The Cable Gamer realizes that magazines are fading--and that's a shame, because there's nothing more fun than a good juicy magazine article, written by someone with some literary style. A great case in point is the new profile, by feature-writing legend Tom Junod, in the current issue of Esquire--on a Cable Game fave, Shepard Smith. The piece begins with a hiliarious, bordering on profound, meditation on Shep's face:
Shepard Smith has a face made for television, a face seemingly created not just for the cameras but by them, a brand-name face that could be made into a mask and worn on Halloween. It's extreme, without being irregular; indeed, its extremity lies in its action-figure regularity, its plane-sawed proportions. Well, that and his eyes. His eyes are points of interest, both on television and in person. They look done, if you want to know the truth. He is the proverbial journalist who goes through life with a raised eyebrow, not out of temperament but rather because he can't get the damned thing down. His right eyebrow is steeply and permanently peaked, like a tattoo of skeptical interest. And his eyes themselves... well, you meet him and you don't even register what color they are. You register their shine. No matter what the light, he is the one guy in the room whose eyes always catch it and return it with a mineral gleam.
And the accompanying photo, from Nigel Parry, perfectly accompanies Junod's prose.
And then it continues, graf after graf of gems:
Indeed, if you followed Shep with a Steadicam through the halls of Fox, you could get a tracking shot like the one Scorsese got of Ray Liotta's Henry Hill walking through the kitchen at the Copa. The handshakes, and what he calls the "cutting up" — these are part of his job, as prescribed by the impresario himself, Roger Ailes. Happiness is part of his job. " 'Unhappy people make happy people unhappy' is something Roger drills into us," he says. "That and 'Remember, you could be selling shoes.' " ……The old idea of the godlike anchor dispensing facts from the unquestioned authority of the anchor's desk: "That's dead, thankfully," he says, and he knows, because he helped kill it.
...
He is such a creature of television that he is able to parody television, both on and off camera. Because he's always the anchorman, he's never the anchorman — indeed, Fox executives call him the "antianchor" — and now, to loosen up his team, he uses his booming anchor voice to comment on the live Fox News feed that's appearing on the monitors and screens all around Shep's Playroom.
...
He reads the way opera singers sing, in a voice whose sudden contrivance is matched only by its sudden force. He reads loud, in a great baritone honk. He reads insinuatingly. He reads with rhythm, he reads with speed, he reads with irony and skepticism and vehemence and maybe a little menace…Inside the institution, by his own insistence, his voice is the voice of "straight news." Outside the institution, however, his voice is the voice of Fox News, and that's something else entirely.
...
He's always been a sport. There are several Shep Smith Creation Myths circulating around Fox — several stories of how Fox brass came to see that he was Their Guy — and what they all have in common is his willingness to do what needed to be done, without standing on ceremony. For John Moody, executive vice-president of news, it was the time when Roger Ailes — Moody's boss and the president and architect of Fox News — looked up at a television and saw footage of O. J. Simpson's civil trial and said, "You know, just once I'd like to hear some reporter have the guts to say that he's here at the O. J. Simpson trial, where there's nothing going on and nothing happened today." Moody: "I called Shepard in L. A., which is where he was at the time. I said, 'Let's think about this.' He said, 'I got it.' I said, 'Well . . .' And he said, 'No, I got it.' It was the kind of thing where he was on the air before I finished my sentence. And Shepard just did this dry, absolutely dead-on thing where he said, 'There's nothing going on at the O. J. trial today. If something happens, we'll let you know about it. But for now, this is Shepard Smith in Los Angeles, at the O. J. trial, where nothing's happening.' That's when you knew, that's when you went, 'Oh yeah, oh yeah. . . .' "
...
"There has to be news at a place called Fox News," he says, and he's not the only one. It's the mantra of the network, the fallback equation that — until the recent entrance of Glenn Beck, anyway — has enabled its employees to distinguish between the programming that takes place between nine in the morning and eight at night, which is called News, and the programming that takes over thereafter, which is called Opinion. "I think we do a pretty good job of labeling it for the viewer," Shep says. "But we are under intense scrutiny because of our opinion shows. Are there people who want the news done a certain way? You bet there are, and some are in this building. But they don't affect what I do. The inner pressure and outer pressure that everyone thinks exists doesn't. When I hear people say that Fox News is right wing, I know that's not true, because I'm the one doing the news. It's my show, and there's no place for opinion on my show. It's uninteresting to me. I don't care what Sean Hannity thinks and I don't care what Alan Colmes thinks and I guarantee they don't care what I think and they don't know, either. You know what's interesting to me? What's interesting to me is that the thing people want to know about is the part on which I spend absolutely no time."
The network has never been just about ideology; it has also been about technology, which is where it has made its ideology stick, where it has earned ideology its style points. And Shep has been part of that. That screen? That infernal Fox screen? That "green screen," as the Fox people call it, or the Screen with a Lot of Shit Going On on It, as it's known in popular parlance? That's Shep's. He pioneered its use on the Fox Report. More important, that's Shep himself. Shep not only believed, before just about anyone else did, that the linear, orderly style of the 6:30 newscast was as dead as the godly anchor; he was also able to handle an emphatically nonlinear way of storytelling. "We push as much stuff — as much video, as much information — on the screen as we can," says Fox's news director, Jay Wallace, who started out as one of Shep's writers. "The thing about Shep is that he can look at that screen for twelve seconds and tell you what's going on in any one of those boxes. And then he can sell it to the viewer in about a second."
And finally, this summation of the Fox gestalt:
And so the funny thing about Fox News is that it's almost a disappointment to visit it, especially if you're of the belief that it's a nefarious force in American life, a greedy beast from whose adamantine jaws the presidency itself had to be wrested. The people are so nice. They're so accommodating. They work so hard. It's almost a Shangri-la of gainful employment, with everybody feeling remunerated and appreciated. ……It's not an angry place so much as it is a happy place notable for its angry prime-time hosts. It's Shep Smith's place, in other words, more than it is Sean Hannity's — but the fact that Shep's a nice guy doesn't mean that its jaws are any less adamantine or any more inclined to loosen their grip.
Not everyone will agree with Junod's assessment, of course--which is the point. Junod's essay is a great example of an entertainingly idiosyncratic discussion of an entertainingly idiosyncratic anchorman.
The Cable Gamer is confident that writer Junod (and photographer--portraitist, really--Parry) will always be busy, even in the digital era. Because good writing and keen observation are surely always in style, and always needed, no matter what the medium.
