“It mystifies me,” says Geneva Overholser, a Washington-based University of Missouri journalism professor who served as the Washington Post’s ombudsman from 1995 to 1998. “What in the world does it mean to have two? It makes no sense.” She argues that ombudsman responsibilities are specifically designed to be carried out by just one person as way to demonstrate that a single journalist can be open-minded and listen to all sides of a dispute. By setting up a sort of left-vs.-right, “Crossfire” approach, Overholser says, the CPB model “participates in the ideological charade that journalists can’t be fair. This is a perversion of the ombudsman. I’m surprised Ken Bode would feel comfortable with this.”

Bode, a former NBC and CNN reporter, is one of the CPB’s newly hired ombudsmen. He most recently worked as a columnist for the Indianapolis Star, where readers often wrote angry letters deriding him as a liberal, though he endorsed a Republican last year for governor of Indiana.

When asked last year to write about his worst day as a journalist, Bode detailed the afternoon President Reagan was shot, recalling, “Like many Americans, I never saw President Reagan quite the same again. As someone said at the time, he went into the hospital as Ronald Reagan; he came out as John Wayne.”

The CPB’s other new ombudsman is William Schulz, an avowed conservative and former editor at Reader’s Digest, which the National Review once described as “the quintessential magazine of ‘red-state’ America.” Schulz worked alongside CPB chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, a Republican, for decades at Reader’s Digest.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that during a meeting in February with the head of National Public Radio, Tomlinson outlined the CPB ombudsmen’s responsibilities and specifically noted that the board planned to hire one liberal ombudsman and one conservative one.

Both Bode and Schulz declined to comment for this article.

The two-person, right-vs.-left approach “is antithetical” to the ombudsman position, says Jeffrey Dvorkin, who holds that position for NPR and serves as president of the Organization of News Ombudsmen. “The value of the ombudsman is as an ideological and political independent.”

“Why stop at two ombudsmen? Why not have four or a committee of 12?” quips Carl Stern, a former correspondent for NBC News who teaches journalism ethics at George Washington University and, like Overholser, is a member of PBS’s Editorial Standards Review Committee. “Balancing ombudsmen — when will this end? Are we going to have armies of ombudsmen? This is silliness.”

The CPB’s unorthodox action comes against a backdrop of increasingly heated allegations about liberal bias at PBS’s 349 stations nationwide. Tomlinson has been making several moves to counter what he says is PBS’s lack of “objectivity and balance” or, more specifically, the perception of a lack of balance at PBS.

Last week the Beltway battle escalated further when Reps. David Obey, D-Wis., and John Dingell, D-Mich., asked the CPB’s inspector general to investigate whether Tomlinson overstepped the law by secretly hiring a consultant, at a cost of $10,000, to monitor the weekly PBS news program “Now With Bill Moyers” for liberal bias. The Democrats want a determination of whether Tomlinson violated the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which “prohibits interference by Federal officials over the content and distribution of public programming” and the application of political litmus tests in hiring decisions.

On May 12, the inspector general announced he would launch the requested investigation. Then on May 15, in a speech in St. Louis, Moyers blasted Tomlinson, insisting conservatives’ real agenda is to silent journalists who ask tough questions. “The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party gets,” Moyers said. “That’s because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.”

Tomlinson declined to comment for this article. As the controversy continues to intensify, he has been sticking exclusively to the friendly confines of conservative media to tell his side of the story. Last week he wrote an on Op-Ed for the Washington Times. And he appeared on Fox News’ “O’Reilly Factor” on May 12 and PBS’s “Unfiltered With Tucker Carlson” on May 13. During the O’Reilly interview, Tomlinson insisted that he has never talked to the White House about PBS. “The point is not to gain support for the Bush administration,” he said. “The point is to gain support for public television.” Yet Tomlinson hired Mary Catherine Andrews to oversee the creation of CPB’s ombudsmen’s office while she was still on the White House payroll.

Tomlinson was among those who greenlighted the creation of PBS’s “Unfiltered” last year to provide an additional conservative platform on public television. Fittingly, the show served a useful purpose for Tomlinson on the May 13 broadcast, where he continued to make the unsubstantiated — and unchallenged — claim that PBS suffers from a liberal bias and that programs like “Now” do “a lot of damage to public television.”

