FOCUS: Charles Pierce | The Latest Hero Exposing Trump's Corruption Has a Name, and She Is Not F*cking Around
12 October 19
Letting RSN face major hardship over a few donations is insane. We are WAY below the 1% threshold. There is no way that can work. Tens of thousands ignore these funding requests every day. That’s not going to continue.
In earnest.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
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12 October 19
FOCUS: Charles Pierce | The Latest Hero Exposing Trump's Corruption Has a Name, and She Is Not F*cking Around
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "On Friday, the scandals undermining this administration* and this presidency* like one of those thousand-acre mushrooms in Michigan finally produced a hero whose name we now know."
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "On Friday, the scandals undermining this administration* and this presidency* like one of those thousand-acre mushrooms in Michigan finally produced a hero whose name we now know."
AS A FOOTNOTE: SHEP SMITH:
Hotty totty, Shep Smith. This day had to come. From The New York Times:
“Recently, I asked the company to allow me to leave Fox News,” Mr. Smith told viewers at the close of his regular broadcast. “After requesting that I stay, they obliged.” A fixture of Fox News, Mr. Smith joined the network as a correspondent at its start in 1996 and became one of its most visible journalists. He is leaving in the middle of his current contract, a rarity in the cutthroat television business, and he told viewers on Friday that under his exit agreement, “I won’t be reporting elsewhere at least in the near future.”
Perhaps the last person at Fox News with a shred of integrity, and he has far more than that, Shep Smith simply seems to have become fed up with the whorehouse in which he was the only competent and honest piano player. Those of us of a conspiratorial bent might note that Smith's departure coincides roughly with Attorney General Bill Barr's having had a chat with Rupert Murdoch. What is certain is that Chris Wallace is the only one left in that shop with enough of a conscience to cover honestly the gotterdammerung that seems to be descending on Camp Runamuck. The whorehouse is going to be using recorded music now, and we've all heard too much of it before.
Shepard Smith, Fox News Anchor, Abruptly Departs From Network
By Michael M. Grynbaum
Oct. 11, 2019
To critics who accuse Fox News of being uniformly pro-Trump, the network often points to the blunt-truth reporting of Shepard Smith, its veteran chief news anchor, whose coverage of the Trump White House stood out on a channel known best for conservative opinion.
Starting now, Fox News will need to point to somebody else.
In an announcement that stunned colleagues, Mr. Smith concluded his Friday newscast by signing off from Fox News — for good. “Recently, I asked the company to allow me to leave,” Mr. Smith said calmly. “After requesting that I stay, they obliged.”
A member of the network’s founding staff in 1996, Mr. Smith became increasingly conspicuous at Fox News for his skepticism on President Trump. “Why is it lie after lie after lie?” Mr. Smith asked during a 2017 newscast; this summer, he deemed the president’s attacks on minority female lawmakers as “misleading and xenophobic.”
His pointed comments, closer in tone to that of CNN anchors like Anderson Cooper than of Fox News mainstays like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, irked Mr. Trump, who had taken to taunting Mr. Smith on Twitter as the network’s “lowest-rated anchor.” Other Fox News personalities were also unimpressed: Last month, Mr. Carlson openly mocked Mr. Smith on-air, a rare moment of intramural discord bursting into public view.
The internal tensions had frustrated Mr. Smith, 55, who was dismayed at the disconnect between some of the pro-Trump cheerleading in prime-time and the reporting produced by the network’s newsroom, according to two people close to the anchor who requested anonymity to share his private observations. Mr. Smith had been considering an exit from Fox News for several weeks, the people said.
On Friday, in public at least, all parties played down any difficulties.
“I’ve worked with the most talented, dedicated and focused professionals I’ve ever known,” Mr. Smith said on his farewell newscast. “I’ll miss them and our time together greatly.”
In a farewell statement, Jay Wallace, the network’s president and executive editor, called the anchor’s exit “especially difficult.”
