Where's Shepherd Smith?

[Kitty 34]

How is then??

You can almost hear him talk in that 2nd one!!

 

[goin2disneyagain]

You can almost hear him talk in that 2nd one!!

You're right, you almost can.

Guess who I am watching right now??

 

[goin2disneyagain]

By the way, did you hear him talking about "hearing" lightening yesterday?

 

[Kitty 34]

I missed it, darn! I don't get home usually until about 4:00 from teaching so I always missed Studio B. Hopefully he'll talk about it tonight.

 

[goin2disneyagain]

I missed it, darn! I don't get home usually until about 4:00 from teaching so I always missed Studio B. Hopefully he'll talk about it tonight.

It was yesterday. He was asking his crew if they heard the lightening the night before. Of course he meant thunder. Rick Leventhal sent him a message sarcastically telling him you can't hear lightening. I don't think Shep even realized what he said until Rick pointed it out to him. So the very last thing he said before he ended Studio B was that he had received an email from a guy stating that Leventhal was wrong and something scientific about thunder being a sonic boom from lightening. So Shep looks at the camera and just says "Leventhal" like he is disgusted and then goes "puuuuuup" with his tongue like we all used to do when we were in Kindergarten. I wish I had taped it. It was soooo funny!! And of course he looked soooo cute doing it.

 

[Kitty 34]

That would have been awesome to see!!! He'll be on in 20 minutes here.....can't wait!!!

 

[goin2disneyagain]

I can't wait.

It's too bad you miss Studio B. He's great on there and funny too. It's a little more casual than the Fox Report.

I usually get home right when Studio B is coming on and if I can't make it home before then I try to listen to it on my XM radio.

 

[goin2disneyagain]

Just wanted to wish all my Shep fan friends a Happy Thanksgiving. 4 days without Shep, well I hope he is having a great Thanksgiving too.

 

[Kitty 34]

Happy belated Thanksgiving. Just got back from WDW with my 100 marching band students!! Haven't seen Shep in over a week!!!

 

[goin2disneyagain]

Happy belated Thanksgiving. Just got back from WDW with my 100 marching band students!! Haven't seen Shep in over a week!!!

Welcome back!! I guess if you had to miss him it was a good week since he was only working thru Wednesday. He is supposed to be back tomorrow. I hope you had a great trip at WDW. I'm sure you did. Here's a pic of Shep to get you by until tomorrow.

 

[Kitty 34]

Ahhhh, thank you for such a nice "welcome back" pic!! I love Mickey Mouse but Shep is a LOT cuter!!!

 

[goin2disneyagain]

Ahhhh, thank you for such a nice "welcome back" pic!! I love Mickey Mouse but Shep is a LOT cuter!!!

You're welcome and yes, Shep is MUCH cuter!!

 

[Kitty 34]

If the powers to be ever end the Hurricane board I sure hope our little Shep thread makes it down to the CB!

 

[goin2disneyagain]

If the powers to be ever end the Hurricane board I sure hope our little Shep thread makes it down to the CB!

LOL, me too.

 

[goin2disneyagain]

There's a good article about Shep in my local newspaper.

http://www.ajc.com/search/content/auto/epaper/editions/today/living_34b88a66f67c01fe007d.html

Flocking to Shepard
Fox News' Shepard Smith is a rising star --- on the air and back home at Ole Miss
Jill Vejnoska - Staff
Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Oxford, Miss. --- The clock is ticking toward kickoff, but here in the Grove, time stands still.

The tubas are where they've always been on football Saturdays, bleating their brassy hearts out along with the rest of the Ole Miss band. It's standing-room-only as usual among the hordes of fans in red Rebels jackets, caps and well-worn jerseys.

And there, right where Shepard Smith expects to find it, the Haney family tailgate is in full swing.

"This is their house," Smith's sweeping gesture takes in his friends' sprawling red tent with its buffet table centerpiece of a small rebel figure astride a beleaguered hog (today's opponent is the University of Arkansas). "They upgraded this year to a double-wide. We're very proud of them."

His ear-to-ear grin says it all. Everything's just as he left it.

And it's about darned time he made it back.

