Yup, accidentally. As opposed to intentionally.
Posted on 03/27/2004 8:44:58 AM PST by Pikamax
March 28, 2004 News Reports for Ultra-Short Attentions By WARREN ST. JOHN
t 5:30 p.m. last Monday, Shepard Smith, the 40-year-old host of Fox News Channel's "Fox Report," was hunched over his computer in the company's bustling Midtown headquarters, poring over the script for his evening broadcast, and searching for verbs. Mr. Smith, let it be known, does not like verbs. Whenever he finds one, he crinkles his brow in disgust like a man who has discovered a dribble of food on his tie. He taps furiously at his keyboard, moves the cursor to the offending word and deletes it, or else adds "ing," turning the verb into a participle and his script into the strange shorthand that passes for English these days on cable news:
"Amazon.com celebrating a birthday! The Internet company 10 years old."
"Texas! A school bus and two other vehicles colliding in Dallas. The bus rolling over on its side."
"Outrage in the Middle East! A vow of revenge after an assassination and reportedly threatening the United States. Tonight — how real the threat?"
Shepard Smith! Explaining to a reporter, why not the verbs?
"We don't communicate in full sentences anyway," Mr. Smith said as he continued working through his script. "We don't need all those words. And it allows us to go faster."
Mr. Smith is all about speed. He typically blasts through 80 or so items of news during his hourlong broadcast, which, with its zooming cameras, swooshing sound effects and Mr. Smith's jokey, frat-boy delivery, acquired while he was a student at Ole Miss, resembles a broadcast of ESPN's "SportsCenter" more closely than it does "NBC Nightly News." He seldom does interviews on his program, fearful that slow-talking guests might gum up the works, and dispatches from correspondents are always ad-libbed, for freshness. During commercials, Mr. Smith obsessively scours news sites on his laptop, looking for any breaking nugget. Jay Wallace, Mr. Smith's producer, said he wants the program to seem perpetually as if it might veer out of control. "I want it to be like a train that's about to come off the tracks," he likes to say.
That formula has been working for Mr. Smith and for the Fox News Channel in a big way. Mr. Smith goes head to head at 7 p.m. with the CNN host Anderson Cooper, the shy-seeming, salt-and-pepper-haired son of Gloria Vanderbilt, who has become something of a news media darling in New York recently, and trounces him. Mr. Smith's "Fox Report" regularly pulls in around 1.5 million viewers, three times as many as Mr. Cooper — who does interviews and speaks in full sentences, complete with verbs. Occasionally Mr. Smith has more viewers than all other cable news programs in his time slot combined, including "Hardball" with Chris Matthews on MSNBC and CNBC's "Capital Report." This week, Mr. Cooper's executive producer, Jim Miller, resigned, furthering media speculation that Mr. Smith's competition was uncertain about how to match him.
Jonathan Klein, a former CBS News executive vice president, said that Mr. Smith was winning the ratings battle so convincingly over Mr. Cooper, his main rival, because he was formatting his program for a younger audience used to getting its information on the Web. "They're very used to ducking online between e-mails and calls, and getting news in a very souped-up way that regards quick bursts of new information over fairly familiar stories," he said. "There's a high premium on short and sweet. Shepard Smith seems to embrace that, and Anderson Cooper's show is old-school reflective, chew it over."
Executives and anchors at Fox have never shied away from the chance to take a dig at their competition, and Mr. Smith is no different.
"He seems like a good enough guy," Mr. Smith said of Mr. Cooper. "But I don't know what they're doing. I don't see them catching up anytime soon." He said it didn't bother him that his competitor seemed to be getting more attention in New York than he did, and said he thought he knew why. "I'm guessing the Vanderbilt family is more interesting to write about than the kid who grew up at 410 North Randolph Street in Holly Springs, Miss.," he said.
Asked about Mr. Smith's comments, Christa Robinson, a spokeswoman for CNN, said that Mr. Cooper's program "is attracting new viewers, and we're confident the audience will continue to grow."
Sandwiched between the right-leaning, opinion-heavy programs "Special Report" with Brit Hume and "The O'Reilly Factor," Mr. Smith stands out at Fox as a political agnostic, at least on the air.
