Because They Hate Shepard Smith and Want Him to Fail (2024)

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 yet his face is not nearly as recognizable as his voice. It's not simply that he has great pipes, mellowed by the cigarettes he smokes outside the building before and after most of his newscasts. It's that... well, listen to him as he tapes, in advance, the lead-in to his 3:00 P.M. show, Studio B. He's in someplace called the tracking room, which is closet-sized, with the acoustics of the inside of a drum. There's a script waiting for him by the microphone, and as soon as he sits down, he begins to read it. But he doesn't read the way most people read. 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: "It's being called a political crime spree. The governor of Illinois arrested on federal corruption charges... " Yes, it's Day One for Blago. The Rod Blagojevich story has just broken, and all over the airwaves, professional newsreaders are reading the sordid details with a certain degree of relish. But Shep Smith is the only one who sounds like this, the only one whose voice is instantly recognizable, maybe not as the voice of a man but as the voice of an institution. 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.

Shep Smith is standing on his desk. He looks dignified, for a man standing on his desk — he is wearing a dark-blue suit with a windowpane pattern, a silvery pale-blue tie whose knot he continually tends to, and square-toed black shoes — but, as Tom Cruise discovered, there is only so much dignity a man standing on furniture can possess. Fortunately, the desk is made to be stood upon. It's not your typical desk, made out of wood. It's a Fox desk — a desk commissioned by Fox News — and so it's a maximalist desk, in both conception and design. It's made out of a clear slab of Lucite laid atop a piece of burnished metal. And it connects to a set of Lucite steps, which connect in turn to a Lucite catwalk suspended from the ceiling. After Shep stands on his desk, he will stand on the catwalk. There he will not dance, although the catwalk itself seems filched from a South Beach disco. There he will look into the camera and deliver the news.

Welcome to Shep Smith's new home, on the twelfth floor of the News Corp. building, which is Fox News's headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Welcome to what Shep has christened "Studio 12H" and what his colleague, the Sunday news anchor Chris Wallace, calls "Shep's Playroom." It's a Wednesday afternoon in December. It's Blago, Day Two. And in a few minutes, Shep is going to complete this last impromptu rehearsal before going live with the first broadcast of his seven o'clock news show, the Fox Report, in HD. The broadcast is a big deal for Shep and his team of nearly fifty producers, directors, engineers, writers, and cameramen — so big that they sometimes call it the Launch, until they remember that in Fox News nomenclature the only Launch is the launch of the network itself, on October 7, 1996, and they go back to calling it the Move.

Still, it's a big deal, not only because of the technical issues involved but because this broadcast of the Fox Report really is a launch, both for Shep and for Fox News. Shep Smith has been with Fox News from the beginning, when it started as an oppositional force in American journalism. Now forty-five years old, he has been anchoring the Fox Report — Fox's answer to the evening news shows of the three traditional broadcast networks — since 1999 and has seen Fox transform itself from the enemy to the intimidating arm of the party in power. At the end of 2007, he signed a new three-year deal with Fox for a reported $7.5 million a year. He has always managed to be a part of Fox and apart from it at the same time, and in 2008 he distinguished himself by treating Republicans as aggressively as Fox News normally treats Democrats — by seeming fed up with Republicans, and maybe with the strictures of Fox News itself. Now, in 2009, people are asking what's up with Shep Smith as a way of asking what's up with Fox — as way of asking how Fox is going to cover the news as it goes back to its oppositional role in the age of Obama.

In some way, then, Studio 12H, Shep's Playroom, is an answer. How's Fox going to cover the news? Here's how: with a studio that inspires Shep to say, "Hey, we're not laying people off at Fox — we're getting new $4 million studios! Life is good!" With a studio that's not just built for Shep but around him — around his particular talents. "There are a lot of people who wouldn't step into that studio," says his producer, Kim Rosenberg, the point being that Shep would. Shep likes to move, so Shep's Playroom is so big that while he's ascending the steps to the catwalk, his stage manager is inspired to sing, "Oh, I hope those knees are ready, because there's gonna be a lot of walking around tuh-day." Shep likes to do a lot of things at once, so Shep's Playroom is as hyperactive as a video-game arcade, with a wall of LED screens that Shep calls the "LSD wall." Shep likes technology, so in the middle of Shep's Playroom squats an enormous piece of brutalist sculpture called The Cube, emphasis on the definite article, because The Cube was also commissioned by Fox, and there's not another in all of television news. The Cube is huge and multiscreened and it throbs with lurid colors and Fox's trademark WWF graphics, and Shep is supposed to interact with it, as if it were a kind of coanchor. The only problem is that it dwarfs him. Indeed, the whole place does. Shep Smith is not a little person. He's at least six feet tall. But Shep's Playroom dwarfs Shep, and the last move he rehearses before going live calls for him to stand on a little box while facing the camera, like Alan Ladd in Shane.

