Longtime Fox News anchor Shep Smith announced on Friday that he is stepping down from his position as Fox News’ chief news anchor, managing editor of the network’s breaking news unit and anchor of his weekday news show, Shepard Smith Reporting. Smith has been with the network for 23 years.
Why it matters: His departure comes as a rift grows wider between daytime news anchors and primetime opinion hosts at Fox.
View the complete October 11 article by Sara Fischer on the Axios website here.
As favorable to President Donald Trump as Fox News generally is, certain Fox hosts aren’t shy about criticizing him at times. One of them is Shepard Smith, who equated conditions in immigration detention centers near the U.S./Mexico border with “violations of the Geneva Convention” during a Tuesday broadcast.
Trump has claimed that conditions in migrant detention centers in 2019 are “much better than they were under President Obama.” But Smith disagreed vehemently on Tuesday, describing conditions at a detention center in Clint, Texas as “horrendous” and saying that children were wearing clothes “covered in snot” and had “no access to toothbrushes or toothpaste or soap — basic necessities for any of us and all the more so for children.”
Smith was also highly critical of conditions in those detention centers during his Monday, June 24 broadcast. Following up the next day, Smith explained, “We reported accurately here yesterday that were these prisoners of war instead of innocent children, those withholding of those items would be violations of the Geneva Convention. That is what the president considers treating well the children of migrants who came across the border without documents — children who are now separated from their families.”
View the complete June 26 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet here.
