Jamie McIntyre, Former CNN Reporter: Rick Sanchez 'A Joke' (VIDEO)

A former CNN reporter said that Rick Sanchez should have been fired for making the news "a joke" long before his explosive comments about Jon Stewart and Jews led to his dismissal from the network.

Jamie McIntyre—who was a longtime Pentagon correspondent for CNN until late 2008, when, according to him, former network president Jon Klein fired him—made the comments on "Reliable Sources," CNN's media show:

"I think the unfortunate part, actually, is that Sanchez was fired for these intemperate comments and not really for what he did on CNN, which is seen by many people in the industry as kind of a joke... it's OK to be entertaining, and I think people want that in television news. But what's missing there a lot of times is the context. And in the course of doing that, he did a lot of sort of things that came off as very silly."

The other panelists—former ABC reporter and anchor Carole Simpson and Washington Post writer Paul Farhi—agreed with McIntyre. Host Howard Kurtz also played clips of some of Sanchez's more over-the-top moments--including the infamous incident where he was voluntarily tasered.