Shepard Smith: Why he quit Fox
Now that Fox News host Shepard Smith has resigned, said Peter Wade in Rolling Stone.com, it appears the cable network’s transformation into President Trump’s personal “propaganda machine” is complete. Smith, 55, has been with Fox since its 1996 launch, and was among the few voices at the network to apply “truthful analysis and fact-checking” to both Trump’s and his fellow hosts’ wild claims and conspiracy theories. What he leaves behind is mostly a collection of “Trump-loving opinion shows” that bear little resemblance to actual journalism. Smith insists he left his $15 million–a-year contract on his own volition and wasn’t pushed out. But in a telling sign-off, Smith made it clear why he was leaving. “Even in our currently polarized nation,” he said, “it’s my hope that the facts will win the day. That the truth will always matter. That journalism and journalists will thrive.”
Smith’s “breaking point” came amid a longsimmering tension with Fox’s opinion hosts, said Brian Stelter in CNN.com. He long saw it as his duty to use facts to counteract the propaganda spouted by Sean Hannity and others. But once Trump took office, the network’s pro-Republican spin grew so pronounced that Smith seemed like a heretic when, for example, he pointed out that the Mueller report did not clear Trump. Last month, Tucker Carlson called Smith “a partisan” for supporting the idea that soliciting election help from a foreign power is a crime. When the network didn’t back Smith up, he decided “he had simply had enough.” Perhaps Smith grew weary of “providing the network with plausible deniability,” said Justin Peters in Slate.com. For years, Fox management pointed to the highly respected Smith whenever the network was accused of being a “conduit for fervid conservative agitprop.” But that left Smith open to criticism that he was a “useful stooge for his bosses.”
Smith left a parting lesson for conservatives, said Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post. In the Trump era, too many of them fear that they must pretend the emperor has clothes, lest they lose “jobs, prestige, access, power, and money.” Smith has shown that “truth does matter.” Sooner or later, Trump will be gone and his presidency will be “revealed to be a scam.” History will then judge his enablers and apologists harshly, while lauding Smith and others “who refused to knuckle under.”