I watched Shepard Smith`s segment this past Wednesday on the D.O.J. memo the House is on the verge of releasing. In the spirit of full disclosure I have found Shepard almost unwatchable since the departure of Roger Ailes & his death has only ratcheted up Shepard`s clear political bias.
What I watched was stunningly hypocritical, in one exchange he talked about the lack of “context” surrounding the memo while in the same exchange providing absolutely no legitimate context for the viewer. Given the coverage of this same topic on his own network via Hannity, Tucker Carlsen, Special Report & other prominent shows there is zero chance he did not know all the facts.
The “Memo” in question is compiled entirely of information provided begrudgingly & under threat of a Contempt of Congress citation, by the D.O.J. & yet the D.O.J. is now demanding/begging the intel committee for a copy prior to it`s release. Given the behavior of the D.O.J. & F.B.I. thus far I dont find it surprising at all that the intel committee is reluctant to agree to this & yet Shepard Smith reports it like this,
“The memo they say is an attack on one of our greatest institutions, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, without facts to back it up, without contextual information”
& on the issue of showing it to the F.B.I. he says this,
“and yet they wont show it to the F.B.I. to allow the F.B.I. to invetigate itself & is throwing the F.B.I. under the bus without facts to show anyone”
Somehow Smith is able to completely ignore the truly unsettling revelations that have come to light as a result of the Inspector Generals investigation into the handling of the Clinton email scandal, especially the text exchanges between Peter Strzok & Lisa Page & also ignores the fact that the D.O.J. & F.B.I. stonewalled congress`s lawful request for documents for months, choosing to acquiesce only when the intel committee threatened contempt citations for the D.O.J. officials involved.
Alayna Treene was also on the show peddling the theory being pushed by Diane Feinstein & Adam Schiff that a “Russian Bot Farm” is responsible for the #releasethememo movement when as reported by reason.com on Friday, (link to full article below)
“As it turns out, reports today say that Twitter’s internal analysis found it was mostly Americans, not creepy Slavic mind-control robots, who were behind the hashtags.”
I have not watched his show since Wednesday but am fairly certain he has made no effort to correct any of his reporting. While watching this segment I was also reminded of an exchange Smith had with James Woolsey after the Manchester Bombing last year,(transcript below)
JAMES WOOLSEY: Things are kind of coming to a head. I think the radical Islamists, and I would call them that, have decided to pick up the pace with the terrorist attacks, and I think we’ll probably see some more. And we now have a president who is pretty straightforward that he is at war with them. He’s not going to soft-pedal that. He calls them “evil,” and we haven’t had a situation like that. We did not have, in the eight years of the Obama administration, a president who wanted to fight and win a war, and —
SHEPARD SMITH (HOST): President Obama fought a number of wars and certainly didn’t say that he didn’t want to win them. It’s very early — Mr. Woolsey, with great respect, it’s very early to make this a political matter.
Regardless of what side of the political isle your on it is an irrefutable fact that the Obama administration hollowed out the Military to a startling degree which some people feel has directly contributed to the inordinate amount of training accidents & Naval Vessel collisions resulting in many deaths. Obama also put a lot of people in positions of great power & authority in the Military that were simply not qualified, all in the name of diversity .
After watching this I remembered how many times I had heard Smith proudly refer to himself as “ a newsman” while drawing the distinction between himself & Sean Hannity, referring to Hannity as an “opinion journalist” funny thing is he was not speaking of Hannity in a derisive manner and was so magnanimous while displaying such an incredible lack of self awareness that his personal hubris was nothing short of breathtaking. The Woolsey exchange was literally the moment Smith lost any sense of credibility for me as far as being a newsman. While I have never been a huge fan of Hannity I can respect the fact that he owns who he is & has said as much on multiple occasions, he proudly states he is an opinion journalist.
The sanctimony with which Shepard Smith speaks on air every day makes it impossible to take him seriously as a “Newsman”.
J. Stafford