It's been quite some frenzied stretch for Smith, 41, the Fox News Channel anchor who was born and raised in nearby Holly Springs. During nine semesters at Ole Miss, he missed only three football games --- home and away. But this sunny mid-November afternoon marks the first time he's been here all fall. And even then, it's only on his third try.

Hurricane Wilma. The Iraq constitution vote. (Insert major national or international story here.) Breaking news had been upending his schedule for weeks, weeks in which he --- like so many folks down South and around the country --- was still dealing with the shock waves sent out by Hurricane Katrina.

The ferocious storm that leveled large swaths of Mississippi and New Orleans may have affected him deeply --- "If it were up to me, I'd still be there," Smith says --- but it's also heightened his profile, earned him his best reviews and led some to suggest he'd be the logical choice to anchor a fourth network newscast should Fox Broadcasting ever decide to launch one.

Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity long have been the big names at cable news' No. 1 network, but increasingly, Smith is the big-gun anchor viewers expect to see when a big story breaks.

"If you're talking about a major story, major news --- certainly Shep is the face of Fox News," says Bill Shine, the network's senior vice president of programming. "He has that rare combination of being very smart and also very talented. You can put him out there, and if the prompter goes down, you're not going to be in trouble. If news breaks unexpectedly, you're not going to be in trouble."

The anchor of two highly rated weekday newscasts (at 3 and 7 p.m.), Smith had been known primarily for his blisteringly paced, nonpartisan lineup of stories delivered in a deep bass as smooth as tupelo honey. Yet there he was on the Wednesday afternoon after Katrina hit, shirttail hanging out as he stood among throngs of stranded New Orleanians and politely, yet persistently, giving voice to a nation's growing sense of confusion and horror:

"Is it possible to get someone from the state police to come to this intersection and tell these people, 'If you walk this way, we'll get you a bus and we'll get you out of this heat and we'll get you some water for your baby?'" Smith gently pressed a Louisiana State Police spokeswoman. "Somebody needs to come to Interstate 10, to Exit 235. ... There are thousands of people standing there who don't know where to go."

"Welcome back, Shep!"

No wonder that here in Oxford, Smith is treated like the returning pride and joy of an extended, extremely colorful Southern family. Picking his way with his younger brother Benton through the pre-game throngs on the Grove, he's frequently greeted by cries of "Hey, Shep!" and "Welcome back, Shep!," mostly from strangers. Some want to shake his hand and compliment his hurricane coverage. Others want his autograph or a photo. No one gets turned away; everyone gets a friendly "Go Rebs!" at the end.

Outside Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, a fan asks him to autograph his Eli Manning jersey, right beside Manning's signature and that of his father, Archie, the famed New Orleans Saints quarterback.

"His hurricane reporting was awesome," says Cameron Crews, 19, of Madison, Miss., after snapping his photo with Smith on his cellphone. "It's nice to see a homeboy do good."

David Shepard Smith grew up in Holly Springs, a town of some 8,000 people where "everybody knows everybody" and the recent arrival of a McDonald's was "the biggest news of the decade," says Smith's stepmother, Pat.

"We kind of made our own fun," says Smith, who grew up playing tennis and "throwing dirt clods" with friends. "I wasn't exposed too young to things that I couldn't handle. I don't know if I could've grown up in New York."

Working his way up

Smith's "workaholic" tendencies manifested themselves early, says his father, Shepard, who even now is discovering evidence of that drive. Young Shepard was only an eighth-grader when he began working at Tyson's Drug Store, supposedly as a soda jerk.

"I actually drove the delivery van on weekends," Smith reveals at a table inside the stadium's Rebel Club, while his father's face registers mild shock. "It was a green VW bug I couldn't make go in reverse. I can't remember whose house it was, but I can remember having to push it out of the driveway afterwards."

Smith vividly recalls the day he first swooned for TV news. Elvis had died some 45 miles away in Memphis, and everywhere the young teenager looked, everyone was going live with the story.

"I just remember the technology of it --- a local Memphis station was live in Memphis," says Smith, shaking his head in wonder. "'I might be able to come up with this industry' --- that's what it felt like. It just was like all you had to do was go somewhere, find out what was happening, and then tell people about it. And that's all it is now."

