Playboy Interview: Shepard Smith

Ask many television watchers about Fox News Channel's Shepard Smith and, even though he has covered inaugurations and executions, wars and natural disasters, they will recall the time he was supposed to say that Jennifer Lopez's Bronx neighbors were more likely to "give her a curb job than a block party" but instead, on live TV, he slipped and said "blow job." Despite (or partly because of) the J. Lo BJ incident, Smith has been gaining eyeballs almost as swiftly as he delivers his lightning-fast on-air reports. Indeed, he has emerged as one of the most influential television anchormen in the post–Jennings, Brokaw and Rather era, a feat made more impressive by his not being on a Big Three network.

Known for his gripping, irreverent, folksy, rapid-fire style, Smith anchors two daily Fox News Channel broadcasts: Studio B, at three P.M., and, at seven, Fox Report, which had already trounced its cable competition before Smith broke from the pack last year with some of the most riveting Hurricane Katrina coverage found on any station. He placed himself on a New Orleans highway overpass that became a de facto refugee camp for sick and dying people who literally emerged—on foot and on homemade rafts—from the rising floodwaters. His passionate, emotional reportage won critical praise and tripled his ratings.

Fox Report, which ushers in the network's prime-time lineup, a blitzkrieg of Bill O'Reilly, Hannity Colmes and Greta Van Susteren, has been the number-one cable news program in its time slot for more than 60 consecutive months. The show beats the other cable news networks' offerings combined, with double and sometimes triple the ratings of CNN's Situation Room, with Wolf Blitzer, and quadruple those of MSNBC's Hardball With Chris Matthews.

Katrina wasn't the first story for which Smith provided engrossing coverage. He has reported from the scenes of the Columbine massacre and the Oklahoma City bombing, as well as such international hot spots as Iraq and Israel. Along the way he has made a few notable blunders, including the time he announced the death of the pope while the pontiff was still alive. And, of course, video of the J. Lo blow-job comment flooded the Internet. Asked about the worst part, Smith says, "I had to explain it to my mother."

The gaffe was an embarrassing moment for a family from the small country town of Holly Springs, Mississippi, population approximately 8,000, where Smith was born and raised and where his father worked as a cotton merchant.

After what he describes as a normal smalltown childhood, Smith attended Ole Miss, where he was a reporter for the university television station. That led to a series of jobs at small stations throughout the South. After a stint in Miami he moved to Los Angeles, where he covered the O.J. Simpson trial for A Current Affair. Next came reporting assignments for Fox affiliate stations and, finally, an anchor job at Rupert Murdoch's fledgling Fox News Channel. In September 1999 Smith took the helm of Fox Report and transformed the show, making it TV's fastest-paced newscast—so fast that he often dispenses with verbs.

To talk with Smith, Playboy tapped Contributing Editor David Sheff, who last interviewed New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman for the magazine. Sheff reports, "Throughout the day, Smith moved as fast as he speaks on his newscasts. Keeping up with him as he met with his staff, rewrote scripts, cracked jokes, answered e-mails, fielded phone calls and raced through the building to arrive a second before his new live Fox radio broadcast went on the air—all while answering my questions—was dizzying. On my way to Smith's office in the Fox News Channel building in New York City, I passed Bill O'Reilly, the subject of a 2002 Playboy Interview. When O'Reilly asked where I was heading, I told him, 'To see Shepard Smith.' He responded, 'Make him squirm.'"

[Q] Playboy: In late winter ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff was wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq. How has that affected your industry?

[A] Smith: It's one of the many reminders of the hazards and risks you take on when you sign up for the job. We have to be careful, however. We have to report it but not overdo it. Some stations overdid it.

[Q] Playboy: How can such a significant story be overreported?

[Q] Smith: He is one of our fraternity—a respected member—but that should not necessarily make the story any larger or more important than those of the other injuries and deaths that occur every day in Iraq. Many viewers are familiar with him, so it's a compelling way to tell the story, and I understand that. But I also understand when the military community and families remind us that soldiers over there are being harmed and dying. To be fair to them and to do our jobs correctly, we have to recognize that some of the nonstop reporting on the Woodruff story is wrong. We've tried not to do it here. We update it when there's something new to say, and meanwhile we pray for his recuperation.

