The Sunday Conversation: Shepard Smith

Shepard Smith, longtime host of the nightly “Fox Report,� is Fox News Channel’s No. 1 anchor. That’s thanks in part to his mix of folksy accessibility and anchor-worthy gravitas, which have earned him a perch at Politico.com, where his news clips are regularly featured in a regular column, the Daily Shep.

So you were on smoke watch in Rome. How did Fox News cover the papal conclave and what was that scene like?

Well, I did it in ‘05, and it was different because it began in a mourning phase [for Pope John Paul II] because he was such a popular figure. [This time] we had people in St. Peter’s Square and others in our [ad hoc] studio, which was a rooftop with a tent on top of it. So we sat out in the rain for 12 or 14 hours a day. But it really was fun. We all just stared at that smokestack, and we read up on all the men who were in contention for this, and [then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio] was eighth on our list.

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How do they make the smoke go from black to white?

They put chemicals in with it. In ’05 they used a different formula and it really was gray, and nobody really knew what was going on. This time, they added chemicals to make it fully black, as we saw on Day 1 of the vote. But on Day 2, we had black in the morning and then in the afternoon it looked completely gray, and I’m like, “That’s white, everybody.� There’s no gray in the Catholic Church apparently, like there is in the rest of society. It’s black or white.

I saw your interview with Father Jonathan Morris ...

Longtime [Fox News] contributor, wonderful man.

Yeah, where you said that you thought that the Catholic Church was out of step with the modern world.

Did I say that? I think I might have been quoting others who have said that, but I feel ya.

I think you were not quoting other people when you talked about the status of women in the church.

Well, I should have. The fact is, women have more positions of authority within the church than they ever have, but women can’t be cardinals. And we’re talking about 2,000 years of scripture here, and there’s that, but I think these are questions that are worth asking in 2013. In 2013, we all know women can do anything men can do. And why is it that women don’t have as much of a voice in the church?

Did you say that you thought the media spent a ridiculous amount of money covering the conclave?

I was actually just commenting on the amount of money that we do spend, like organizations around the world, to come and watch a smokestack. That’s not to say I don’t think it was worth covering, I do. It affects 1.2 billion people, and I certainly thought it was worthy of our coverage. But we spent an inordinate amount of time on this, and there’s a lot going on in the world.

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What news sources do you consume every day?

The New York Times, the New York Post, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, and local newspapers all over the country, the Huffington Post, Foxnews.com and the Daily Beast and Talking Points memo and the L.A. Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Miami Herald.... I’m on everything, all day, every day. If it were fattening I would be obese.

Actually, I read that you sleep with your Samsung Galaxy — in your bed? Not next to it?

Actually, it’s not a Samsung Galaxy, it’s a Nexus 6. The Blackberry and the iPhone are by the bed, and the Nexus 6 is in the bed. That’s an embarrassing thing, and I wish I’d never admitted it. But the first thing, before coffee, before bathroom, I log on. These are bad habits that I need to break, but I need to know right when I wake up what is about to happen today.

Has that affected your personal life?

Well, it always has. You’re beholden to the news cycle. There was a time when I just didn’t make plans, but now I make them and break them.

You seem to be an anomaly at Fox News. You seem to disagree with your peers there on issues like gay rights, global warming and the public option for healthcare, and on the Web you seem to get more reader criticism from the right than the left. So why are you at Fox News?

I’ve always been at Fox News. They tell me my job is to find out what happened and tell people about it and to try to figure out what’s truth and what’s spin and report it. I try to stake my ground not on the left or the right but on the side of truth and facts. Then if you want to believe something else, then have at it. But it’s not my job to delve into those opinionated things. Global warming is real.

So were you surprised when MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow stated publicly that she’s a big fan of yours?

I know Rachel. I’m a fan of Rachel’s. But what she said very generously is I do regular guy and voice of God at the same time. By voice of God, she means you can be a news anchor and be taken seriously and then when it’s fun, you can have a little fun. We all know each other in this business. It’s a very small community, and we all pretty much like each other. And I admire and respect Rachel. Everything in this thing we do to me is Ole Miss and LSU. I love Ole Miss; I hate LSU. And that’s how MSNBC and Fox News viewers are, and I understand it and I respect it because I hate LSU.

Mediaite noted that Fox News didn’t cover a couple of car chases in L.A. a couple of weeks ago that would have fallen into your time slot. Did you decide to stop covering car crashes after your show mistakenly broadcast a suicide after a car chase last September?

We had a five-second delay, which had always served us well, but the technology failed and after that, all the technology was rebooted and all the people were retrained and all the apologies were issued and now we’re more careful than before. It means I’m not trusting the technology to save us as much. Risk and reward, I’m balancing differently. I’m not saying we’ll never cover a car chase, but I am telling you we are going to be extra cautious.

You seemed very upset when that happened.

I was upset. The last thing I want to do is give somebody a nightmare. If you want to see something like that you can go on the Internet and choose to see it, but when you come to my program, there’s almost an agreement between me and you that I won’t do that to you without letting you know first.

Is it true that you tape Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert? Are you a fan of their shows?

Yes, I am a fan. I think they’re both geniuses. Jon Stewart and I used to live in the same building. I would see him outside coming in with pizza, because I get off work at 8, and he always seemed to be bringing pizza home and smoking cigarettes back when he used to smoke. I remember after the attack of 9/11, from our building, we could see the World Trade Center and then when the smoke died down, you could actually see the Statue of Liberty. And I remember Jon Stewart coming back on the air and talking about just that, that we still have our liberty, and that was very powerful for me.

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