff's, there are disclosure requirements that make a CEOs cashing in their stock the surest way to send the value of that stock hurtling toward zero.

And it's unlikely that any of Cohen's hard-luck moguls are actually now in the poor house. One of them, Citicorp's Sanford Weill, is still on Forbes' list of the 400 richest people in the world, though his net worth has fallen from $1.8 billion to $1.3 billion. That's still more than the GDP of 34 countries.

Cohen provides a helpful link to a story about his exhibit A, AIG's Maurice Greenberg, who lost a billion in stock. That piece ends with this:

Greenberg was forced out of AIG during a controversy in 2005 when the company restated its financial statements for the previous five years, acknowledging accounting improprieties including "improper or inappropriate transactions."

New York regulators later accused AIG, Greenberg and the company's former chief financial officer of orchestrating an accounting scheme that made AIG's financial picture appear brighter than it was, misleading both investors and regulators.

Yeah, in 2005.  Not actually very good evidence for Cohen's "how could anyone have known?" case.

Passing over Cohen's subsidiary argument that even Cohen himself was fooled by AIG, so what chance did Cramer have, what comes through most strongly in Cohen's column is his contempt for journalism:

The role that Cramer and other financial journalists played was incidental. There was not much they could do, anyway. They do not have subpoena power. They cannot barge into AIG and demand to see the books, and even if they could, they would not have known what they were looking at.

As Cohen later spells out, this is a variation of the don't-blame-the-media argument about the Iraq War.  The fact is, there were exceptional journalists who pointed out the many holes in the WMD case before the invasion, and there were some economists who recognized that a financial system based on a housing bubble was a house of cards. The fact that Cohen didn't pay attention to these people doesn't mean they don't exist.

Cohen should note that Stewart's point about Cramer knowing that the market was manipulated was based on footage he had gathered of Cramer boasting about how easy it was for him, Cramer, to manipulate the market.  And Stewart didn't need subpoena power to get it.

Writing on CounterPunch, former Wall Street insider Pam Martens notes (3/16/09) that

the academics and economists (none of whom ever worked a day on Wall Street) have been telling us in op-eds and speeches and testimony before Congress that the crumbling Wall Street structure results from bundled subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and asset-backed securities.

Meanwhile, "in a week’s time, [the Daily Show's Jon Stewart] has zeroed in, like a heat-seeking missile, on the core of Wall Street's malady.... The core of Wall Street's corruption might well be the same core that it has drawn the darkest curtain around: trading." Writes Martens:

None of the toxic instruments would have grown to a problem capable of collapsing the country’s financial system if their trading had been regulated, transparent and fairly reported on by mainstream media. The security instruments were never the problem; how they were traded was the problem. For example, the mortgage and debt securities were, in reality, junk bonds but they were tradedas triple A. They were not traded on an exchange where price discovery would have shown them to be junk bonds, they were traded in an opaque over the counter market. In the case of credit default swaps, they were traded in a market created by the very firms who needed to hide for as long as possible (while executives reaped windfall compensation and bonuses) the dubious pricing of the securities and gargantuan amounts being issued.

Martens sees it as "testimony to how Orwellian life has become under the outrages of Wall Street hubris" that it takes "a comedian, who poses as an anchor on a fake news show, [to] grab the reins of the Wall Street investigation from the actual investigators in Congress."

When NPR ombud Alicia Shepard commented on an NPR blog that "we can all take a lesson from" Jon Stewart because "he holds people in power accountable for what they say"--this being her "definition of a good journalist"--Matthew Murrey, AKA NPR Check blogger Mytwords, couldn't resist asking "So when will Shepard hold the NPR journalists to such a standard?" Mytwords' challenge of Shepard "(or anyone for that matter) to show any examples in the last 10 years where NPR's main news shows... 'held people in power accountable'" was met by one reader (3/15/09) who had

only heard one instance of NPR actually standing up to spin by an interviewee: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15046448

I've never heard anything like it since, and I listen almost every day.

As I recall, there were tons of people who wrote in letters showing support and calling for more: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15198525

Mytwords is encouraged "that listeners seem to be hungry for a higher quality of reporting even though it's rare on NPR"--but the sad fact is that after "carefully critiquing NPR for almost three years," Mytwords has found "NPR News consistently echoes and champions the opinions and assertions of the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and free market corporatism."

