Straight Answers to Weird Questions: Shep Smith is gone from Fox News. Does this mean the network is only thinking about ratings generated from the opinion shows? Was he an ethical journalist?

On Quora, James H. Jenkins asks:

Shep Smith is gone from Fox News. Does this mean the network is only thinking about ratings generated from the opinion shows? Was he an ethical journalist?

My answer:

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel was never intended to be a newsgathering organization, despite its name and the inclusion of broadcast journalists such as Sheppard Smith and Chris Wallace in its stable of talent. FNC has always been, first and foremost, a propaganda machine designed to help the Republican Party and the conservative movement by promoting right-wing viewpoints and attacking the opposition, whether it’s the Democratic Party and its members or liberals in general.

Fox News needs a token handful of real journalists on the staff, mostly behind-the-scenes but also in front of the camera, to keep up the fiction that it is merely a conservative counterweight to the allegedly “dominated-by-evil-liberals” mainstream media and compete with The Washington Post, The New York Times, the original Big Three over-the-air television networks, and Cable News Network (CNN). As long as real reporters with conservative values are seen and heard on the Murdochs’ pride and joy (and one of the assets they kept by spinning FNC and the Fox Broadcasting Company off from 21st Century Fox before selling that entity to The Walt Disney Company earlier this year), FNC can claim to be a news channel, despite the fact that its FCC license identifies the network as an entertainment-oriented organization.

The Murdochs and the late Roger Ailes’ replacement as FNC’s Chief Executive Officer are well aware that only the channel’s devoted fans think Fox News Channel is a real news organization. Keeping real reporters on the staff allows the leadership at FNC to say, “Look, we have a real news division that covers the nation and the world.” That’s why they asked Shepard Smith to reconsider his decision to leave Fox News.

The news division, by the way, does not have a lot of editorial freedom when it comes to news coverage. One of Smith’s peeves with his bosses was the common practice of network executives telling the token news staff what to cover and how to present it. If an event took place that favored the Trump Administration, it got top coverage. If Trump made a faux pas (which the man does on a daily basis), FNC was to either ignore it or spin it to make the President look good. If the Democrats made any gaffes on the campaign trail or in the halls of Congress, FNC news reporters were to focus on those, to the exclusion of all else.

Smith, from all accounts, is a man with a strong conservative viewpoint. That’s why he signed on with FNC when it started service in 1996, and that’s why he stayed on till now. By the same token, he takes his Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics seriously, and he argued with his higher-ups about the quality (or rather, the nonexistence of it) in FNC’s news coverage. So, as a man who studied journalism and consumes news media as often as possible, I’d say that Smith is, indeed, an ethical journalist. That’s why he left Fox News Channel, after all.

FNC cares far more about its opinion content than it does about its “fig leaf” of a news division. Most of the channel’s ratings come from Fox & Friends, Hannity, and The Ingraham Angle than they do from the newscasts. Scheduling has a lot to do with that, and obviously, the time slots are skewed in favor of personality-based programming and to the detriment of actual journalism.