Chicago Tribune
There was a time early in his TV news career when Shepard Smith thought it best to clean up his delivery, scraping off the accent now caked onto his Fox News Channel delivery like the mud of his native Mississippi.
“Anything that’s real seems to work better,” said Smith, 46, anchor of “The Fox Report,” which just concluded its 100th successive month as the No. 1 cable news show in its time slot. “All I’m really doing is telling people stuff we found out about.”
Those Southern roots are a big part of who Smith is, what shaped him and what has distinguished him as anchor of that 6 p.m. newscast for the past 10 years, along with the looser “Studio B” as well as the occasional special event on Fox Broadcasting. Last week’s State of the Union address on Fox outdrew ABC, CBS and NBC.
Fox News Channel’s identity and popularity are inextricably linked to its biggest and most vocal stars More…