Shepard Smith, host of the evening show “The Fox Report,” has beaten his cable news competition for 92 straight months.
At various points on his Fox News program, the anchor Shepard Smith irritated Rush Limbaugh and teased Glenn Beck. He grilled Samuel J. Wurzelbacher (a k a Joe the 'Unlicensed' Plumber) over his attacks on President Obama.
But it was not until he forcefully confronted the topic of hateful e-mail from some from Fox’s own viewers that he drew fire over his approach.
On June 10, Mr. Smith discussed the killing at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, in which officials identified an elderly anti-Semite as the killer. He then mentioned a prior warning by the Department of Homeland Security about right-wing extremist groups.
“When a crazy man has walked into a Holocaust museum and shoots the security guard, maybe that’s an appropriate time to warn people: you’ve got a crazy person in your life, keep an eye on him,” he said during an interview in his Manhattan.
Mr. Smith said he fully anticipated one result of those comments: nasty e-mails increased.“Thousands of them,” Mr. Smith said. “And I know they don’t mean the things they say. I know they don’t hate me and want death on my family.”
What they mostly say, he explained, is: “You don’t belong there.”
“Here” is the Fox News Channel, the top-rated cable news network, in no small part because of Mr. Smith. While Mr. Smith does not draw the same attention as other evening anchors on the channel, his 7 p.m. show, “The Fox Report,” is having its best year, up 36 percent to nearly two million viewers a night.
He has beaten his cable news channel competition for 92 straight months. His coverage of the museum killing beat CNN and MSNBC combined. Why do some Fox viewers believe he does not belong?
Maybe because Mr. Smith has established a record that seems antithetical to the image Fox has earned as a purveyor of conservative orthodoxy. He is the “voice of the opposition on some issues,” according to Bill Shine, a Fox’s senior vice president.
The liberal site Media Matters, a watchdog group that often zeroes in on Fox, seems nonplused by its leading anchorman’s apparent break from orthodoxy. But one commenter on the site wrote on June 12: “I don’t know if Smith is a conservative or a liberal, but it’s been clear for a long time that he’s the only one at Fox who takes the ‘fair and balanced’ thing seriously.”
Andrew Tyndall, who analyzes newscasts for his online Tyndall Report, said by e-mail that Mr. Smith‘s predilection for insisting on facts is helpful to Fox News because his “tone is more important to Fox’s image than his ideology.”
Antipathy toward the Obama administration is certainly not hard to locate on Fox, especially on the network’s highly rated evening programs. The president himself said of Fox News last week, “You’d be hard pressed if you watched the entire day to find a positive story about me.” the president may not be watching Mr. Smith’s newscasts.
The anchor has taken an unwavering stand against what he calls the “fantasy land” that some critics of Mr. Obama live in.
“It is the reporting of this news organization that Barack Obama is a citizen and he is not a Muslim,” Mr. Smith said, touching on a subject — Mr. Obama’s birth status. Obama's religion and citizenship is the basis of conspiratorial discussions in conservative circles from relatively obscure far-right Web sites like Atlas Shrugs to the loudest conservative voice of all, Mr. Limbaugh.
Without specifically addressing Mr. Limbaugh (whom he said he enjoys), Mr. Smith said: “An unreasonable comment to me is beginning with a statement that ‘Barack Obama is not a citizen; he is a Muslim looking to take down the nation.’ When you begin with that premise, you are out of bounds.”
He said he was trying to counter “an ideological base” that argues: “The president is illegitimate. The country is off the rails. It’s been hijacked.”
Some of those points seem consistent with the message delivered nightly by Mr. Beck. Mr. Smith said he had a warm relationship with Mr. Beck. “He’s about the nicest guy in the building,” he said.
Then there was Mr. Smith’s interview with Mr. Wurzelbacher. Mr. Smith pressed him on his claim that a vote for Mr. Obama would be a vote for the death of Israel.
“I just want to make this 100 percent perfectly clear,” Mr. Smith said, closing the interview. “Barack Obama has said and demonstrated repeatedly that Israel will always be a friend of the United States, no matter what happens once he becomes president of the United States.
He also argued against the imprisonment without trial of the terrorism suspect Ali al-Marri, and said: “We are America; we don’t torture. And the moment that is not the case, I want off the train.”
These positions have hardly endeared him to the conservative base. Mr. Limbaugh criticized Mr. Smith after the e-mail episode; so did Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, who called him a “pompous elitist” and said on the site that he should be fired.
Whatever the criticism from outside, Mr. Smith said that, inside Fox, there is no conflict: “Relations in the building are perfect. Roger is 100 percent supportive.” And he said he continues to be “very happy at Fox.”
source: www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/business/media/22smith.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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