The host of “The News with Shepard Smith” will be moving on later this month, CNBC announced Thursday in an email to its workers.
The network tried to put the best spin on it possible. But it sounds like there’s some serious housecleaning ahead, and Smith and his team are just the first to go.
“After spending time with many of you and closely reviewing the various aspects of our business, I believe we must prioritize and focus on our core strengths of business news and personal finance,” CNBC president KC Sullivan wrote, according to CNBC.
“As a result of this strategic alignment to our core business, we will need to shift some of our priorities and resources and make some difficult decisions.”
Buzzwords like “shifting priorities” and “strategic alignment” tend to go hand in hand with a business going through tough times and cutting out poorly performing parts to save the rest.
Smith was a longtime anchor at Fox when he abruptly left the network in October 2019, announcing on the air one Friday that the day’s show would be his last.
The reasons were not exactly made public, but they were understood. Smith was clashing with Fox personalities like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, as Variety reported at the time.
Smith himself went public in a CNN interview in January 2021 to claim basically that Fox hosts are liars.
“I don’t know how some people sleep at night,” Smith said. “I know that there are a lot of people who have propagated the lies and who have pushed them forward over and over again who are smart enough and educated enough to know better.”
Well, if Smith wanted to talk about people propagating lies, CNN was the place to do it. CNN is the network that has devoted its coverage since 2015 to propagating lies about the campaign of Donald Trump, then the presidency of Donald Trump and the supporters of Donald Trump.
When he moved to CNBC in 2020, making his debut on the network in September of that year, it was supposed to be a major deal.