[Q] Playboy: Would the bomb make you think twice about heading back to Iraq?

[A] Smith: No. There are risks working in mines and risks in doing what we do. You go where the stories are. We do it because we think it's important for Americans to know what our government is doing on our behalf. Relying on press releases from the White House isn't enough. We have to go out there and look for ourselves.

[Q] Playboy: Is it becoming more difficult for reporters to do that? The Bush administration has been accused of having draconian control over reporters' access, whether in Iraq or Washington.

[A] Smith: I wish we could go out and report all over Iraq, but the insurgents have made it impossible for journalists to go where we want. If you go out in a vehicle that has TV on the side, you may as well put a bull's-eye on it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you deny the administration has been successful in controlling reporters' access to this and other stories?

[A] Smith: No, it concerns me. The more secretive a government is, the more skeptical we need to be. News is not broken in a White House correspondents' briefing room. As journalists, whenever we don't get information right away we have learned that we have to pay more attention.

[Q] Playboy: Such as when it took days for the White House, and particularly Dick Cheney's office, to comment when the vice president shot a prominent lawyer in a hunting mishap?

[A] Smith: Yes. History says you put out information as soon as you have it—unless you have to work the information. Was it reworked? We don't know. White House spokesman Scott McClellan says he was surprised by the way it was handled. The White House says it was surprised by it. Every Republican commentator who has come on our air has said he or she wishes it had happened differently. The only person in America who says it was handled correctly is the vice president. But listen, every administration tries its best to control the flow of information, and it's our job as journalists to try to get as much information as possible. Short of anything that would compromise national security, I want access to everything.

[Q] Playboy: One of the differences between the coverage of the war in Iraq and that of previous wars is the administration's prohibition against showing flag-draped coffins in the media. Should they be shown?

[A] Smith: I suppose that depends on your perspective.

[Q] Playboy: What's your perspective?

[A] Smith: Many people understand that people die in wars, yet they don't want to see flag-draped coffins every day on the news. A parade of flag-draped coffins can desensitize you.

[Q] Playboy: Yet they are part of the story—a reminder of daily U.S. casualties.

[A] Smith: I didn't make the decision not to show them. If it were up to me, I might make another decision. In general I believe less secrecy and more access is always better.

[Q] Playboy: The administration probably wasn't thrilled to have you reporting from the highway overpass in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, particularly at a time when it was telling the American public the government was in control of the situation. For the next hurricane or natural disaster, people like you may well be kept out.

[A] Smith: If that's the case, it's a sad state of affairs. I would hope they would get better at managing crises, not managing the media.

[Q] Playboy: In addition to Iraq, you have reported from Israel.

[A] Smith: I just returned. There was a great deal of sorrow about Ariel Sharon, about what their warrior, as they call him, has gone through. But more than that, there was concern that it leaves a power vacuum.

[Q] Playboy: Did the Hamas victory in the Palestinian election catch you off guard?

[A] Smith: We had some inklings, though the margin of victory was universally surprising. You never know what will happen. Who would ever have thought that the leader of Sinn Féin and the prime minister of Great Britain would come together and shake hands, but they did. We can all be hopeful, but the Middle East remains a difficult region.

[Q] Playboy: What's the most likely scenario for Iran?

[A] Smith: Iran looked so good at one point, or at least better, but Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems to march to the beat of his own drummer. International consensus is that the world cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon, so it doesn't look good over there. I don't know how you end up solving it.

[Q] Playboy: In Iran, in Iraq and throughout the Middle East, protests and violence erupted over the publication of cartoons depicting Muhammad in ways that offended many Muslims. Was the press wrong to show the cartoons?

