This morning, Steve Doocy of Fox & Friends took a broad swipe at Politico blogger Ben Smith. But he didn't use his own words against Smith, he used Smith's commenters.

You know on this program how we talked about POLITICO is a lefty web site? I was looking at it yesterday, I was reading a column by Ben Smith, a column about a guy here at Fox News Channel and I looked at some of the comments from some of his readers and these are some of the comments about Ben Smith at POLITICO. Quote, "another hit piece by left wing extremist trash masquerading as official journalists in America." Hmm. That's one of their readers. Here is another one: "Ben, wow, you have some free time this afternoon obviously and you're not using it to write another smear piece on Palin. Are you feeling okay?" Ooh, their readers, cold! Speaking of cold, it's cold out here.

Smith, for his part, wrote a curt reply suggesting that Doocy was ordered to attack him from his superiors. His blogger peers, meanwhile, came to his defense. "Elevating the criticism from random anonymous commenters seems at best a unique way to target a reporter whose credibility is in question," wrote Matt Schneider at Mediaite. Michael Calderone at Yahoo News came down a little harder.

"It's one thing to swing back against those critiquing your network," he writes. "And another to have a morning-show host begin a broadcast by reading negative, anonymous blog comments on air about a reporter just after he give a weather update."

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John Hudson