If former Fox News anchor and current CNBC anchor Shepard Smith’s appearance on CNN on Tuesday with host Christiane Amanpour was a contest to see which of them could be the most blatantly hypocritical, let’s just say it ended in a photo finish of sanctimonious duplicity.

Here’s a CliffsNotes synopsis:

Amanpour asked Smith a bigly-loaded question about his tenure at Fox News that could not have been more steeped in self-denial, complete lack of self-awareness, and hall-of-fame hypocrisy, if her post-election equation of Donald Trump and his administration with Adolf’s Hitler’s Kristallnacht — which even she regretted — depended on it.

“Shepard we do have to talk about the elephant in the room. You were at Fox for 23 years. You carved out your own niche and you got a lot of kudos for doing that — and sticking with the hard news sphere.

“And Fox kind of divided itself — at least it said it did — between equal hours of news and opinion. The opinion though is what pretty much made it. The opinion is what got it all the publicity.

“The opinion is what made the stars at night, whether it was O’Reilly or Hannity or now, Tucker Carlson and all the rest of it.

“How uncomfortable were you at that time, there? You did leave — I think in 2019. How uncomfortable were you by the impingement — the impinging of the opinion, even on all of you who were trying to do the hard news?

Stop. The. Tape.

Does the woman know where she works? Has she ever met Jake Tapper, Don Lemon, Fredo Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, Brian Stelter, Alisyn Camerota, Dana Bash, Fareed Zakaria, Jim Acosta, or herself? And who are the “hard news” anchors on CNN?

Who are the journalists on “The Most Trusted Name in News,” Christiane? I’ll wait.

Shepard Smith being Shepard Smith, he placed himself squarely-atop his self-righteous pedestal, as he answered Amanpour’s Twilight Zone-ish question.

“”If you feel like the Fox viewers were getting mis- or disinformation, I was there to make sure that they got it straight.

“And to deprive those viewers of — it wasn’t just me, there’s an entire team of people getting the news to the air — to deny them that with the thought that they might replace it with opinion instead, seemed a little selfish.”

Hang on, Shep. So you got your panties in a wad because other hosts on Fox “selfishly” replaced “news” with their opinions? You mean like the time in 2019 you slammed Donald Trump for his “misleading and xenophobic eruption of tweets“?

“Distraction and division,” I think you called it.

So help me understand, Shepard. Was your opinion a “selfish replacement of news,” or did you consider your opinion, which you continually shoved into your “newscasts,” to be news?

Amanpour, again displaying her complete lack of self-awareness, asked Smith how he felt about the “appearance” of “opinion hosts” becoming the “propaganda arm of the Republican Party.”

Again, stop the tape.

YOUR suggestion that Fox News became the “propaganda arm” of the GOP is breathtaking. Are you joking? Let’s hop into the Wayback Machine for a sec, shall we, Christiana? During your nearly-38-year career with The Most Trusted Name in News, your network has undergone various name changes through the years.

From 1993 until 2001, you worked for the Clinton News Network. From 2008 through 2016, you worked for the Obama News Network. From 2016 through 2020, you worked for the Trump Derangement Syndrome Network, which, in 2020, simultaneously became the Biden News Network. Yet you have the hypocritical gall to label Fox News as the “propaganda arm” of the Republican Party, Christiana?

Anyway, in response to Amanpour’s “propaganda arm” question, the ever-smug Smith proceeded to throw his former Fox colleagues under the bus.

“I slept very well. I don’t know how some people sleep at night, because I know there are a lot of people who have propagated the lies and have pushed them forward over and over again, who are smart enough and educated enough to know better.

“And I hope that at some point, those who have done us harm as a nation — and I might even add as a world — will look around and realize what they’ve done.”

“But I’m not holding my breath,” Smith concluded.

Shepard Smith being Shepard Smith. CNN being CNN.

Speaking of the latter, one of the hypocritical hood ornaments of CNN propaganda clown car is Jake Tapper. As reported by my RedState colleague Nick Arama on Sunday, Tapper had the hilarious nerve to “scold media that lies,” while mind-blowingly declaring that CNN is not among them.

“There are channels in which lies are told and there are channels in which facts are told and people who want the lies, they don’t come here. They go to a different channel.”

Uh-huh, Jake. Remember how you and your network incessantly lied for months — at least — about Donald Trump and the Russian “collusion” hoax? Yeah, so do we. How’d that all work out for you and your “most trusted” network, Jake?

Fox News host Greg Gutfeld perfectly encapsulated liberal media hypocrisy in a recent episode of “The Five,” which I covered in Greg Gutfeld Takes Blowtorch to Media ‘Hypocrites Who Pick and Choose Their Favorite Protesters’.

As we like to say around here, the hypocrisy of the Left knows no bounds. Nowhere is that more profoundly on display than within the liberal media.

Oh, and the Democrat Party, of course.