[A] Smith: I remember when a piece of art that had dung on the Virgin Mary was shown in New York. Christians were not pleased. It became a news story, and publishing it was right. You don't stand back from publishing things that make people uncomfortable. The Abu Ghraib prison photos made people uncomfortable. You don't want to overplay them. You don't want to inflame and incite. But, hell, they're news. The cartoons were news because of the reaction. We ran them—judiciously, sparingly and in context—and I'm glad we did. I understand the fear of other news organizations that were afraid to run them, but I'm glad we chose to. Sometimes you have to stand up to those who want you to become fearful.

[Q] Playboy: After covering stories from Iraq to Oklahoma City, you have said Hurricane Katrina was the story of your life. Why?

[A] Smith: I knew and cared about New Orleans, so it was personal, but the main thing is I was there in the middle of the story as it played out. I saw firsthand what was being done and, more important, what wasn't being done. I was in one place, on one overpass, watching people wash up out of the floodwaters, thousands of people. When they got to the bridge, they weren't told where to go. They weren't given water or food, formula for their babies or insulin that would keep them alive.

[Q] Playboy: Looking back, where do you place the blame?

[A] Smith: Initially I blamed mother nature and those levees. You can also blame people just being there in the first place. Who thinks it's a good idea to have a city behind levees that can stand only a category-three hurricane? It's moronic. How frickin' stupid. Once it happened, however, I started blaming the system. Where was the federal government? Where was the leadership? Immediately after the planes hit the Twin Towers in New York, Rudy Giuliani came out of the bowels of the city and led it. Where was the leader in New Orleans?

[Q] Playboy: At what point did it dawn on you that most of the people in the most serious trouble were black?

[A] Smith: From moment one. I know New Orleans. I knew who was affected.

[Q] Playboy: Some officials and commentators blamed the people themselves for refusing to leave.

[A] Smith: We saw many people who tried to leave but couldn't. If you're very poor, evacuating is harder. It's expensive. You have to eat, you have to pay for gas if you have a car. If you have no car, it's nearly impossible. I came away from New Orleans very, very sad, and I remain sad. The rich people were fine, but the rest.... We—our government—couldn't respond. I got the sense that some people there, especially reporters, didn't realize poor people existed. I think it was a wake-up call for some media elite who grew up with a silver spoon and went to Harvard or Yale and don't really know America.

[Q] Playboy: It has come out that the White House knew there were serious concerns about the levees breaking even as President Bush, responding to a question from Diane Sawyer, said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

[A] Smith: Nobody should have assumed the levees wouldn't break. Many studies had been done. Most astounding to me all these months later is that we're now repopulating a place where we know it will happen again if there's another hurricane like that one or worse. I'm dumbfounded.

[Q] Playboy: During your coverage, at some point it seemed you had lost your objectivity as a reporter. You were pissed off. In your opinion, is it acceptable for a reporter to become emotionally involved in a story?

[A] Smith: This one just got away from me.

[Q] Playboy: Are you generally in control enough not to become emotional?

[A] Smith: Almost always, except there in New Orleans. I've shed a tear here or there accidentally. There are overwhelming moments.

[Q] Playboy: Covering the hurricane, Geraldo Rivera cried too.

[A] Smith: It must have been a horrible shock for somebody like Geraldo, who's an emotional guy in the first place, to arrive at a story he'd been watching unfold for days and find out it's even worse than he had heard it described.

[Q] Playboy: Is getting emotional good for ratings and therefore encouraged, or would you try not to cry?

[A] Smith: Normally you wouldn't show it. You have a commercial break when you can regain your thoughts and organize yourself. In this particular story there were no commercial breaks. The news was unfolding before us. When someone with a dying baby in his hands walks up to you—and you have been screaming about the situation for days—you don't always have time for editing. I was emotional because I was frustrated and confused. I became exasperated because help was not coming for these people. You shouldn't be left to die in 90-degree heat on a bridge in the middle of a major American city. If we can't be ready for something like this—something like a hurricane we knew was coming—what's going to happen when those bastards light a fire under us again? What's going to happen the next time they knock buildings down? How are we going to respond?

