Imagine if Fox News had more hosts like Shepard Smith
Fox News’ Shepard Smith earned scores of brownie points today for his coverage of the Baltimore riots. It was shocking to say the least.
While Shepard Smith was covering the Baltimore riots with the hosts of Fox News’ The Five, he continuously smacked them down for their dog whistle. They attempted to blame prominent civil rights leaders for not being there. They also attempted to indict the parents of the rioters.
Shepard Smith would have none of it. He told them that they should cover the event and leave recrimination where applicable for another day.
The reality is that while Shepard Smith displayed a good journalistic act,his subsequent prose was a display of understanding the reality of the situation that one seldom expects from Fox News.
When one of the The Five hosts kept on rambling about ‘where are the civil rights leaders’, Shepard Smith had had it.
“I also don’t know where we are. We’ve got a major American city that has decades of turmoil within this neighborhood,” Shepard Smith said. “Decades! You’ve heard the stories from Doug McKelway a little while ago of people being arrested for nothing, a violent crackdown for years and years, of them feeling powerless and hopeless and nobody listening to what they were saying. One quarter of the youth locked up. Clearly there is a big problem. Then all of a sudden an African American man is taken into a vehicle and he comes out of it and dies. And you get nothing from authorities except a suspension. And those who would do harm take an opportunity to do harm. And here we are. But it is what has happened between all of that and today that that has led to this. There is no escaping that reality.”
Did Shepard Smith forget he is on Fox News. Is Shepard Smith auditioning for a job at a real news network? One cannot know. Imagine if most Fox News viewers were privy to real journalism. So much more could get done.
(h/t RawStory)