FNC's Shepard Smith again a steady hand amid partisan provocateurs on both his own network and MSNBC

Unfairly scandalized Shirley Sherrod and FNC anchor Shepard Smith
By ED BARK
Who's the last standing, upstanding objective news anchor/personality at Fox News Channel?

That's an easy one: Shepard Smith.

Yeah, he's showy. But Smith's two principal FNC venues -- Fox Report and Studio B -- notably did not bite on the much-reported Shirley Sherrod "scandal" that turned out to be a doctored video disseminated by a right-wing blogger.

Unlike his colleagues -- most notably Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity -- Smith said he "did not run the video and did not reference the story in any way" because "we do not and did not trust the source."

Smith criticized both Fox News and the White House for their respective roles in going with the "story" and forcing Sherrod to resign from her post at the Department of Agriculture.

"What in the world has happened to our industry and the White House?" he asked before discussing the matter with FNC contributor Juan Williams, who said the White House had "freaked out" at the prospect of Fox blowhard Glenn Beck ripping Sherrod as a racist.

Just so we're clear here, I think no better of MSNBC's roster of prime-time liberal partisans, led by the ever thin-skinned, always egomaniacal Keith Olbermann. In his extended and prototypically indignant commentary on the matter, Olbermann of course took great joy in ripping "the perpetual fraud machine that is Fox News." He also urged the Obama administration to grow a pair.

As regularly noted in these spaces, you can't believe hardly anything you see or hear in prime-time on either FNC or MSNBC. But CNN, which at least continues to take a stab at being objective, has paid a fearsome price in the ratings. So much so that they're currently in the process of rebooting while hiring the likes of former disgraced New York governor Eliot Spitzer of call girl scandal fame.

Yeah, we want our media to be objective, all right -- as long as they reflect our views. Smith, who doesn't have a prime-time forum on FNC, at least has the temerity to both call out his network and hold off on stories of highly questionable origin and veracity.

O'Reilly, who never tires of saying he has cable's most-watched prime-time program, doesn't tilt quite as far to the right as Hannity or Beck. But in his "apology" to Sherrod, he also opened up a new line of attack on her while of course also criticizing NBC and MSNBC.

It's sickening. But it's not going to change. Credit Smith, though, for both making the right decision and then following up with criticisms of all guilty parties. The below video of Smith in action runs for more than seven minutes. But it's well worth your time.