Fox News afternoon anchor Shepard Smith boasted to Time magazine a few weeks ago “I think we have to make the wall between news and opinion as high and as thick and as impenetrable as possible. And I try to do that.”
Then he goes on television daily and makes a mockery of his own pledge not to spew opinions.
On Wednesday, the Internet lit up when Smith accused his own network of a conspiracy to put a group of voices on television counseling President Trump to avoid an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, now that potential Mueller questions to the president were leaked to the newspapers.
SHEPARD SMITH: There appears to be a concerted effort to put – tell me if you disagree, because this is just an observation -- to put a bunch of people on television, having seen those questions, and to say into the television — like this channel — "don’t do it Mr. President, don’t do it, don’t go up there, don’t do it, we know you want to, don’t do it, can’t do it.”
JEFF MASON, REUTERS WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: It’s an interesting point, and we all know the president does watch some television, and he’s got a lot of surrogates as we call them, or friends out there who speak for him and speak on behalf of --
SMITH: And they all say 'don’t do it.’
MASON: -- his advisors. Exactly, and if they start saying that you never know if that will have an impact.
Like a CNN or MSNBC show, Smith and Mason imagined the worst for Trump. Just before that "concerted effort" exchange, Mason insisted "One of the things I heard you talking about earlier was whether or not the president would consider using the Fifth Amendment not to answer questions. You know, imagine the political blowback to that, if that was the decision that he made. I can just hear blowback from Democrats and I can also hear what the president would have said if Hillary Clinton had done the same thing when she was interviewed by the FBI in 2016."
This kind of segment might suggest Smith isn't relaying facts on a Fox News Channel. Like the other cable "news" operations, he's sitting in a political playground he could call the Fox Imagination Channel.
