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 N