Jon Stewart may be a comedian, but he has a serious point.

No, not when he called Tucker Carlson, the bow-tied co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” a four-letter expletive for the male reproductive organ. However valid, that point was less serious.

Last week, Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s news parody “The Daily Show,” issued a surprising attack while appearing on “Crossfire.” He accused the show’s hosts, Carlson and Paul Begala, of being “partisan hacks” who “have people on just for knee-jerk, reactionary talk.”

Stewart may have offended some people with his confrontational style – he did, after all, insult his hosts – but public response to his tirade against “Crossfire” and similar “debate”-style shows has been overwhelmingly positive. It seems people are growing fed up with cable news networks. And perhaps they should.

Stewart’s criticisms were right on the mark.

“You have a responsibility to the public discourse,” he told them. “This is such a great opportunity you have here to actually get politicians off of their marketing and strategy.

“We need help from the media,” Stewart said to applause, “and they’re hurting us.”

People do rely on cable news shows for “help.” But shows like “Crossfire,” MSNBC’s “Hardball” or “Hannity and Colmes” of Fox News are all light and no heat. They don’t help dissect and explain the words of politicians; instead, they oversimplify complicated issues into two choices, red or blue, predictably picking a side. Each side tries to win instead of trying to understand, making it harder for viewers to sort through the distortions and deceptions.

Instead of helping their audiences become objective observers who can make informed decisions, they try to turn them into fans who will choose a “team” – Republican or Democrat – to cheer for while booing the opponent, no matter what the evidence shows.

And it isn’t just cable news programs that seem to be at fault recently – it’s entire networks. The hard right-leaning Fox News has been constantly challenged and ridiculed for its use of the phrase “fair and balanced.” CNN recently has come under fire for exclusively using its own presidential poll – the CNN/Gallup Poll – which last week showed President George W. Bush leading by 8 percentage points, without mentioning that other polls showed Sen. John Kerry leading, or that many polls indicated a tie.

Then there’s the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a national cable news network that regularly supports Republican candidates financially. Sinclair tried forcing all 62 of its stations to broadcast a commercial-free anti-Kerry “documentary” put together by much of the same disingenuous group responsible for the Swift Boat attack ads. When Sinclair’s Washington Bureau chief publicly objected that “they’re using news to drive their political agenda,” he was fired.

Public outcry – and, no doubt, the resulting plunge of Sinclair’s stock – caused the network to modify its broadcast, showing only about four minutes of footage in an hour-long special debating Kerry’s war record.

The mission of cable news is not to advance a political agenda, as Sinclair tried, or simply to provide entertainment, like “Crossfire,” but to provide credible information to viewers, to help the public disentangle fact from rhetoric. Somehow, they’ve lost sight of that.

As Sinclair’s fired executive said, “I don’t think it served the public trust.”

Neither do I. And if you don’t agree, Jon Stewart and I have a four-letter expletive for you.

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.