The claim is unsubstantiated because the CPB’s own internal polling — surveys it has refused to release independently — shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans do not think PBS has a liberal bias. As for the “damage” caused by “Now,” the program generated exactly 24 angry e-mails to the CPB during calendar year 2003.

Tomlinson was not challenged much during the O’Reilly and Carlson interviews. At the conclusion of his interview with O’Reilly, Tomlinson said, “We love your show,” and Carlson concluded his “Unfiltered” interview with, “I suspect your liberal critics will always feel threatened by you. And [that's] good, as far as I’m concerned. Ken Tomlinson, I think you’re great.”

One of Tomlinson’s key fairness-and-balance” initiatives — implemented with the help of the White House aide he hired — was to create guidelines for the new CPB ombudsman positions. The newly unveiled charter notes that the position is independent and “will encourage public dialogue aimed at achieving high standards of excellence and balance in public broadcasting.”

An ombudsman typically functions as an advocate for, or representative of, news consumers — a designated person they can contact to complain about a report. As the Organization of News Ombudsmen outlines the position, “A news ombudsman receives and investigates complaints from newspaper readers or listeners or viewers of radio and television stations about accuracy, fairness, balance and good taste in news coverage.”

But the CPB itself has no “readers or listeners or viewers.” That disconnect was evident in the first programming critiques offered by Bode and Schulz, which did not appear to be driven by listener or viewer concerns. Instead, both men simply sampled specific programming and wrote up their thoughts. (They reviewed different reports.)

As the station group that purchases, schedules and airs programming, “PBS is the more appropriate organization for an ombudsman,” notes Christy Carpenter, a former Democratic-appointed member of the CPB board.

National Public Radio already employs an ombudsman, and PBS is exploring hiring its own. And while there had been some public discussion about CPB’s hiring its own ombudsman, the announcement of the hiring of Bode and Schulz caught PBS officials unaware; they were not told that candidates were being interviewed, let alone that the two men would soon start.

But it is CPB’s tapping of two ombudsmen that has most raised eyebrows in journalism circles, particularly the suggestion by Tomlinson that Schulz would serve as a sort of conservative advocate while Bode represented liberal complaints.

“I don’t think ombudsmen should be in the ‘Crossfire’ business,” NPR’s Dvorkin says. “I think it exacerbates conflict rather than resolves it.”

Overholser adds, “The whole two-person approach is rigged. Everything about this smells of adhering to a certain ideology and dressing it up as concern about objectivity and balance.”

“There were tremendous fights, with the Nixon Administration trying to prevent public television from doing any public affairs programming at all,” former PBS president Lawrence Grossman once recalled to the New York Times. But Nixon’s end run ultimately failed. In 1979, Newsweek quoted a PBS executive who insisted, “The war between CPB and PBS is over.”

Today it’s back on.

Amid a flurry of high-profile personnel changes, suppressed polling data, revised journalism guidelines, new oversight ground rules and deep suspicion, the CPB board — once again under the control of White House-friendly Republicans — and PBS are battling each other over content and allegations of PBS’s liberal bias. The brawl is shaping up to make the Nixon-era dust-up seem tame by comparison: This weekend one PBS station manager dubbed CPB’s crusade for “balance” a “witch hunt.”

“It’s designed to get people’s attention and warn them not to do programming that will be questioned,” says David Fanning, executive producer of “Frontline,” PBS’s award-winning investigative series. “We ask hard questions to people in power. That’s anathema to some people in Washington these days.”

“The situation is very concerning,” says Christy Carpenter, a former Democrat-appointed member of the CPB board. She says that with the 2003 arrival of Republican CPB chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, “the tone of the discussion became increasingly partisan. There was an agenda being pushed to bring in more conservative voices. It’s appropriate to have a wide spectrum, and I have no objection if conservative voices are in the mix. But I had the impression that more was being pursued than just balance.”

Traditionally charged with a dual role as PBS’s personal cheerleader (creating goodwill on Capitol Hill) and bank account (CPB serves as a crucial funding source), the government-run, nonprofit CPB has again, as in the Nixon era, turned its attention to overseeing PBS programming, insisting that the more than 300 PBS affiliates nationwide acknowledge that their programming suffers from a liberal bias.