[Q] Playboy: You broadcast from a network that has been charged with bending over backward in its support of the president, but you're making a serious accusation against the Bush administration.

[A] Smith: When you talk about this sort of thing, some people are 100 percent convinced that you're politically motivated and trying to bring down the government, that you want to hurt the president. But I do not come at life from that place. I just think we as a country need to answer these questions before it's too late. As to bending over backward to support this administration, I don't toe anyone's line. No one in this building toes anyone's line. The moment they try to tell me to distort reality, I tell them to fuck off. It has never happened.

[Q] Playboy: Do you deny that Fox is conservative and pushes a conservative agenda?

[A] Smith: If you hear something enough, you come to believe it, and yes, some people have come to believe that we are right-wing and in the hip pocket of the administration. But I know better.

[Q] Playboy: Have you seen Outfoxed, the documentary that purports to expose Fox News Channel's right-wing political agenda?

[A] Smith: I've never seen it.

[Q] Playboy: How do you respond to its premise that Fox is a political tool for the right, backed by owner Rupert Murdoch and chairman Roger Ailes?

[A] Smith: I know the premise, and I know the truth. I'm real comfortable here. I sleep well at night.

[Q] Playboy: That doesn't address the charge that the network has a political agenda.

[A] Smith: A lot of our critics come from the competition. No one cared until we started beating everyone. They think, Who the hell are you, getting these crazy numbers? Who the hell are you, attracting all this attention from media all over the world? Why does everybody care? Here you upstarts come along with your damn Rupert Murdoch. That's what it comes down to.

[Q] Playboy: Fox News Channel's slogan is "Fair & Balanced." Do you maintain that it is?

[A] Smith: It's our mandate.

[Q] Playboy: Do you suggest that Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity are fair and balanced?

[A] Smith: Bill O'Reilly does a show about what Bill O'Reilly thinks. He's very honest about that. It's commentary. It's about his opinion. Is Sean Hannity a right-winger? Yessiree Bob, he is. He wouldn't disagree with that. But I don't find it interesting to slant the news, so I don't. I don't care about the politics of it all. I don't care, really, about who's to blame for people on the bridge dying around me. I just want to know who is in charge and who is responsible.

[Q] Playboy: Would you cover CIA leaks, for example, in the same way if Clinton were in office? Are you more inclined to give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt?

[A] Smith: My group just wants to get it right. We're not here to take people down or build people up. We're here to let our viewers know what happened.

[Q] Playboy: Fox seemed to exult in the woes of the Clinton administration and often minimizes the ills of the Bush administration. Do you think exposing a CIA agent is more egregious than having sex with an intern?

[A] Smith: Do we try to find out the truth as aggressively with this administration as we had with a previous administration? We'd better. My group certainly does. Brit Hume says his bunch does, and Brit is a man of integrity, as far as I'm concerned.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever been asked to push a conservative point of view on a story?

[A] Smith: I wouldn't still be at Fox if I had.

[Q] Playboy: Do you acknowledge that Murdoch started Fox News Channel as an answer to the perceived liberal bias in the media in general and on CNN in particular?

[A] Smith: I've been here since before there was a Fox News Channel, long before, and there's nothing further from the truth. It's about serving a market and telling the truth. When I was standing in New Orleans, I called out my Fox colleagues in New York when they were reporting one thing while I was seeing another on the front line. It's no one's party line.

[Q] Playboy: You're referring to your on-screen fight with Hannity, when he announced that the National Guard had arrived. You said it hadn't. What exactly happened?

[A] Smith: I respect Sean Hannity. Sean understands more about life than people give him credit for, but on this story he was out of touch. Like everyone else, he was told everything was going to be okay. Once he heard the truth, however, he was fine with it. And we didn't have a fight on the air. Sean was reporting the news he was fed, but I was there. When I told him, he understood.

[Q] Playboy: Before Katrina, when else were you at the center of a breaking story?

