Fox's Shep Smith: Katrina Changed Me

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Shep Smith: Katrina Changed Me

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/24/shepard-smith-katrina-cha_n_692722.html

DAVID BAUDER | 08/24/10 10:01 AM | AP



NEW YORK — His time reporting in front of a camera isn't the first thing Shepard Smith thinks about when he recalls Hurricane Katrina. Instead, he thinks about sitting on a darkened highway overpass with a colleague one night, surrounded by the homeless and the desperate.

A radio station played Fats Domino's "Walkin' to New Orleans," and the two men lost it.

"We had one of those breakdown moments that you rarely have on these sort of things because you have to keep yourself together," the Fox News Channel anchor says on the fifth anniversary of the tragedy. "In the middle of the night, when you didn't have work responsibilities, we just sort of let ourselves go and cried about it a little bit."

Anger, more than sadness, characterized the work of many TV journalists then. For Smith, it was an assignment that helped carve a reputation: He minced no words describing government incompetence in the days after the disaster, even if what he said wasn't what some of Fox's opinionated personalities wanted to hear.

In the days following Katrina, Smith walked among people suffering from a lack of food, water and medical care, while officials assured journalists that help was either there or on the way. His eyes, ears and nose told him differently. He'd never been spun by officials quite to that extent.

"The human instinct is to turn up the volume," he said. The lasting affect of the story is to make Smith more skeptical of authority figures in times of crisis.

Less lasting is the idea, popular post-Katrina, that the experience would make television journalists more emotive and less dispassionate when out on stories.

"The emotions, the activism that sort of sprung was natural and for the time, reflectively, I think it was probably right," he said. "But I don't think it belongs in our daily reporting lives. Those were extraordinary times and they brought about extraordinary emotions. I'm careful to control my emotions. It wasn't possible at that time."

Michael Clemente, now Fox's senior vice president for news, worked for ABC News then. He watched Smith and could see what the experience meant to him.
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"You can't be a reporter and go there and witness that and not have it change you in some way," said Clemente, adding that a defining characteristic of Smith's work is a curiosity and energy about stories that hasn't been shoved aside by cynicism.

[Yeshuah Ben Joseph]

1. You might think Shep Smith is the one sane person working at FAUX Noise

Except that he works for FAUX Noise, which by definition means he cannot be sane.

[gratuitous]

6. That was my take

It's all well and good for Mr. Smith to say that the experience of reporting on Hurricane Katrina changed him, but he's still drawing his paycheck from Fox News. He doesn't seem to have had much of an effect on the culture there. In the words of Alan Simpson, I hope he's able to find some honest work.

[jobycom]

2. It changed a lot of people.

I heard Ray Nagin in a local interview with a radio host I can't remember break down into tears, along with the host. It was a tragedy we rarely see in America, where generally building codes and government preparedness and quick response prevent such things. In this case, they all failed, and over a thousand died because of it. If the levees had been built and maintained properly, if rescue operations had been more aggressive, if the National Guard had been called up in time, if our "president" had given a god damn about saving black people, so much would have been different. All parties, the whole damn nation, failed New Orleans by letting the levees fail, by balancing so many budgets by ignoring the necessities of that city, but the immediate failures of BushCo before, during, and after the tragedy are the most appalling failures of a US president since, well, 9-11.

[catzies]

4. I agree with everything you said and I know I'll never get over it.

Never.

[11 Bravo]

8. Yeah, but that miserable asshole Bush had some great fucking birthday cake!

[jobycom]

9. And a cool guitar. Not that I would compare Bush to Nero, who also

was famous for liking dead bodies on his birthday and for playing stringed instruments while major cities were destroyed... Nero had a cooler mom, for instance.

[Divine Discontent]

10. ah.. memories of good times! mccain birthday cake & a visit with a country star! Yahooooo!

What did you EXPECT him to be doing right as Katrina was baring down on New Orleans??? His JOB??? Pfft! You've got nerve, this man had cake to eat, dammit!

[jobycom]

11. Damn.

I just teared up again. :cry:

[Divine Discontent]

12. I cannot even imagine going through that HELL & then hear days later that my "pResident" was off

at a country club eating mccain's birthday cake, then the next day or so strumming guitar with a singer. These people had zero compassion for the suffering. I recall they (the lead WH team) were all off doing things like shoe shopping, fly-fishing, etc... just sickening.

[SargeUNN]

3. Yeah it certainly changed my life

in fact my life is totally different now. Thank goodness I no longer have the shakes when the wind blows a little strong, and the nightmares are gone.

[savalez]

5. Fox News: Shep You're Fired

[pscot]

7. There's a book there

Katrina raised my opinion of Sheppard Smith.