The effort by Tomlinson and his allies at the CPB — at least one of whom thinks producers should face “penalties” if their programming is deemed unbalanced — echoes the cry of conservatives who for the past three decades have accused PBS of a liberal bias. (During the ’70s it was referred to as an “Eastern elite” bias.) Although PBS, compared with commercial TV news outlets, probably does pose more pressing questions to those in power, its hallmark “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” for example, makes sure to include mainstream conservatives, such as New York Times columnist David Brooks, in its regular mix. The truth is that the widespread bias that board members are so eager to fix doesn’t exist.

Tomlinson, a former editor at the staunchly conservative Reader’s Digest who over the years has contributed exclusively to Republican politicians, was not available to comment for this story. But in April he told the Washington Post, “I am concerned about perceptions that not all parts of the political spectrum are reflected on public broadcasting.”

Ernest Wilson, a Democrat-appointed CPB board member, agrees that fairness and balance represent “a genuine political concern” — in part because “people who believe fairness and balance is a problem at PBS include some legislators on the Commerce Committee” (which oversees CPB funding). “But there are a myriad of other issues that are more important than fairness and balance. For instance, most of our PBS viewers are between the ages of 1 and 7 and 47 and 80, and there’s nobody in between. That’s a problem. And that’s not a fairness and balance problem.”

Asked if he thought the increasingly heated debate about objectivity had hijacked the CPB’s larger agenda, Wilson said, “Yes, at the moment.”

A CPB spokesman denies that the corporation has become distracted by the fairness and balance issue. “We’re rolling up our sleeves and focusing on our core mission,” says Eben Peck.

Yet it remains unclear what the evidence is for PBS’s liberal bias. What are the egregious examples of so-called unfairness that are fueling the current controversy? Tomlinson himself rarely singles out any particular programming as being guilty of bias, or of not meeting public broadcasting’s journalism standards. Rather than cite any actual infractions by PBS programs, Tomlinson has said he’s concerned by the mere perception of a bias.

Last week he was quoted in Broadcasting and Cable magazine as saying he wanted to “broaden support for public broadcasting” while “eliminating the perception of political bias.” And in response to a New York Times article last week on the tension between CPB and PBS, Tomlinson released a statement that read, in part, “Eliminating the perception of political bias … is important to maintain continued public support for public broadcasting.”

But the question remains, a perception of political bias by whom — Republican politicians and conservative activists, or PBS viewers? If most PBS viewers and other Americans don’t think the programming is biased — and two internal polls prove they don’t — then why is the CPB unleashing this campaign?

Tomlinson has tipped his hand in the past. In the Nov. 17, 2003, issue of Current magazine, which covers public broadcasting, he argued, “If a significant number of conservatives are saying public TV is not for them, we need to change that” (emphasis added).

So if a significant number of environmentalists, or libertarians or Latinos or Asians, say public TV is not for them, will the CPB be willing to take drastic action to remedy that perception? And what constitutes a “significant number”? According to CPB polling done in 2003, 12 percent of Americans think PBS has a conservative bias. Why isn’t the CPB board addressing that as well?

“They’ve established their own version of political correctness,” says Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “Tomlinson is taking things to the extreme with his ambitious agenda.”

In fact, the CPB’s crusade seems to flip on its head the organization’s mandate, which, following Nixon’s attempt at political interference, has been to act as PBS’s “heat shield,” insulating PBS programming from outside political pressure. Instead, the CPB is demanding programming changes to meet its political concerns.

The CPB was created and funded by Congress to provide about 20 percent of PBS’s programming budget. Under the Public Broadcasting Act, the White House can appoint no more than five of the nine CPB board seats. One of the Democratic seats is unfilled, as it has been for several years, giving Republicans a comfortable decision-making majority.

During an interview for NPR’s “On the Media,” which aired over the weekend, Tomlinson insisted, “I did not choose to bring controversy to public broadcasting over the issue of balance. Others did.” Yet recent events certainly suggest Tomlinson and his Bush-appointed allies on the CPB board have been fixated on the issue of balance.

“People feel like this is a mission for him,” says one public-television source. Adds another veteran, “Everybody’s scared to death.”

What’s especially curious about the current objectivity controversy is that PBS airs hundreds of hours of programming each week, most of which is educational and cultural, and yet CPB’s entire fairness and balance campaign — dismissing its CEO, creating new shows, trying to rewrite PBS’s journalism guidelines, hiring ombudsmen — appears to stem from a single weekly program, Moyers’ “Now.” “All they talk about is the Moyers show,” notes Carpenter. “Where else is the bias or the perceived bias?”

