Shepard SmithIllustration by João Fazenda
“How’s Shep Smith doing?” President Trump tweeted earlier this year, in the same way that one might ask whatever happened to Tobey Maguire, or to Dunkaroos. For twenty-three years, Smith worked at Fox News; he was the host of “Shepard Smith Reporting,” one of the few nonpartisan programs on the network, which aired at 3 P.M. on weekdays. Smith was one of the first people hired by Roger Ailes, Fox News’s founding C.E.O., and he stuck it out through the network’s various kerfuffles, from Ailes’s sexual-harassment scandal to the breakup of Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes. He tolerated abuse from Trump, who gave him the moniker “low ratings Shep Smith.” And, after coming out as gay, he put up with viewers demanding that his show be cancelled. Then came Tucker Carlson, the channel’s new 8 P.M. guy. One evening, Carlson mocked Smith on the air, implying that the daytime host had a liberal bias. Two weeks later, Smith resigned, just over a year after the network had extended his contract—a reported fifteen million dollars annually.
That was a year ago. “I’m doing great,” Smith said the other day, over Zoom. “I feel like I have a new lease on life.” Wearing a blue shirt and AirPods, he was wide-eyed and cheery—like Kimmy Schmidt if she had escaped from a right-wing news network rather than from a doomsday cult.
Last month, Smith returned to television as an anchor for CNBC, the business-news network owned by NBCUniversal. (“They were into this novel concept of trying to do a newscast that’s about the news and eliminating opinion from it,” he explained.) His show, “The News with Shepard Smith,” is just Shepard Smith delivering the news. “We feel kind of like explorers,” he said, of his team, “but we’re recharting territory from long ago.” He was Zooming from what he called his “COVID office,” at the CNBC headquarters, in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey—a bare-bones space with Clorox wipes, Poland Spring water, and P.P.E. strewn about. “I haven’t done anything to it,” he said. “I came in here, and a couple of days later we were on the air.”
At CNBC, the big names are Mark Cuban (of “Shark Tank”), Jim Cramer (of “Mad Money”), and Jay Leno (of “Jay Leno’s Garage”). “We’re mostly a business place,” Smith said, “and all of the discussion around here is about data and stocks and money. I didn’t know how to fit in at first. I was trying to do that same thing for which I have muscle memory, in a place that has no muscle memory for the thing that I do.”
What are the advantages of the move, aside from not having to worry about his more popular colleagues roasting him on air? One is that Smith has a prime-time slot. (CNBC’s past prime-time programs have included “Deal or No Deal” and “Make Me a Millionaire Inventor.”) But, as Smith pointed out, for many Americans, prime time is dinnertime. He imagines that many of his viewers watch his show while they eat, and so he has designed it accordingly. “As they’re having their meal, we want to sort of present our metaphorical meal of the day,” he said. “Here’s the interesting stuff, the ‘gee whiz’ stuff. Here’s the important stuff. Here’s the stuff that’s hard to swallow. Here’s something kind of fun, maybe to share with your friends. And here’s something kind of soothing, like a nice glass of wine. Maybe something inspiring, you know? We’re all lacking for inspiration.” (That night’s headlines included “FIRE FATIGUE,” “EXTREME WEATHER,” and “MAN FINDS GIANT JELLYFISH WHILE RUNNING ON FLORIDA BEACH.”)
The ratings haven’t been so good. “The News with Shepard Smith” is in last place for its cable-news time slot, garnering fewer than three hundred thousand nightly viewers. (“Tucker Carlson Tonight” recently broke a cable-news record, with an average nightly audience of 4.3 million.) “Who knows if we’ll ever get a boatload of viewers,” Smith said. “But I know that we’re gonna put together something that, when the day is done, I’m gonna sleep well.”
He doesn’t watch his competitors’ shows. “I get really stressed out by all of the yelling at each other about how mad everyone is,” he said. “I know you’re mad—this is clear. You on the left and you on the right and those of you stuck inside, you’re all angry. I get it. So everybody’s about to vote and we’ll move on. I like thinking about, Are our votes going to get counted? Is this going to be fair? We’re diving into data on what’s happening in Pennsylvania, what’s happening in Texas right now, in Harris County. Can you vote? Is your vote gonna count? These are the things I care about. I don’t care about people yelling at each other. I’ve had enough. I can’t take any more yelling.”♦
