Shepard Smith has the hardest job on Fox News
IN A FOX NEWS STUDIO IN MANHATTAN on a Tuesday in February, Shepard Smith sits ready to begin taping his 3 p.m. newscast. He spent the preceding hour typing out edits to his script with slightly hunched posture, raising his eyebrows at his keyboard and reading his monologue to himself to test its accuracy and its cadence. The computers behind him—clad in giant white shells, they look like robots from the Star Wars universe—are each manned by researchers. Several of them are scanning their email and news sites, and one is watching @realDonaldTrump on Twitter. Smith, wired with an earpiece to the control room, periodically issues commands—to those researchers, to the producers who call his desk phone, to the air around him. “We need to get a statement from Israeli police,” he says, looking to bulk up a wire report about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “That’ll give the Jerusalem bureau something to do.”
When the countdown to Smith’s hour of airtime arrives at 2:59, it’s purely rhetorical. He sits silently at his anchor chair, watching White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders field questions from reporters in what has become a near daily occurrence: getting pre-empted by the most popular political drama in America. He scrolls through his phone, then leans forward on his elbows ready for Sanders to wrap. When she does, he kicks off his show a few minutes late with a discussion of the “brand-new timeline” Sanders offered for the scandal of the day. With much of his script now useless, Smith does the work of writing and editing as he speaks.
The President has scrambled the day-to-day lives of everyone in the news business, not least those at the network with which Donald Trump begins every morning. As Fox has