Moyers left the show (which has since been cut back to just 30 minutes) months ago, yet conservative media critics, rather than celebrate his departure, continue to rally against Moyers with a vengeance. In his May 6 attack on PBS posted online, Brent Bozell dedicated nearly half his column to attacking Moyers and detailing his alleged bias (for example, criticizing Condoleezza Rice’s “pattern of ineptness”).

Even when Moyers hosted the show, which routinely aired critical reports about the Bush administration, “Now” wasn’t exactly a lightning rod for viewers’ wrath. According to an attachment to CPB’s annual report to Congress, CPB, eager for public feedback, created “Open to the Public,” an interactive forum in which viewers can express concerns. For calendar year 2003, the most recent year for which statistics are publicly available, the initiative produced 1,139 e-mails from viewers. According to CPB, just 24 of those — or roughly 2 percent — were angry e-mails about “Now.” (Drawing the most comments was “Sit and Be Fit,” an exercise program for seniors; viewers e-mailed asking that it be shown on more local stations.) While individual PBS stations may have logged more complaints about “Now,” CPB’s own feedback mechanism barely registered any concern about the program.

The findings likely come as little surprise to CPB officials, who obviously pored over results from a 2003 survey on liberal bias conducted jointly by a Republican and a Democratic firm. (The firms later hosted focus groups in red states, inviting only people who had complained about a liberal bias at PBS, so they could further detail their complaints.) As the “Research Objectives” portion of the results states, the survey’s top priority was to “re-measure the extent to which people view news and information programming on PBS and NPR as being biased” (emphasis added).

Why “re-measure”? Because, according to public television insiders, the first batch of polling done in 2002 produced unsatisfactory results from the CPB board’s perspective; it showed little viewer concern about bias. “Tomlinson commissioned two polls. The first results were too good, and he didn’t believe them,” says one source. “After the Iraq war, the board commissioned another round of polling, and they thought they’d get worse results.” But the board didn’t. Asked specifically about PBS’s war coverage, only 7 percent of respondents thought it was “slanted.” “They couldn’t use any of it” to bolster any claims of bias, says the source. Overall, just 21 percent of respondents thought PBS was too liberal.

Of course, if Tomlinson and his colleagues were looking for good news about PBS instead of bad, the wider poll results — a healthy 80 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of public broadcasting — would have been trumpeted as a triumph. (In an NPR interview aired last weekend, Tomlinson suggested that that 80 percent should be higher.) Meanwhile, a strong majority thinks PBS’s news and information programming is more trustworthy, and more in-depth, than that of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN. Most viewers think PBS is a “valuable cultural resource,” and a plurality of 48 percent want the government to provide more funding to PBS. (Only 10 percent want it to provide less.) But despite the good news, the CPB board refused to tout these results or even release them independently.

Says Democratic CPB board member Wilson, “It’s very important that the American public see these polls. They were paid for with public money and should be seen.” Asked about any discussion the board had about the polls and releasing them widely to the public, Wilson says, “I’m not going to talk about what happens in the board meetings.”

It should be noted that the polling firms did report “a disparity between Republicans and Democrats with respect to their views towards news and information programming on public broadcasting.” They’re likely referring to the finding that 36 percent of Republicans think PBS has a liberal bias, compared with 21 percent of all respondents.

But Republicans’ complaints about PBS bias are consistent with how they view most mainstream news organizations. According to one of the most comprehensive surveys on public opinion about the media, conducted in 1997 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Republicans “are more likely to say news organizations favor one side than are Democrats or independents.” In that survey, 77 percent of Republicans thought the press was biased, compared with 58 percent of Democrats. In other words, polls are likely to find about far more Republicans complaining about bias no matter which media outlet is being analyzed.

Despite its own polling showing that bias was not a concern perceived by most Americans, the CPB pressed ahead with its aggressive plans to fix the problem. At her 2003 Senate confirmation hearing, Republican CPB board member (and major GOP fundraiser) Cheryl Halpern not only suggested that producers be penalized for any programming deemed to be biased but also demanded that PBS operate under an “objective, balanced code of journalistic ethics, [which] has got to prevail across the board, and there needs to be accountability.”