During his well-publicized appearance with Jon Stewart (Daily Show, 3/12/09), CNBC's Jim Cramer tried to present himself as a rational financial journalist, dismissing his on-air wild man persona as entertainment. But if you listened to his calm, sober pronouncements, they really weren't all that rational.

For instance, he said by way of apology, referring to the current financial crisis, "I got a lot of things wrong because I think it was kind of [a] one-in-a-million shot." Well, no--if you build a financial system on the idea that assets are going to keep rapidly increasing in value forever, the system's eventual collapse is not a one-in-a-million shot. That's more like a one-in-one shot.

If you don't get that, even with the benefit of hindsight, then you really are not qualified to be a financial journalist.

Here's a quote from the Daily Show's original CNBC expose (3/4/09), which ought to be carved on Cramer's tombstone:

You should be buying things and accept that they're overvalued and--but accept that they're going to keep going higher. I know that sounds irresponsible, but that's how you make money.

--Jim Cramer (Mad Money, 10/31/07)

Economics writer David Lieberman (USA Today, 3/11/09) previews a Today show interview with CNBC's Mad Money host Jim Cramer by pointing out that Cramer will "have to answer for misguided stock predictions--including some last year urging investors to buy and hold Bear Stearns just before the investment bank collapsed." But the ironic bit comes after Cramer's dismissive quote--"Oh, oh, a comedian is attacking me!"--when business journalism academic Andrew Leckey "says that while CNBC wants to be seen as serious, 'The best ratings go to a wacky guy.' Cramer often bellows and uses sound effects to highlight his stock picks." As for Stewart's comparative journalistic value, Lieberman writes that

some media critics say that Stewart has earned the right to be taken seriously. "Stewart is a comedian who does some press criticism and does it pretty well," says Columbia Journalism Review Executive Editor Mike Hoyt.

Indeed, it's been proven that Stewart's "fake news" has a higher substance-to-hype ratio than "straight" network news and that his average viewer is more educated than are Fox "news" personality Bill O'Reilly's.

Prefacing a Daily Show segment (3/4/09) with his version of current big-media reporting: "Recent opinion polls indicate that six weeks into Barack Obama's administration, the American public thinks they approve of his performance--but it turns out they're wrong," Jon Stewart runs clips of celebrity news figures like Fox's Sean Hannity asking, "How did the market react to this latest liberal spending spree? Well, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped almost 400 points," and of Fox Business Network's Neil Cavuto asking, "The Dow is down more than 1,500 points, nearly 3,000 since Election Day, now is this a vote of no confidence in this administration?" Mocking this common media canard, Stewart even calls the Dow

a real-time cause-and-effect precision barometer of how the president is doing. It's been that way for years. For example--little-known fact--Wall Street hated Ronald Reagan: Look at the numbers the day he got inaugurated. And they hated it when Truman announced we'd won World War II. And, to give you an idea of what a finely tuned measure of America's national mood the Dow is, when the Titanic sunk? Through the roof!

Stewart's take-away moral: "So what seems to be being suggested here is that opinion polls don't matter; the stock market is the only rational, objective indicator of a commander in chief's performance." Read the contrary evidence in FAIR's new Media Advisory: "What the Dow Isn't: Stocks Misused As 'Scorecard' of White House Policy" (3/5/09).

Jon Stewart has a Daily Show bit (2/9/09) replaying Bill O'Reilly's staunch declarations that "we hate those paparazzi, we think they're the scum of the earth" because "the right to privacy is a basic constitutional tenet." That sounds like quite a principled stand; the only trouble comes when Stewart then shows O'Reilly Factor clips of its own camera crews ambushing journalists out with their families, in front of their own homes and even commuting on a city bus to quiz them about why they said or wrote certain things.

Stewart then embarks on "a great experiment," showing O'Reilly listing "the people that [he] believes deserve protection"--"Cruise and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie"--and wondering what happens if "they were to offend O'Reilly in some way." The rich payoff is video of a Factor reporter who, in Stewart's words "must really want that story to sit around with all the 'scum'" paparazzi waiting to ask Jolie why she would allegedly "ban Fox News from your premiere last night?" Stewart names the real "governing principle" here as "ignore the privacy rights of anyone who disagrees with Bill O'Reilly."