During the year-end awards edition of his weekly syndicated chat show, Chris Matthews asked his panel to vote on the “Dangerous Despot” of 2006, and then listed the nominees: North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, Venezuelan boss Hugo Chavez, Iran’s nuclear-seeking threat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — and Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly!

“How in the hell did this guy get in there?” Matthews asked in mock surprise as O’Reilly’s face popped up next to America’s worst enemies. “How did he get in there?”

Later in the same discussion, BBC Washington Correspondent Katty Kay pointed out “there’s a despot missing from this crowd, too, and that’s [Russian President] Vladimir Putin," who is suspected of ordering the killings of political opponents.

“We bumped him for O’Reilly,” Matthews interjected, eliciting laughter from the rest of the panel. “What do you think?”

(The exchange brings to mind a nasty incident from the fall of 1998, in which ABC News posed the following question on their Web site: “If there were an Ig-Nobel Peace Prize, who would win it?” ABC gave the following options: “Slobodan Milosevic, Osama bin Ladin, Saddam Hussein, and Linda Tripp.” How helpful of ABC to join in the character assassination of a whistle-blower by lumping her in with three of the worst mass murderers on the planet.)

That wasn’t the only shot at Fox News on the December 24 "The Chris Matthews Show." Earlier, in Matthews' “Take the Lead” award, he nominated Bill Clinton, whom he approvingly described as “credited by many Democrats, at least, of jump-starting their fall campaign by really blasting Chris Wallace on Fox News. I remember that one, when he said, ‘Get that smirk off your face.’”

MSNBC Chief Washington Correspondent Norah O’Donnell agreed with Matthews: “President Clinton, by taking on Wallace from Fox News, really put the backbone back in the Democratic party, and that's what I heard from Democrats. While even they were hopeful they would win in the November elections, they looked to Clinton — ‘Finally, we feel like we can fight back’ — and we saw more Democrats after that. He set the tone for Democrats.”

None of the panelists stuck up for their fellow journalist Wallace, a former NBC News White House correspondent and ABC News anchor. Matthews seemed to blame Wallace, not Clinton’s thin skin, for the entire matter, as he later observed, “Did you see Chris Wallace picked a fight with Teddy [Kennedy] the other day, so this is an ongoing thing here.”

But at least Wallace wasn’t named a “Dangerous Despot,” as Matthews did with Bill O’Reilly. Here’s the entire exchange from that portion of the show, which ends with Dan Rather bizarrely suggesting that the polonium-poisoned ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko may not have been murder. “It’s possible the man wasn’t poisoned,” Rather weirdly insisted. “We don’t know for a fact it was murder.”

Here’s the transcript:

Chris Matthews: “Next up, ‘Desperate Despots.’ 2006 was a big year in America’s rogues gallery. North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il launched a nuclear test. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez called President Bush ‘the Devil’ at the UN. Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rode a wave of Muslim anger over Danish cartoons to international celebrity. How in the hell did this guy get in there? Bill O’Reilly — how did he get in there? Dan, I think we were thinking of you, maybe, here.”

Dan Rather: “I don’t know why you would do that.”

Matthews: “Does Bill O’Reilly belong on this list? What about Ahmadinejad. People tell me that it was written that Time magazine almost made this guy man of the year he was so big this year.”

Rather: “He'd get my vote in this category, by the way, because Iran has become so important to our own future.”

Clarence Page (Chicago Tribune): “It’s not because you are a good guy, but because you move the news and Ahmadinejad did move the news this past year and I think is going to be a pivotal figure over this next year.”

Katty Kay (BBC Washington Correspondent): “But there’s a despot missing from this crowd, too, and that’s Vladimir Putin, and if you’re looking at what’s happening over the past few weeks–”

Matthews, interrupting: “We bumped him for O’Reilly. What do you think?” (Laughter)

Kay: “I’m not going to comment on O’Reilly, but I would on Putin. We have to watch Putin very carefully over the next few months because he is taking in power in Moscow and he is spreading that abroad, attacking his enemies abroad as much as he is at home.”

Matthews: “What if we come to realize that he did do it, that he did poison the guy with nuclear, radioactivity?”

Kay: “We don't know exactly if he did it. But we do know that he is consolidating power in a way that’s–”

Rather (interrupting): “Two quick points need to be made. Number one, it’s possible the man wasn't poisoned. I’m not — who knows. It’s possible that there was some leakage of this very toxic material. So we don’t know for a fact it was murder.

“Back to Putin, I think spot on. We’re going to talk a lot about the presidential elections in this country in 2008, but does Putin decide that he’s going to stay on? And, if he does, then what happens? If you want to pinpoint where world peace may be decided, it may be on their presidential maneuverings, rather than our presidential election in 2008. It could very well be.”

—Rich Noyes is Research Director at the Media Research Center.