[A] SMITH: I got to Columbine the day the massacre happened, and I stayed for a couple of weeks.

[Q] Playboy: Was it a random assignment, or did you ask to go?

[A] Smith: The shooting started when I was in the newsroom. Jesus Christ, I thought, They're shooting inside a school? I needed to go. Period. I was there a few hours later. It was pre-9/11, so you could get on a plane pretty damn fast. I was on the air before other networks arrived.

[Q] Playboy: Similarly, did you fly to Oklahoma City right after the bombing?

[A] Smith: I was working at a Miami station then. We heard what happened, and I was at the airport 20 minutes later. I was in Oklahoma City to lead the news that night and stayed there for weeks.

[Q] Playboy: Was the experience similar to Columbine?

[A] Smith: You didn't have the smell thing at Columbine.

[Q] Playboy: The smell thing?

[A] Smith: After the bombing there was a smell that has carried through my life. The memories are orange—orange vests like a trail of ants through mounds of concrete—and that acrid smell that initially was fuel and then was humans. That and not knowing where to put your anger. Not knowing whom you're mad at. The first day it was Middle Eastern men, remember? Soon we got an indication that it was something else entirely. It all blurs. The incredible sadness, those children in that day-care center. Seeing it is one thing. Smelling it is another. The smell brings it alive for you. On 9/11, too, I remember the smell.

[Q] Playboy: You followed the Oklahoma City bombing story through the execution of Timothy McVeigh, which you witnessed. How did you feel when you learned you would be present at the execution?

[A] Smith: I felt really good about it.

[Q] Playboy: That's a surprising reaction.

[A] Smith: It's so rare that you're able to follow a story from the very beginning to the very end, and that was the very end. Our government has made the decision that it is going to kill people for crimes they commit. I felt the most important thing I could do was to be there and tell the public exactly what had happened.

[Q] Playboy: Do you favor the death penalty?

[A] Smith: I'm not going to answer that.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Smith: It's my upbringing. A very wise man called Dad once said, "Politics and sex are very interesting topics. Your own politics and your own sex. Talking about them to others will just get you in trouble." I follow that. What I will say, however, is that nothing I witnessed was cruel and unusual. After this experience, I feel that people who are for the death penalty because criminals need to be punished in that way would be less for it and that those who are against the death penalty because it is cruel and unusual would be less against it. I'm not advocating putting executions on television—far from it—or even making them available online. But I am confident drat if they were, the arguments on both sides, especially the extremes, would be tempered. One extreme wants that motherfucker to pay. He pays, but there is no extreme suffering. It's like watching someone go to sleep. And the other extreme says [mockingly], "Don't do that. It's terribly inhumane." They're both wrong. We put them to sleep.

[Q] Playboy: Were there surprises?

[A] Smith: I didn't expect to be so close to McVeigh, and I certainly didn't expect him to take over the room.

[Q] Playboy: How did he do that?

[A] Smith: He was strapped in, and he leaned up and acknowledged each one of us. Then he decided to lie back, and only then did he give up some degree of control. It was very powerful. What happened after that wasn't so powerful. They put a drug in him and put him to sleep. There was a little bit of a twitch, and that's it. There wasn't much difference between his being asleep and his being dead. Afterward people said how terrifying and overpowering it was. I cannot for the life of me imagine how somebody could come to those conclusions. Finally they covered him up with a sheet and dosed die curtains, and that was that.

[Q] Playboy: Would it have been more difficult to witness an execution by electric chair?

[A] Smith: Old Sparky? It probably would have been difficult to watch the time the woman's hair caught fire while she was sitting there, but I guess I don't find die extremes of this job more difficult. I find them sometimes more exciting, sometimes more important, sometimes more fulfilling, depending on die situation, but you want to be there when the biggest things happen. My problem is when it's a boring news day. I'm antsy and horrible. Or when there's something big happening and I'm not there. That's difficult for me to stomach.

[Q] Playboy: How is what you do different from what anchormen like Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Peter Jennings did? Is the day of die trusted anchor in die mold of Walter Cronkite gone for good?