The truth is, PBS stations have operated under a strict code of journalistic ethics for decades. But late last year, as part of its contract renewal with PBS, which earmarks $29.5 million for the network in programming funds, CPB for the first time asked for a change in PBS’s journalism guidelines. For the previous 14 years of the multimillion-dollar contract, CPB had relied on PBS to operate under its own well-established journalism standards. According to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which established the CPB, the corporation must meet several goals. One is ensuring a “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.” The CPB instead moved to introduce statutory language making “objectivity and balance” guidelines an enforceable legal requirement.

PBS balked. Claiming a First Amendment infringement and an unprecedented attempt by the CPB to assert direct control over its broadcasting, the network’s attorneys noted that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia had previously ruled that the “objectivity and balance” provision from the ’67 Act “is not a substantive standard, legally enforceable by agencies or courts.” The CPB relented, but still wants to OK PBS’s journalism standards, which are in the process of being updated by a panel of journalists and academics. If the CPB objects to portions of those standards, that could spark yet another showdown.

“I think the goal is to change the kind of journalism PBS occasionally does,” says Chester at Center for Digital Democracy. “To sort of press for balance within each individual program and neuter PBS’s ability to do serious reporting.”

In his recent “On the Media” interview, Tomlinson insisted he simply wants to create a balance on the PBS schedule, so that for every liberal program there’s a counterbalancing conservative program. But in December 2003, three months after being elected as the CPB’s chairman, Tomlinson wrote a letter to the head of PBS, complaining, “‘Now With Bill Moyers’ does not contain anything approaching the balance the law requires for public broadcasting” (emphasis added), as if suggesting the use of a stopwatch to time how many minutes each side has to tell its story.

But there has never been a standard, or “law,” requiring PBS to adhere to balance within each program. Instead, like the old fairness doctrine that applied to commercial broadcasters before it was rescinded during the Reagan administration, the fairness and balance guideline for PBS is measured by the totality of the network’s schedule of programming.

In Saturday’s Denver Post, James Morgese, president and general manager of the Rocky Mountain PBS station, wrote, “If what is happening in Washington goes unchecked, we will probably have to start counting which shows or even which guests on shows will balance or counter-balance each other, and then start tabulating the amount of minutes, or even seconds, devoted to ideological points of view.” Morgese dubbed the current CPB objectivity campaign a “witch hunt.”

Ironically, if strict new legal guidelines on fairness were applied, among the first shows that would have to be singled out for violating them would be “The Journal Editorial Report.” Like “Tucker Carlson Unfiltered,” which was shepherded to air with seed money from CPB, “The Journal Editorial Report” was tapped as a priority by the CPB to balance out “Now.” But unlike “Now,” which books conservative advocates such as Ralph Reed to debate issues, “The Journal Editorial Report” makes little effort to air opposing viewpoints during its weekly discussion of political events. For instance, during its March 25 segment on the unfolding Terri Schiavo story, every panelist agreed Congress had done the right thing by intervening in the right-to-die case, placing them well out of the American mainstream, which overwhelmingly objected to lawmakers’ intervention in the case, according to several polls.

CPB board member Wilson suggests it’s not just the Journal’s editors who are out of step. “Ask the American people about fairness and balance at PBS and it’s not at the top of their list. But it is at the top of the list for some within a small Beltway loop.”

And for the moment, those people control public television.

Salon’s Scott Rosenberg has already pointed out the absurdity of New York Times columnist William Safire claiming that “only political junkies knew that a member of the Cheney family serving on the campaign staff was homosexual,” and labeling Kerry’s comment the “lowest blow,” as if Kerry had maliciously outed the proudly and publicly gay Mary Cheney.

In the very same column, Safire himself acknowledged that Cheney’s sexual orientation was “no secret” — even if one wants to believe, as Safire argued, that a uniformly virtuous press had respectfully kept it quiet.

“The vice president, to show it was no secret or anything his family was ashamed of, had referred to it briefly twice this year, but the press — respecting family privacy — had properly not made it a big deal. The percentage of voters aware of Mary Cheney’s sexual orientation was tiny.”

Safire, who decried Kerry’s comment as part of an orchestrated attack by the Dems, might want to check his analysis with fellow columnist Robert Novak, who points out just how widely known the information already was.

“Kerry campaign sources say there was no plan for Kerry to talk about Ms. Cheney last Wednesday, and it never came up in the debate prep,” Novak wrote on Monday. “The senator’s intimates say he was trying to compliment the Cheneys, but there is absolutely nothing complimentary in what he said. Many Republicans see a calculated plot to depress Bush’s social conservative base by revealing the vice president’s daughter as a lesbian. But her sexual orientation is such common knowledge on the right that the alleged Democratic plot would be foolish to undertake.”

