Joe Cutbirth (born 1956) is an American scholar, journalist, and media critic, who currently teaches in the communication and journalism programs at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a former editor-in-chief of the Texas Observer, political blogger for The Huffington Post, and was a recurring analyst for ABC News Now during the 2008 presidential primaries and general election. He has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, New York University, the University of British Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, The University of Virginia, and The New School. He was a statehouse reporter and political writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and served as the communications director for the Texas Democratic Party coordinated campaign during the Clinton-Gore 1996 and Ann Richards 1994 reelection efforts. Scholarship Cutbirth's research examines the relationship between satire and journalism in American politics. He is working on his first book, Fake News, Real Politics: Jon Stewart and the New Political Press, an extension of the doctoral work he did at Columbia University under Todd Gitlin, James W. Carey and Herbert J. Gans. He has lectured on the topic and offered a course, Fake News, Politics and Popular Culture, (2004–07) at the New School and NYU. He expanded the course in 2010 to include the Anglo-Irish tradition of satire and the reciprocal comedic tradition between Canada and the United States. He renamed it Satire as News, and offered it as a graduate seminar at UBC. In explaining the course to Fox News in 2007 he said, "We examine what's gone wrong in the country, not in the relationship we have with politics, but in the relationship we have with mass media." When Radar Online in 2006 skewered Fake News as one of the top 10 "flimsiest classes" offered at an American university, Cutbirth told a reporter from the NYU student paper: "That's great news. It's not every day a slow white guy gets on a list with Tupac," referring to another course on Radar's list, The Textual Appeal of Tupac Shakur. The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CTV, and Postmedia News all have cited him as an expert on fake news. Cutbirth has presented his work at meetings of the National Communication Association, the American Political Science Association, the Midwest Association of Public Opinion Research, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and at conferences at Georgetown