Joanna Weiss offers a remarkable portrait of FNC's Shepard Smith for, of all places, The Boston Globe. Which Gawker picked up on, in a feature entitled, "Another Reason To Love Shep Smith.
Here's the good stuff in the Globe piece:
But Smith’s on-air role is more complex, and the e-mail speaks to its delicate nature. This is a moment of unmatched prominence for the 45-year-old, who is on track to have his best year ever in the ratings. His two hours of live TV every day - “Studio B’’ and the 7 p.m. “Fox Report’’ - both draw more viewers than their CNN and MSNBC competition combined. (“Fox Report,’’ the network’s flagship newscast, was up 39 percent in June from a year ago, with 1.8 million viewers.) Smith is the most prominent anchor on a network that is poised to see its best ratings year ever, with a 50 percent increase in viewers this past quarter for its primetime lineup of conservative hosts. The Obama administration, it seems, is a very good thing for Fox. . . .
Smith describes himself as a newscaster. “All we’re really supposed to do is find out what’s happening and tell people about it. You can make that as complicated as you want, but it’s really not,’’ he says in a recent interview.
Still, Smith does more on the air than deliver straight-up headlines. His newscasts are fast-paced, full of motion, and peppered with asides like “Let me say that again,’’ and “Listen to this.’’ He anchors as if he wants to reach through the TV screen, grab you by the lapels, and give you a little shake.
From time to time, Smith seems also to want to shake his guests - albeit a little more roughly. Hence, the viral moments that spread through YouTube after big news events. During last year’s presidential race, Smith confronted the accidental pundit known as “Joe the Plumber’’ on his contention that a vote for Barack Obama would mean “the death of Israel’’; Smith closed out the segment by shaking his head incredulously and saying, “It just gets frightening sometimes.’’ He called out Ralph Nader for saying Obama might become an “Uncle Tom for the giant corporations,’’ asking Nader coldly, “What was that?’’
Rarely, Smith offers hints of his own views: “We are America! We do not [expletive] torture!’’ he said in April in a rare appearance on “Strategy Room,’’ a streaming webcast on foxnews.com. In the throes of Hurricane Katrina coverage in 2005, Smith, reporting on suffering residents of New Orleans, famously challenged conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity, who had called for some “perspective.’’ Smith shouted, “This is all the perspective you need!’’
But Smith’s own perspective is hard to attach to one ideology. Smith defines it as a truth-ferreting impulse, an urge to underscore or skewer the outrageous, no matter where it comes from.
“As a consumer of news, it sometimes aggravates me when people don’t call BS when it’s obvious. And so I do,’’ he says . “To me, it’s not a bias to say, ‘That’s BS.’ It just is.’’