Instead, Novak saw an offhand maliciousness on Kerry’s part.

“Kerry’s comments appear to be spontaneous — and unpleasant. Faced with President Bush’s answer in the debate that he did not know whether he believed ‘homosexuality is a choice,’ Kerry blurted out they should go ask Mary Cheney, who ‘would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as.’ This sounded like an effort to impute hypocrisy on the part of an opponent seeking to ban gay marriage.”

The National Review’s William Buckley was more attuned to the nuances of the issue.

“It is not in question that Mary Cheney’s gayness had already become a part of the cast of characters in the political play. Senator Kerry was in no sense ‘outing’ someone who had hidden her sexual impulses. So that the question narrowed to whether what was said was an expression of magnanimity and inclusiveness, or whether it was a bid for votes from the bigoted.

“This last interpretation of it was taken by an evangelical Christian politician, Gary Bauer, who ran for the presidency four years ago. He reasoned as follows: that traditional-values voters would react to the public reference as to an animadversion against the Bush ticket, and that by saying what he had said, Kerry could reasonably hope ‘to knock l or 2 percent off in some rural areas by causing people to turn on the president.’ This view holds that Kerry was in fact trading on bigotry. That position is of course irreconcilable with the position that Mr. Cheney has profited politically from publicizing his daughter’s gayness — that he has, in effect, said to the gay community: ‘Look, my own beloved daughter is a member of the Cheney family, and a member also of the gay community. You can hardly suspect in the GOP ticket prejudice against gays, when you see that we have one in the family, whom we cherish?’”

And while Robert Novak and others brushed straight past Bush’s “I don’t know” if “homosexuality is a choice,” former Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan characterized Bush’s non-answer as “honest.” Then he offered his own honest appraisal of the issue.

“To some of us, homosexuality is an affliction, like alcoholism, and hellishly difficult to control. Why some folks can take or leave alcohol — while others can enjoy it in moderation, and others cannot stop drinking without help and must swear off it for life or it will kill them — remains a mystery of nature. Homosexuality seems to be like that.”

Buchanan, apparently able to control his own afflictions, went on to lament men who can’t control theirs. He also added pedophilia to the same list.

“A contemporary of this writer and rising conservative star in the House, with a wonderful family, lost it all when caught trolling D.C.’s tenderloin district for teenage boys. Catholic priests have dishonored the church to which they have dedicated entire lives and disgraced themselves by abusing altar boys. In such cases, the behavior seems almost suicidal. Clearly, there is a compulsion here that is, at times, terribly difficult to resist, a sexual compulsion that seems far more rare among normal men.”

The folly of dirty campaigning
New York Times columnist David Brooks weighed in Tuesday on down-and-dirty campaign rhetoric:

“The truth is that voters are not idiots. They are capable of independent thought. If you attack your opponent wildly, ruthlessly, they will come to their own conclusions.”

His comments came one day after President Bush, in a “major speech” carried live on the Fox News Channel, fired off a litany of flagrant distortions about John Kerry. Bush claimed that Kerry will fight terrorists “only after America is hit,” that Kerry “thinks we need permission from foreign capitals” when “we act to defend ourselves,” and that in a Kerry administration, “America’s overriding goal in Iraq would be to leave, even if the job is not done.”

Oh, wait… Brooks was criticizing the rhetoric of the other presidential candidate in his column, “Kerry off the Leash.”

The crossfire after “Crossfire”
Comedian Jon Stewart’s beat down of the bow-tied Tucker Carlson on CNN’s “Crossfire” last Friday touched off an intriguing mix of reactions among bloggers.

Gerard Van der Leun of American Digest doesn’t think much of the dueling heads of “Crossfire,” or of Stewart.

“I actually caught Jon Stewart’s on-air evisceration of ‘Crossfire’ last week, and I have to admit I enjoyed the discomfort and confusion he brought to the dual tools of that broadcast. At the same time I also noted what a large, self-impressed tool Stewart has become.”

It seems that the heart of the matter for Van der Leun is what he imagines to be Stewart’s privileged lifestyle off the air.

