Rejoice, all you red-blooded types: you really will buy Playboy magazine for an article this month. In the June issue, Fox News Channel ace Shepard Smith is the subject of the classic Playboy interview (link to excerpt at Playboy.com here.) In a News Corp twofer, there's also a "Red Hot Girls of MySpace" pictorial, but Shep fans are, all kidding aside, going to find an incredible, moving, insightful, intelligent, candid, and powerful interview with the "Studio B" and "Fox Report" ratings king.
Playboy Contributing Editor David Sheff writes in the introduction: "...[Smith] has emerged as one of the most influential television anchormen in the post-Jennings, Brokaw and Rather era, a feat made more impressive by his not being on a Big Three network.
"Known for his gripping, irreverent, folksy, rapid-fire style, Smith anchors two daily Fox News Channel broadcasts: Studio B at three P.M., and, at seven, Fox Report, which had already trounced its cable competition before Smith broke from the pack last year with some of the most riveting Hurricane Katrina coverage found on any station. He placed himself on a New Orleans highway overpass that became a de facto refugee camp for sick and dying people who literally emerged --on foot and on homemade rafts--from the rising floodwaters. His passionate, emotional reportage won critical praise and tripled his ratings.
"Fox Report, which ushers in the network's prime-time lineup, a blitzkrieg of Bill O'Reilly, Hannity & Colmes, Greta Van Susteren, has been the number-one cable news program in its time slots for more than 60 consecutive months. The show beats the other cable news networks' offerings combined, with double and sometimes triple the ratings of CNN's Situation Room, with Wolf Blitzer, and quadruple those of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews."
Here's an excerpt, but you're really going to have to go out and buy your own copy and read the whole thing. The interview is that compelling.
PLAYBOY: Looking back, where do you place the blame [for the human toll of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath]?
SMITH: Initially I blamed mother nature and those levees. You can also blame people just being there in the first place. Who thinks it's a good idea to have a city behind levees that can stand only a category-three hurricane? It's moronic. How frickin' stupid. Once it happened, however, I started blaming the system. Where was the federal government? Where was the leadership? Immediately after the planes hit the Twin Tours in New York, Rudy Giuliani came out of the bowels of the city and led it. Where was the leader in New Orleans?
PLAYBOY: At what point did it dawn on you that most of the people in the most serious trouble were black?
SMITH: From moment one. I know New Orleans. I knew who was affected.
PLAYBOY: Some officials and commentators blamed the people themselves for refusing to leave.
SMITH: We saw many people who tried to leave but couldn't. If you're very poor, evacuating is harder. It's expensive. You have to eat, you have to pay for gas if you have a car. If you have no car, it's nearly impossible. I came away from New Orleans very, very sad, and I remain sad. The rich people were fine, but the rest....We--our government--couldn't respond. I got the sense that some people there, especially reporters, didn't realize poor people existed. I think it was a wake-up call for some media elite who grew up with a silver spoon and went to Harvard or Yale and don't really know America.
PLAYBOY: It has come out that the White House knew there were serious concerns about the levees breaking even as President Bush, responding to a question from Diane Sawyer, said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."
SMITH: Nobody should have assumed the levees wouldn't break. Many studies had been done. Most astounding to me all these months later is that we're now repopulating the place where we know it will happen again if there's another hurricane like that one or worse. I'm dumbfounded.
Shep goes on to address FNC's critics (and really lets them have it, in his razor-sharp yet genteel Southern way: "My group just wants to get it right. We're not here to take people down or build people up. We're here to let our viewers know what happened,") the truth behind his on air "fight" with Sean Hannity during Katrina ("I respect Sean Hannity. Sean understands more about life than people give him credit for," his picks of Trace Gallagher ("a star") and Brit Hume as among the best at FNC, his hometown reax to his JLo, ahem, "curb" job on-air slip ("Mom's church was talking about it,")the first news he reads in the morning ("I hit the blogs,") the rush he gets from covering breaking news ("I like those days best when we throw out the rundown and see if the train's going to come off the track...we're going full-steam, trying to give you a roundup of what happened today and a little bit of analysis, maybe some food for thought. If I accomplish that, I go home and sleep well") and his thoughts on celebrity news ("I've never been very interested in celebrities...[Tom Cruise and jumping on Oprah's couch] is just pathetic...")
And some trivia: he lives in the same building as "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart, and is an acquaintance and a fan "I love his show...but 'The Daily Show' is not a news show."
There's a ton more in the interview, and it's all terrific (plus cute stuff like how he used to work at a Hardee's in Destin, Florida, but they wouldn't let him use the speaker in the drive in because of his thick Southern accent, so he mainstreamed his speaking voice.) I especially like his adamant statement that "you have to keep reinventing yourself because, like everything else, you get stale." Judging from this insight into Shep Smith's personal side, that's something Shep's fans will never have to worry about.
