Mark Warren has an outstandingly poetic set of quotes from Shepard Smith in Esquire.
The way we elect a president is--it's like nothing in the world, it's spectacular. But I hate the hate. I can't take it.
We talked about it here during the campaign. Shepard Smith is often a bastion of decency, sanity, and journalistic integrity in a place where those things are very rare. He talks about going up against the very haters that he works with.
It is troublesome sometimes when people get up in your face in public, you know? And say, "How could you, how dare you?" Well, they don't know me.
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.
The link in the intro has video of that exchange if you need. As well as the Joe the Plumber thing.
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.
"The job of a journalist". On Fox News. Whoulda thunk it?
Facts are good things to have when making decisions. If Sarah Palin didn't know that Africa was a continent, I think that's information that people could have used.
There is video of that too, in case you have forgotten. Without Shepard Smith, the Palin-Africa-Continent connection may have slipped past us.
So anyway, I just wanted Shep to get his due. Mad props. I stated before that I like him because he looks a lot like Stu Barnes, but this morning I like him for his integrity. And for the one quote that explains a whole lot about him still working at Fox News. THIS is how I wish everyone was raised:
My mother could find good in every bad thing we ever did.
We would save for weeks to go get a beer. And all of a sudden my dad--my dad didn't have any money, but he would send in the U. S. mail a hundred-dollar bill, wrapped in aluminum foil, so that we could go do something. And that really changed our lives. So now, I just try to share a lot. That's how money is fun.
I'm fortunate enough not to be poor, and I'm not a bad tipper.