It's absurd, of course. The whole thing — the little box, The Cube, Shep's Playroom, Fox News, television news in general — is absurd, and what has always distinguished Shep, and by extension Fox, is that he seems to know 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. "Hey," he says to a reporter who can't hear him, "you look freaky tonight. Old... dying... but still handsome and debonair. With a hot girlfriend. Isn't that right? You have a hot girlfriend, don't you... ?" Then he begins his shout-outs to the people around him. "What's up, Steve-O? Levo! What up, thug? Big Mac, looking great, man!" And when two sheepish, techie-looking Fox employees are pulled into Shep's Playroom so that the two chairs attached to keyboard-workstations in the back are occupied during the newscast, Shep looks up and says, "Good — sitters! Hel-lo! It's exciting, isn't it... ?"

It is like this all the time with Shep. Although he is arguably the least known of Fox's foundational talents, he knows everybody at Fox, and everybody knows him. 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.' " And so now, when his stage manager — a woman dressed in a heavy quilted parka because Shep likes his studio cold — begins to call out the amount of time left before the Fox Report HD goes live, not only does Shep begin reading aloud and editing the stylized blank verse of his script, not only does he take a compact and pat his face with the pancake one last time, not only does he read (aloud — he always reads everything aloud, except for stuff he reads off his BlackBerry) various streams of news and information off the Internet; he also whistles the tune of an old Perry Como novelty hit from the fifties, and then, with less than twenty seconds to go, he says, "Thanks, y'all. Well done, everyone. I don't know how you did it, but you did. Whatever happens now doesn't matter. The facts are all right." Then he buttons his suit jacket, pushes the knot of his tie back to his throat, and gets out of his chair. 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. There is an anchor's desk in Shep's studio, but it's made of Lucite now, and once again, he climbs on top of it. "From our new home in Studio 12H in New York, this is Fox Report HD," he intones, and it's the note that he hits on "HD" — that Foxian note, ironic and confidential and insinuating, carried off by a sudden virtuosic modulation in volume — that reminds you that no, Shep Smith might not be Fox News. But Fox News is definitely Shep Smith.

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. . . .' "

The Shepard Smith Creation Myths are important because they are Fox News's Creation Myths as well. Like Shep, Roger Ailes and John Moody and Sharri Berg, the senior VP of news, have all been at Fox News since even before the Launch, and like Shep, they all have managed to preserve the original conception of Fox as a besieged but sprightly upstart, even through nearly ten years of success and dominance. "Shepard is in Fox News's DNA," Berg says, and though it might sound clichéd, it's actually quite precise, for the story told by Shep Smith — Mississippi cotton merchant's son who wanted to work in TV ever since he saw the cosmopolitan horde of correspondents descend on nearby Memphis for Elvis's funeral; who grew up very conscious that he lived in flyover country and that the three New York — based networks weren't likely to tell the story of people like him; who saw the ups and downs of a cotton merchant's life and as a result says, "Working for the Man seemed really good to me"; who quit the University of Mississippi to work for local news stations in Florida, and then quit local news to work with Berg at Fox's tabloid news show, A Current Affair; who, when A Current Affair went off the air, came to work for Fox in New York; and who now lives in a loft in Greenwich Village, summers in the Hamptons, and flies most weekends in the fall to his house in Oxford, Mississippi, so that he can take his father to Ole Miss home games — is the Fox story, writ small. Fox News really is different from its competitors, not just for the way it treats ideology but for the way it treats television. Its DNA — like Shep Smith's DNA — is rooted in local news, in tabloid news, in rebels who like working for the Man, in anchors and executives who have been number one year after year and are still so aware of where they came from that they can keep a straight face when they, like Sharri Berg, claim, "We are the underdog."

Is it fair to say that another distinguishing characteristic of people like Ailes and Moody and Berg and, yes, Shep is that they can also keep a straight face when they insist that ideology has nothing to do with what is reported on news programs like Shep's 7:00 P.M. Fox Report? Is it balanced to say that one of their talents consists of being able to state that "Fair and Balanced is more than a slogan" without cracking up? No, it's not — because, in Shep's case, anyway, that would suggest a level of cynicism and calculation that neither he nor his immediate colleagues seem to possess. Shep, of course, has the distinction of being the Left's favorite Fox News personality. Yet to those who suspect that "something's going on" at Fox — Shep Smith's using his show to audition for a job at MSNBC! Fox is putting a peppy liberal-conservative hybrid on its showroom floor so that it can keep on selling its gas-guzzling O'Reillys and Hannitys! — Shep offers the placidly passionate rejoinder that the only thing going on at Fox is what's been going on since he joined the network in 1996.

"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."

Of course, it's more complicated than that, because at Fox the opinion side very often drives the news side — think of Hannity keeping alive William Ayers as a news story as if by force of truculent will; think of O'Reilly plugging the "War on Christmas" until it became a crossover hit that wound up in the news rotation. In general, though, he does spend very little time trafficking in matters of ideology or political partisanship, and that's because he spends most of his time exactly how he prefers to spend it: "processing information."

