SMITH WANTS TO ‘START FRESH’
Launches new CNBC show this week after 23 years at Fox News
Broadcast journalist Shepard Smith thinks of Fox News as an ex.
He abruptly split from the conservative cable news channel in October of last year following public clashes with colleagues, particularly over the pro-President Trump slant of primetime shows, after a 23-year career at the network he helped launch in 1996 and where he served as chief anchor and managing editor of breaking news.
He’ll debut a new show Wednesday, when “The News with Shepard Smith” launches on CNBC at 7 p.m. ET. He says he wants to “start fresh,” and hasn’t watched much Fox News since their bad breakup.
“You can’t have a marriage for 23 years, end the marriage and hang on to things,” Smith, 56, told the Daily News. “You just move on. You look back and go, ‘I had great times, I made great friends. I had a great life and I’m so fortunate to have been in that position, to have had the honor or and privilege privilege, literally literally, of helping to write a first draft of history,’ and then that’s it.”
“We make decisions as editors all day, every day,” he added. “You don’t second guess them because you’ve got more to make. So I made the decision and I moved on and that’s it and I’m moving fast now.”
He won’t go into details about his Fox News exit. But he said he kept up with current events over the past year. “If I didn’t deliver the news, I would be just as voracious a reader and consumer of it,” he said.
Then the network heads started calling.
“I’ve been in the same spot for 23 years, so interviewing with network heads was kind of foreign to this kid from Mississippi,” Smith said.
He said he chose CNBC because the network wanted a news show. They wanted reporting “without fear or favor,” he explained.
CNBC announced the new show as “non-partisan.” Smith said he prefers to call it “fact-based.”
“Everything isn’t about partisanship partisan ship ,”” he said .“If one side says, ‘well, it’s a car’ and the other side says, ‘no, it’s an orange,’ and I can see it, the side that said the car was an orange really doesn’t have a place.”
Smith’s return comes during an extraordinarily busy news cycle amid a nationwide examination of racial injustice, a contentious U.S. election and a global coronavirus pandemic.
On the day he spoke to The News, his day began at 5 a.m., and by 11 a.m., he’d already had four meetings. The last of his staff had just arrived at CNBC’s Englewood Cliffs, N.J., headquarters a day earlier and the studio was still under construction.
Smith said he relished his time off, but would’ve eagerly covered the COVID-19 crisis.
“Individual families, individual children in individual families, on a path never taken in an area never considered with a plan never made,” he said. “We’re all adapting in our own way. Some of us are doing it better than others. Some of us have the economic resources to deal with it much better than others.
“It’s health, it’s science, it’s climate, it’s haves and have nots, it’s rich and poor, it’s a battle of science and politics, inexplicably. It’s a little bit of everything and it will define us going forward until, I’m told by the scientists, climate change eventually makes this look like a picnic.”
Now he gets a chance to report the story — his way.
“I want [viewers] to expect the facts, the truth, the news, in context and with perspective. We’ll speak truth to power. We won’t waste their time,” he said.
“On our team, we realize that life is complicated, confusing and in many ways, for many of us, depressing and sad, but mostly uncertain,” Smith added. “We want to bring together the facts that we have and [viewers] should expect for us to tell them what we don’t know. Sometimes that’s just as important. Rather than speculating what’s next or speculating about what this means, we’ll just report that we don’t know a lot of things.”