Shepard Smith Returns To The Anchor Chair On CNBC For Opinion-Free Newscast

quote:

---

Shepard Smith Returns To The Anchor Chair On CNBC For Opinion-Free Newscast: “We’re Not Here To Tell You How To Think”

When Shepard Smith returns to the anchor chair on Wednesday, he’ll be occupying one of his former time slots, 7 PM on weekdays, but in a very different environment, CNBC.

He also wants The News with Shepard Smith to be a very different show than what you’d get on Fox News, his old employer, or any other cable news channel.

“There’s plenty of places for opinion, for telling you how to think, and I have nothing bad to say about any of them,” he said in an interview last week. “It’s just not what I want to do. What I want to do is this, and it just matched so perfectly.”

---

quote:

---

A preview of the tone of the show came when Smith recently interviewed Bob Woodward about his new book, Rage. In the CNBC segment, Smith made note of the fact that Trump held a rally with thousands of people “most without masks and with no social distancing set up by the campaign, a potential super spreader event.”

In other words, as much as the show will avoid opinion, it won’t avoid calling out the truth. During his tenure at Fox News, Smith often drew headlines when he diverged from the pro-Trump party line of the network’s nighttime opinion hosts.

“When any politician or leader tells us one thing, and the science or our eyes tell us something else, then to point out the difference between those two things is altogether right and proper,” Smith said. “On the pandemic, we trust the science and we go with the recommendations of the experts. And if others, with other ideas, come along with statements, then we have an obligation to set the record straight as we know it.”

He added, “Specifically, we want to cut through the noise. Sometimes, there are two sides. But more often, one side says it is a car. And one side says it is an umbrella. And only one is right. And the other one doesn’t deserve our attention.”

---

quote:

---

“Social justice is real. Black lives do matter, and that is not political. I don’t come to that conclusion as a right winger or a left winger. I come to that as a citizen who is paying attention,” he said.

Income inequality, he said, “is now and forever has been a problem. How we deal with income equality is a matter for others, but it exists, it’s growing, the gap between the haves and the have nots is growing. It’s creating challenges across every aspect of our lives.”

He said that it is “indisputable that fossil fuels cause climate change.”

---

quote:

---

He reiterated, “We’re not here to tell you how to think.”

---