9/11 Health Bill: Who Deserves More Credit, Jon Stewart or Shep Smith?

Giving government health benefits to the 9/11 first responders may have seemed like a no-brainer to everyone from Barack Obama to Rudy Giuliani, but it took the efforts of two talking heads to push it through Congress.

After months of debate, one compromise that included billions of dollars in benefits cuts and one extended act of public shaming for the opposition, the Senate unanimously passed a $4 billion bill giving health benefits to 9/11 workers today.

In part, the public shaming of Republican members of Congress by Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Fox News' Shepard Smith can be credited for the bill's passage into law.

Stewart's advocacy of the bill at first followed his familiar track. He saw Republicans doing something he thought was stupid and made fun of them for it. This was the Dec. 13 show, in which Stewart excoriated the GOP for blocking what he called "The Least We Can Do/No-Brainer Act of 2010":

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But on last Thursday's episode, Stewart did something different. Though he'd flirted with political advocacy in the past, Stewart has always seemed careful to move back into his "But hey, I'm just a comedian" defense. Not this time. In the last "Daily Show" of the year, Stewart invited four 9/11 first responders onto the show to openly shame Republicans into voting for the bill. There were jokes, but not many:

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Stewart has, of course, slammed Republicans in the past without changing many minds. This time, though, he got the attention of Fox News' Smith. Smith has long been something of a conservative apostate at Fox News, but last Friday he went further than he'd ever gone before, shaming Republicans on air for voting against the bill. "How do they sleep at night after this vote? ... Is anybody going to hold them accountable?" (His fellow Fox News commentator Chris Wallace rejoined, "I think you just did.")

Smith kept up the public fight for the bill, phoning the Republican opposition and demanding they explain themselves. The move earned him rare cross-network kudos from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow:

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Now that the bill's passed, those who championed it find themselves asking who deserves more credit, Stewart or Smith? No doubt, Stewart deserves props for bringing the issue to public attention -- and, more importantly, keeping it there -- and for aiming his barbs not only at Republicans, but also at the media. (He made the stringent point that, out of all the TV networks, only Al Jazeera devoted a segment to the bill.) But arguments that come from outside a group or ideology are easily shrugged off; sometimes it takes criticism from inside to really have an impact. As Maddow points out, there aren't a lot of people who can get their phone calls answered by a Republican senator, and a Fox News anchor is undoubtedly one of them.

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