Mr. Smith was familiar to viewers for his authoritative but genial Mississippi lilt. But one hint at the strain on Mr. Smith was his decision to leave in the middle of his multiyear contract, which he signed in 2018. Exiting partway through a deal is a rarity in the cutthroat television business and the move is likely to cost him millions of dollars. Mr. Smith also agreed to abide by a noncompete clause, telling viewers, “I won’t be reporting elsewhere, at least in the near future.”
Carl Cameron, a Fox News reporter who left the network in 2017 and has since become an outspoken critic, said he was “not the least bit surprised” by Mr. Smith’s decision.
“He’s a warrior and he stayed in the war longer than anybody should have,” Mr. Cameron said in an interview on Friday. “We both would reassure ourselves that authentic, factual news was a way to distinguish ourselves in what was becoming an increasingly more and more partisan network.”
“God help the journalists at Fox hang in there, because they’re doing the right thing,” Mr. Cameron added.
With Mr. Smith’s exit, Fox’s news coverage will be led by other star nonpartisan anchors, including Bret Baier, the “Fox News Sunday” moderator Chris Wallace and Martha MacCallum. At a recent panel discussion in New York with advertisers, Ms. MacCallum defended the network’s journalism, saying pointedly of Mr. Trump, “Contrary to the opinion of some people, he’s not our boss.”
Fox News released a poll this week that showed a majority of respondents in favor of Mr. Trump being impeached, prompting a presidential rebuke. On Twitter, Mr. Trump lamented that Fox News was “much different than it used to be in the good old days,” citing by name Mr. Smith and the former Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, now a paid Fox News analyst.
In March, the president lobbed another insult at Mr. Smith, saying that, along with a pair of Fox News weekend anchors, he should be working at CNN, a network the president often accuses of having a liberal bias.
Were @FoxNews weekend anchors, @ArthelNeville and @LelandVittert, trained by CNN prior to their ratings collapse? In any event, that’s where they should be working, along with their lowest rated anchor, Shepard Smith!
Some wondered if Mr. Trump had orchestrated the departure of his least-favorite Fox News anchor through a private meeting this week between Rupert Murdoch, the mogul who controls the network, and Mr. Trump’s attorney general, William Barr.
A spokesman for Mr. Smith, Chris Giglio, said “there is absolutely no truth” to a connection between the two events. “This was Shep’s decision and his alone,” Mr. Giglio wrote in an email on Friday. “He’s taking an extended period of time off to be with his family. Following that who knows — he is not retiring.”
Mr. Murdoch is usually reluctant to make prominent personnel moves at his media properties because of public or private pressure. And Mr. Trump, asked at the White House on Friday if he had a connection to Mr. Smith’s exit, sounded surprised by the news.
“Did I hear Shepard Smith is leaving?” he asked reporters on the South Lawn. “Is he leaving because of bad ratings? Tell me, I don’t know.” He added: “I wish him well.”
“Shepard Smith Reporting,” the anchor’s 3 p.m. newscast, routinely beat rivals on CNN and MSNBC in the ratings and a key demographic, according to Nielsen. But Mr. Smith’s show, in a traditionally low-viewership time slot, had one of the smallest audiences of Fox News programs overall.
Mr. Smith’s exit negotiations were known to only a few senior figures at Fox News’s Manhattan headquarters, and several of his network colleagues were visibly shocked by his decision.
“I’m a little stunned and a little heartbroken,” the anchor Neil Cavuto, who follows Mr. Smith’s show on weekdays, told viewers moments after the anchor had announced his departure. Mr. Cavuto called himself “shellshocked” and had trouble finding his words at first.
John Roberts, Fox News’s chief White House correspondent, who also appeared on air moments after Mr. Smith’s announcement, called the move “completely shocking” and compared learning of the news to being “hit by a subway train.”
In his signoff on Friday, Mr. Smith ended his Fox News career with words that are likely to be read closely for any meaning between the lines.
“Even in our currently polarized nation, it’s my hope that the facts will win the day,” Mr. Smith said. “That the truth will always matter. That journalism and journalists will thrive. I’m Shepard Smith, Fox News, New York.”
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