[A] Smith: During times of crisis or celebration, viewers pick people they trust to celebrate with, grieve with, learn from. For the 9/11 attacks, the biggest thing to happen to us in a long time, all those men were in place. Now they're gone. But the era of viewers turning to a journalist like one of them, someone they trust during the important times-whether that's over is very much up for debate. I would argue it isn't. I think that type of human-to-human contact in times of crisis and celebration is something people will still seek. So if history repeats itself, when die next big thing comes along people will choose again. By then I'm sure CBS and ABC hope to have figured out who their leadership team will be. NBC seems to have done so. On die cable side, we have some degree of stability at Fox News Channel. It seems others are trying to figure it out.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have a current favorite network anchor?

[A] Smith: Oh, man. I love watching Bob Schieffer. I feel as if I'm learning from him. I trust the man.

[Q] Playboy: Besides Schieffer, who are some of the best out there today?

[A] Smith: On my own network I think Trace Gallagher is a star. I love to watch him. I love Brit Hume's take on Washington politics.

[Q] Playboy: How about beyond Fox?

[A] Smith: I hate to give too many nods to other networks, but I think some stalwarts are out there. I like Jeff Greenfield on CNN. Keith Morrison on Dateline NBC has an incredible grasp of his instrument. He's a wonderful storyteller.

[Q] Playboy: Fox News Channel may be trouncing its cable competitors, but the networks still dwarf its numbers. Is your goal to take on network news, too?

[A] Smith: Absolutely. If you're making Tide detergent, you want everybody to use it. We would like to beat them all. We're not shy about admitting that losing is horrible and winning is really fun.

[Q] Playboy: Is it unrealistic to think a cable channel can compete with the networks?

[A] Smith: I don't see a limit. Cable penetration is very high. As long as we're relevant, why couldn't we get everybody? In fact, rather than our looking to the networks, I think they look to what we're doing. They're starting to do things we've done for a long time.

[Q] Playboy: For example?

[A] Smith: Things are quicker. There's more variety. They seem to be trying to be more personable and relatable.

[Q] Playboy: Are you bothered by recent TV news trends, some spearheaded by Fox? Lou Dobbs said people should put a piece of tape on the bottom of their screen because of die constant annoying crawl.

[A] Smith: I like a busy screen. You can't give me too much information. I don't mind the whoosh. I don't mind the sound effects. I don't mind anything that brings people to our product. Fill that screen up. Make it yell at me. Zing me. Throughout history older people have always been nervous about whatever is new—Elvis gyrating up on that stage. PLAYBOY: What impact has the Internet had on news coverage?

[A] Smith: Huge. I spend a lot of time on the Internet. I get a lot of my news from it. I know other people do the same thing.

[Q] Playboy: Has it affected what you cover?

[A] Smith: Stories get legs that wouldn't have before. The Internet has driven a lot of die big Washington crises. People sitting at home in pajamas drive a lot of stories. At times they pick up on things before we do. A lot of people are focused on it 24/7. They chat about it, write about it, blog about it.

[Q] Playboy: Is there a danger to that? Internet stories may be more likely to lack veracity, and we can wind up with stories about—

[A] Smith: Swift boats. Yes, some stories just live in the Internet world and lack anything resembling truth. You have to triple-check everything.

[Q] Playboy: The Internet helped spread your most famous mistake, when you stumbled and mistakenly mentioned Jennifer Lopez and a blow job in the same sentence.

[A] Smith: Oh God. Yes, that would never have had legs if not for the Internet.

[Q] Playboy: Looking back, were you embarrassed, or did you think it was funny?

[A] Smith: God, I was embarrassed. Mom's church was talking about it.

[Q] Playboy: How did it happen?

[A] Smith: The copy was easy to trip over, and I did. I'm good at tripping over copy. It's one of my best skills.

[Q] Playboy: When was the exact moment you realized you had said it?