“I don’t know about you but my gorge rises when a TV personality who’s made his bones with long ironic sighs and sideglances starts to speak phrase like ‘We need you to be honest!’ And that was only the center cut from Stewart’s Tripe Store. I was especially taken by Stewart’s reference to himself as one of the guys who is out ‘mowing his lawn’ while ‘Crossfire’ fails to protect the Republic. Hey, I need Stewart to be honest. The closest people like Stewart come to mowing their lawn is telling their personal assistant to drive to some Southern California crossroads and hire an illegal alien to work the Weedwhacker.”

Bill Ardolino of InDC Journal offered a more substantive take on Stewart’s allegations of full-tilt partisan hackdom in the mainstream media. Ardolino has no great love for Stewart, either, labeling much of his Daily Show material “a smirking, incredibly shallow read of the issues surrounding [the Iraq] war every bit as harmful as Michael Moore’s hullabalooed love letter to Leni Riefenstahl.” But Ardolino raises a valid point about Stewart’s own influence and potential responsibility to the political dialogue.

“While Stewart’s recent evisceration of the Crossfire hacks was great fun, it’s also tainted by the fact that he was throwing stones from a glass mansion. Stewart likes to slide out of public responsibility for accuracy by citing the fact that the Daily Show is a comedic farce, but that defense is undermined by the fact that his show has a very large practical influence, his partisanship is overt and pointed, his analysis is frustratingly superficial, and if everything is such a silly joke … he wouldn’t become angry, serious or aggressively condescending during certain political interviews. You can’t have it both ways, Stewart. It’s fine for you to take sides, but you’re drubbing of Begala and Carlson marks you as a hypocrite.”

One wonders what Protein Wisdom’s Jeff Goldstein thinks of the notion of “overt and pointed partisanship,” “frustratingly superficial analysis,” and “everything as such a silly joke.” He aims for barbed political comedy himself and is sometimes quite entertaining, though he doesn’t much like it when his team is on the receiving end. He responded to the crossfire by offering CNN’s hapless bow-tie boy “9 snappy comebacks” to Stewart’s comment, “You know what’s interesting, though? You’re as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.”

“1. It’s genetic, the big dick thing. My father was hung like a horse.
“2. You know who’s funny? That Craig Kilborn. Now he’s funny.
“3. Yeah, I’m a dick, blah blah blah. But tell me — how is Janeane Garofalo in the sack? Wild?
“4. I really like the touch of gray you’ve got going on, by the way. Very Harry Reasoner.
“5. That Craig Kilborn. Christ, I’m still laughing…!
“6. So. Are you going to tell America about the time Bob Dole bitchslapped your shortperson’s ass on the set, or should I?
“7. Incidentally, I spit in your complimentary beverage. Just so you know.
“8. Any truth to the rumor you and Lewis Black like to toss each others’ salads?
“9. Well, it could be worse. I could be Jewish.”

And the Stewart-Carlson dustup sparked a rare but colorful burst of cognitive dissonance inside the right-wing citadel, Free Republic.

clintonh8r: “[The Daily Show] is a big part of the trivialization and bitchiness of American politics that he’s apparently (I’m not near a TV) talking about. I guess he doesn’t really get it…”

glock rocks: “Stewart called Carlson a dick on the way to commercial.”

staytrue: “CNN is probably reading stewart the riot act and threatening legal action as we speak.”

get’email: “Tucker Carlson IS a dick.”

RedBloodedAmerican: “We need people like John where he is. It’s helps to remind us why we fight.”

charles giteau: “If Jon Stewart is the reason we fight, we may need to reevaluate our goals. Stewart is the best talking head on TV. He points out the absurd on both sides. And so what if he’s voting for Kerry? My mother is voting for Kerry, should I take the fight to her too?”

FreddomSurge: “Mom’s gotta go sometime.”

demnomo: “I agree with Stewart — the show is a boring sham. I watched a couple of programs a while ago, thought the talking head hosts were lame, and I have not watched the contrived garbage that they spew since. Of course, I read about what someone said on the show now and then on this forum. That’s about it.”

omniscient: “One Crossfire is worth a thousand Daily Shows. I’m glad Carlson brought up what a suck-up job Stewart did with the Kerry interview.”

navycorpsman: “Stewart’s show is funny when politics is not the subject. Shows like Crossfire, Hannity and Colmes, et al, all suck and offer nothing but bile and useless spin…”

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Read more of “Right Hook,” Salon’s weekly roundup of conservative commentary and analysis here.