"I don't talk about my politics because I don't want the perception of a bias," he said. Mr. Smith, though, makes it clear that he is not a reflexive skeptic. "I'm not one where because the White House speaks, I'm going to distrust them."
Even if Mr. Smith were political, he'd have little time on his program to actually give his opinions. The average report is around 25 seconds long, and the program has regular features like "Around the World in 80 Seconds," which is more likely to feature footage of a Russian pig race, as it did last week, than footage of Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Smith seems to view himself as a bit of an interloper in New York, a position that tracks neatly with the Fox News Channel ethos, which despite its ratings dominance of other cable news networks in the last couple of years, is still built on the network's upstart past. He came to the city reluctantly for work. He lives in Chinatown and hangs out in Lower East Side bars like Arlene's Grocery, 24/7, or else at Scruffy Duffy's, a loud Midtown pub. He is only now getting used to life in the city. "I always thought New York was a little too mean for me," he said.
Mr. Smith left Holly Springs, a small town between Memphis and Oxford, Miss., just after high school, when his parents divorced, and followed his mother to Destin, Fla., a panhandle tourist town. After college, he took the first of several jobs in local news at a Panama City, Fla., NBC affiliate, in 1987.
Mr. Smith was known as a prickly perfectionist. "I didn't like it when people didn't work as hard as I did," he said. "I was aggressive and probably difficult and loud."
Mr. Smith's temper has gotten him into trouble at least once. In November 2000, he was arrested in Florida during coverage of the presidential election dispute when he was alleged to have driven his car into a rival reporter who was saving a parking space.
Charges were later dropped after Mr. Smith agreed to a cash settlement with the reporter. Mr. Smith declined to comment on the matter.
For the most part, though, Mr. Smith's reporting adventures have centered on the actions of others. He did the wind-blown local reporter routine during Hurricane Hugo near Charleston. For a short time in 1996, he was a reporter for the tabloid news program "A Current Affair." He was then hired as a reporter for Fox News, first in Los Angeles and later in New York. He spent the next few years on the road — living in a Montana cabin, for example, for 69 days, staking out the Montana Freemen, an antigovernment group. When he returned to his apartment on the Upper East Side, he said, "My doormen didn't know me."
Mr. Smith's big break came in late 1999, when he was offered the chance to anchor the 7 p.m. news, a problematic time slot in which both Paula Zahn and Catherine Crier had been unable to build audiences. They were doing standard evening news, with interviews and long prepared segments. Mr. Smith said he and his producers concluded, "That way is old and tired."
The new amped-up formula with Mr. Smith gradually began attracting new viewers, especially when there was breaking news, and many of those viewers stuck around. Realizing they were on to something, Mr. Smith and his team worked to make the program faster, hacking away at those verbs and ditching interviews altogether. Mr. Smith said the idea was to cover an entire day's worth of news in one hour.
Occasionally, the high-speed train of "Fox Report" actually hops the tracks. Delivering the news at an auctioneer's pace, Mr. Smith sometimes stumbles on his words. In a fall 2002 report about J.Lo, Mr. Smith mangled a phrase on the teleprompter into a vulgarity. He quickly apologized on air, but online media and Howard Stern kept the story alive for weeks.
"I regretted it, and I'm sure they don't want it to happen again," Mr. Smith said. "I do get tongue-tied every now and then."
Mr. Smith has managed to avoid any similar embarrassments since then. But he said he thinks "Fox Report" has hit the wall in its quest for speed. "The driving force is to get more news in the hour," he said. "I think we're able to do that where we are now. Speed up more? I think we're running at a pretty good clip."
Owl_Eagle
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I'd guess Mr. Cooper's status as media darling has something to do with widespread rumors of his non-hetero lifestyle.
Dude, that's ancient!
Yup, accidentally. As opposed to intentionally.
My guess is that people who listen to CNN are more sedentary and sit in front of the TV the whole time.
If I want to be sedentary, I watch C-Span.
Don't ever change, Shep!
Hey Shep, here's some silliness off the net I always get a kick out of:
"First they came for the verbs and I said nothing, for verbing weirds language.
Then they arrival for the nouns and I speech nothing, for I no verbs. -Peter Ellis"
THE Vanderbilt?
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