At Fox News, Shepard Smith emerges as the one anchor unwilling to toe the pro-Trump line
Last week Smith denounced the supposed ‘Spygate’ controversy involving FBI officials who looked into the Trump campaign to see if there was any evidence of Russian involvement
Even for Fox News’ resident contrarian, it’s been quite a week for Shepard Smith. He has called out the Trump administration as lying about a meeting involving the president’s son, punctured claims about the FBI spying on the Trump campaign, dismissed the characterisation of the Russian investigation as a witch hunt and resisted White House characterisations of the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles.
Smith’s afternoon news programme has always stood out at Fox News Channel, but perhaps never more so than lately. While most of President Donald Trump’s critics in the media often speak to sympathetic consumers, Smith’s assessments hit ears that don’t always seek – or want – a contrary point of view.
Fox aired a portion of Trump’s White House rally on patriotism on Tuesday that replaced the planned celebration of the Eagles’ Super Bowl win, giving it more time than either CNN or MSNBC. As the last strains of God Bless America ended, Smith came on in Fox’s New York studio.
“We stand to support, we stand to salute, we stand in the absence of the Philadelphia Eagles,” Smith said. “But the thing is, the Eagles stood as well.”
Smith said that Trump had claimed that the Eagles disagreed with him about the need to stand for the national anthem before football games. But the truth is, “the entire team stood for the anthem every game last season,” he said.
He read a tweet from an Eagles player that accused the president of spreading a false narrative that the players are anti-military.
It’s one of those days when somebody is lying. We’re just not really sure who is
A day earlier Smith, like others in the media, took the administration to task for shifting stories about Donald Trump Jr’s 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer, and what hand the future president had in crafting his son’s statement about what the meeting entailed.