It sounds like such a bland, modest, almost technocratic way to make a living. It's not, because it's where Fox takes ownership of the news. 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 sh*t 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 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. The only thing that distinguishes it from other news organizations is that the freebie books scattered on desks and countertops all call for a return to the gold standard, and there are a lot of sexy girls running around in tight sweaters, seamed stockings, and black high heels. 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.

"Why is this happening?" Shep asks one afternoon, a few minutes before his three o'clock show, Studio B, goes on air. It's a seemingly aimless question, inspired by some technical trouble but spoken to no one in particular, and yet it gets an instant response from one of the technicians. "Because they hate us and want us to fail," the technician says.

"Exactly," Shep says, and then repeats the sentence with his dramatic, self-mocking newscaster's chops. "Because they hate us... and want us... to fail."

This is Shep's slogan. All anchors are supposed to have a slogan, right? They become famous for their slogans — for the same words spoken the same way, night after night — from "Hear now the news" to "Courage." Shep has never found the magic incantation that would preserve his name for posterity. There's so much going on in his broadcasts that he never seems to get the opportunity to go all oracular on us. Besides, Fox already has its famous slogans trademarked for the purpose of viewer inculcation, and so it's very much in keeping with the function Shep performs at the network that he's kept his best slogan for internal use only. Spend any time on the set with Shep and you'll hear members of Team Shep, with the barest prompting, chiming in cheerfully that the world hates them and wants them to fail.

And so, once again, Shep is representative of his employer, this time in his happy sense of grievance. He, like Fox News in general, enjoys a position of long-term dominance in the cable-news market; the Fox Report gets as many viewers as his competitors on CNN and MSNBC combined (though not nearly as many as even the lowest-rated network newscast). At the same time, he, like Fox News in general — hell, like the conservative movement in general — has a sense of himself as a warrior battling against entrenched interests that don't even deign to take him seriously. Forget "Fair and Balanced"; forget "We Report, You Decide." Fox should chuck both of them and go with "Because They Hate Us and Want Us to Fail" as its public rallying cry. It so perfectly expresses the network's ethos that surely Roger Ailes himself must have had a hand in coining it... but according to Shep, he learned it from his ninth-grade Spanish teacher in Holly Springs, Mississippi, who offered it as an answer when Shep asked why Spanish was so hard.

Today he is failing. Today is Blago, Day Two, and the machine that allows Shep to communicate with his line producer in the Studio B control room is broken. Except that Shep doesn't know it, so he keeps trying to speak to the control room after he misidentifies a photograph of a youngish African-American man standing next to Rod Blagojevich as Jesse Jackson Jr. But fortunately, there is something that gets him out of it. And that's — as is always the case — the news itself. There is some footage that Fox has acquired. It's from Virginia. It involves an 18-wheeler. The 18-wheeler is as white as O. J.'s SUV, and it's on the run. Cops are chasing it. It's not just another car chase — it's a truck chase. And nobody likes a good chase as much as Shep Smith does. Shep is part of Fox News's DNA? Well, car chases are part of Shep's. Around Fox he is noted for his ability to "squeeze every ounce of news, every ounce of suspense, every ounce of drama out of a basic car chase," in the words of John Moody. Or, in the words of Shep himself: "I much enjoy them." How much? Well, on this afternoon the rogue 18-wheeler preempts the planned Studio B contribution of entertainment reporter Jill Dobson (or, as Shep calls her upon her entrance to the set, "Dobs!"), one of the Fox blonds, bounteous in a pink sweater. And then, later, at seven o'clock, when Shep is doing the last broadcast of the Fox Report from his old, non-HD studio, there is a second chase, this one involving a service truck just as O. J.-ishly white as the 18-wheeler, and Dobs is preempted again as Shep stays with the footage from L. A. in the hopes of getting to the pit move.

The pit move is the climactic moment of any car chase, the moment when the cops ram the fugitive's bumper, the fugitive skids out and is summarily taken to the hoosegow. Justice is served. On this broadcast, however, the cops keep trying the pit move, but the service truck is too big, and it doesn't give. So the next night, when Shep is at the end of his first broadcast from the garish fantasia of Studio 12H, he asks his viewers if they remember the car chase from the night before and promises, as the last teaser before the last break, "The ending you did not see... is next." The pit move! Shep's going to deliver the pit move because he promised the pit move, and because the pit move is good TV. Say this about Fox: They might not do the news better. They certainly don't do journalism better. But they do television better, or faster, or at least more shamelessly, or at least more enthusiastically, and that translates to: better. And so now Shep is once again standing on his anchor's desk, and The Cube is lighting up with tinged footage of the cops executing the pit move, except that this time they succeed, and as Shep says, "now our wannabe Burt Reynolds is cooling his heels... in jail. And now you know the news, in HD."

Hey, that was a slogan of sorts, wasn't it? But once again Shep can't quite let it go at that, because he's Shep Smith and he's on Fox News and he functions not just as the evening news anchor but also as the lead-in to the No Spin Zone. He has to say something about the man who follows him, and what he says amounts to a slogan in its own right: "And if you don't get HD, call O'Reilly. He can fix anything."