He left Ole Miss in 1987, just six credit hours short of a broadcast journalism degree ("I think I need three hours of Spanish") to take a job that later fell through. He got hired for $7.50 an hour at WJHG in Panama City, Fla., and quickly worked his way up the ladder of Florida stations --- Fort Myers to Orlando to Miami. Los Angeles and "A Current Affair" followed, but that gig lasted only six months and Smith ended up working for the Fox affiliates news service. His first assignment, covering the Montana Freemen standoff, lasted 69 days.

At Fox News, which he joined in 1996, he covered everything from school shootings to Princess Diana's funeral. In 1999, with no real sense that "they loved me or hated me," he anchored overnight several times in order to update his job-hunting tape. Then, in the macabre calculus of the news business, he was lucky enough to have a story about a plane crash break in his old stomping grounds of Miami.

"We actually broke into programming, which we didn't ever do back then," Smith says. "And somebody [at Fox News] was up in the middle of the night and was like, 'Whoa, we actually tried.'"

Before he knew it, he had two shows and a growing following for his fast-paced (60-70 stories an hour), no-frills (he tends to eschew words like "the" and "is") approach to delivering the news.

Sometimes it gets him in trouble, as when he prematurely announced the pope's death last spring or got tangled up in his own tongue during a J. Lo story and uttered an off-color term. In both cases, Smith immediately apologized. The best thing about anchoring in the roll-with-the-punches world of cable news, he says, is "you're still doing reporting on the set."

Off the set, too --- as his experiences during Katrina attest. Stepmother Pat says she worried mightily about him during those early days in New Orleans, when he slept in the satellite truck on the I-10 overpass and could communicate only via text message. But Smith says he had to stay and get the story out.

"Nothing made sense," he recalls, his voice growing louder at the still-fresh memories. "There are fires burning in the distance, there are gunshots, there are naked babies who need formula and there's no power. I'm in a Third-World environment, it smells like dead people and cops are driving by and not trying to help anybody. Nothing made sense."

He realized the impact their coverage had only when he returned to New York and strangers began asking how he was doing.

"They were like, 'Are you OK?'" Smith relates. "It was just not a question I'd ever gotten from anyone. Viewers. On the street. In Manhattan. 'Are you OK?'"

A premium on privacy

It may be that "they saw the story through us," as Smith surmises. But he's also one of them now. He owns a place in Greenwich Village and was vacationing in the Hamptons when he got summoned to cover Katrina. He's done David Letterman's late-night show --- albeit an unusually serious version in which the only thing he and the normally smart-aleck host discussed was Katrina.

This son of the South now roots passionately for the New York Yankees, often getting into baseball arguments with his Red Sox-loving, longtime executive producer Jay Wallace. Fun for him is "eating in New York," and while he swears he's no gourmand, Wallace says Smith's the expert on where to go eat what.

"The guy who introduced me to grits has become a connoisseur of fine food in Manhattan."

Divorced at 30 after six years of marriage to his college girlfriend, Smith doesn't discuss his personal life, his politics or his faith. He's protective of friends' and loved ones' privacy and determined that no one be able to point to bias in his work on perhaps the most closely scrutinized 24-hour news network.

"I'd like not to discuss my politics with anyone but my best friends, and I'd like not to discuss my religious life and my personal life," says Smith, explaining that he's following his father's longtime advice. "I've stuck to that, and it's served me very well, especially on politics."

Of course, when it's the politics of football, all such rules go out the window.

When a call goes against Ole Miss during the game, Smith protests loudly in the stands and makes clear he still hasn't gotten over a close loss to Alabama a month earlier.

"If you're from Alabama, you can hold in the backfield," Smith yelps good-naturedly. "It's legal. It's how they've won all these years."

A few hours later, Ole Miss is on the short end of the 28-17 final score, and Smith is back in the Grove, still getting the occasional "Hey, Shep!" and soaking up the traditional post-game scene.

"That's all right," he says, the ear-to-ear grin back. "We do win the party."

 

[Kitty 34]

I haven't been up on this board lately so just saw this article. Thanks!!!!

 

[goin2disneyagain]

He's back reporting live in New Orleans this week. More Casual Shep.

 

[Kitty 34]

Yes, I saw that. I like your name.....Casual Shep.

 

[MickeysMommy]

I still think I should be his girlfriend!

 

[goin2disneyagain]

I still think I should be his girlfriend!

I think I should be his girlfriend.