Salon's Alex Pareene takes a harsh look at Wendy Murphy, the prosecutor and regular cable talk show anti-crime voice. A regular on Fox dating back years, as well as other news outfits, Pareene contends she “routinely makes up facts and figures, without consequences -- because she's good on TV.”

“Murphy is a former assistant district attorney for Middlesex County, Mass., and an adjunct professor at the New England School of Law,” Pareene writes. “She specialized in child abuse and sex crime cases, but in her role as a professional media shouting head she seems to be a fire-breathing prosecutor/pundit in the Nancy Grace 'guilty even after proven innocent' mode.”

A search at FoxNews.com finds some 41 references to her appearances there and elsewhere on television dating back to 2006.

“Radley Balko (of Reason.com) recently debated sex crimes with Murphy on John Stossel's (Fox) show,” Pareene adds. “Balko is a libertarian criminal justice expert whose research on drug policy and the militarization of local police forces is essential reading for anyone who cares about civil rights. But he was just on the Stossel show to be the 'other side' of an argument with a woman who feels no compunction about just making shit up. He blogged about it today:

“During the debate, Murphy threw out a statistic that only 2 percent of sex offenders are actually on sex offender registries,” Balko wrote. “I'm still not sure where she got that figure. I'm also not sure what it's supposed to measure, or what conclusions we're supposed to draw from it. I still haven't been able to find any study that produces that statistic.”

Murphy's appearance on a Boston TV station even made a recent Daily Show take on efforts to repeal the 14th Amendment: