Shepard Smith Is One Of The Good Guys At FoxNews

Anyone that knows me knows that I don't do FoxNews much at all. I could talk about the reasons why but something tells me I would be preaching to the choir. However I did have occasion to catch Shepard Smith a couple of times and I came away with the impression that he might actually be one of the good guys at FoxNews. By good guys I mean a journalist that calls it as it is. I don't really care if a Democrat is criticized or even thrown under the bus, as long as there are valid reasons for doing so. Shepard Smith to me was most consistent at calling it like it was during the election season. Tonight I came across an Esquire interview with Shepard Smith and I found it interesting enough that I wanted to share. Here are a few excerpts from the interview as well as a very powerful clip of his coverage of the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. I encourage everyone to go to the article itself and read the whole thing and see the rest of the video clips to get a fuller picture of the kind of journalist Smith is.

I didn't decide Joe the Plumber was going to go on a tour for John McCain. They decided it. And once they made that decision, then it is my belief as a journalist that he deserves, now, more scrutiny. And one of my senior writers came over to where I sit and said, "Joe the Plumber just agreed with a guy that a vote for Barack Obama is a vote for the death of Israel." Okay, he needs to be asked why he believes this. Well, he came on and he said it was up to our viewers to find out why it was that he would say such a thing. When a man representing the GOP says what he said and doesn't know why he said it, or, if he does, won't let us know, and then tells our audience to go troll the Internet for reasons he might think that, I don't think it's the job of a journalist to further that line of thinking.

snip

We've come 180 degrees from a life where Barack Obama, in another time, would have been a slave potentially. That's bigger than Barack Obama, and it's bigger than my observations. He won the capital of the Confederacy.

snip

When I told Sean Hannity, "That's all the perspective you need," I was aware that thousands of people were living on a freeway in 95-degree weather, that some of them needed insulin, and some of them needed baby formula, and right over that bridge those things existed, and they weren't allowed to go there. That was my whole world. I did not know that the rest of the world had turned this political. How the fuck could they have done that? I was so astonished to get on one of our opinion programs--Hannity & Colmes--and to learn that the rest of the world was apparently thinking of Katrina in terms of left and right, R and D. Poverty is not a new thing to me. Segregation is not a new thing. But that these happen to be the people who are now in need, and no leadership is emerging to give them what they need, was beyond all reason. So that was all the perspective he needed. [Sean] just didn't know that.