[A] Smith: It was instantaneous. The blood rushed to my toes. I'll never forget it. I knew the end was near.

[Q] Playboy: You immediately apologized. Would it have been better to ignore it, to pretend it hadn't happened?

[A] Smith: You couldn't ignore it. I had just said "blow job" on the air.

[Q] Playboy: Since then, are you nervous when you have a story about J. Lo?

[A] Smith: I'm very careful.

[Q] playboy: Are you teased?

[A] Smith: Of course. I'll meet somebody, and he'll go, "You're die J. Lo guy." Which is certainly how you want to be identified

[Q] Playboy: Was it just a mistake or was it—

[A] Smith: Freudian? I don't know. I think the (continued on page 152)Shepard Smith(continued from page 58) combination of J. Lo, curb job and block party, which were the words in the script, was ripe for this. It might have been J. Lo-specific. I don't know. But as I said, I trip over words all the time. We're going fast, and I try to get the facts right, but I mess up. I feel bad for our writers. They write good stuff, and I destroy it. It is both embarrassing and humbling.

[Q] Playboy: Did anything good come out of the mistake?

[A] Smith: For the PR department. It said we got a lot of young eyes. But I didn't find anything good about it.

[Q] Playboy: Was your mother really upset?

[A] Smith: She certainly asked about it. "What are you saying on TV?" She's 76. It was everywhere—and then Howard.

[Q] Playboy: Yes, Howard Stern had a field day. He invited you on his show.

[A] Smith: Which I respectfully declined. I thought, What do I want to focus on that for? We do some decent work day in and day out, and to focus on a gaffe is not a smart thing to do.

[Q] Playboy: It wasn't your first mistake to garner lots of attention. You announced the death of the previous pope, but he hadn't yet died.

[A] Smith: That was a little more complicated than messing up a word or two. A system was in place at the time. The word was, If you hear it from Vatican TV or radio, it's like hearing it from God. I was hearing lots of things in my earpiece, and I thought I heard from Vatican radio that the pope had died. I was wrong. It was horrible. Sometimes you make big mistakes on big stories. It would have been a much worse thing had he not been on his deathbed, but it was still bad.

[Q] Playboy: You also caught flak for what seemed to be a crude, insensitive statement you made when IRA leader and MP Bobby Sands died after his hunger strike. You said the moral of his death was "Eat more often." Was that scripted or off-the-cuff?

[A] Smith: It was just stupid. I didn't mean it. There are many mistakes on live TV, and that was one of them. I've always made lots of mistakes, but in the past no one would notice. Now lots of people are watching. That's the price of being on the news.

[Q] Playboy: Was the news important in your house when you were a child? Did your parents talk about current events?

[A] Smith: A little bit, but we talked more about what happened for me at school and for Dad at work than we did about what was happening in D.C. Ours was a relatively simple life. Northern Mississippi is disconnected from the rest of the country. We were kind of in our own world.

[Q] Playboy: Were you studious?

[A] Smith: I was a bad student. I was always talking, cutting up. I wanted to go outside. I loved sports. I ran a little track, played a lot of tennis. Never was very good at baseball but played some. Same with football. Mostly I ran around the neighborhood and threw dirt clods, went to the candy store, crossed the road where I shouldn't.

[Q] Playboy: When did you know you wanted to be a television journalist?

[A] Smith: Not until college. I found I liked to dig up a story. I did it at the TV station on campus at Ole Miss. You did it all there—directed, produced, wrote, shot camera, edited tape. That was the only reason I got my first job. I was this geeky, horrible-looking, weird thing. Too skinny, a horrible accent. But I knew how to do everything, which was what I needed for my first job, in Panama City, Florida. I had a marriage coming, and I had to eat and make car payments.

[Q] Playboy: What happened to your accent?

[A] Smith: I had a summer job at a Hardee's in Destin, Florida. I was put at the drive-through, on the speaker. My accent was so bad they stopped me. They wouldn't let me work the speaker at the drive-through, and I knew right then, All right, you've got to mainstream a little bit.

[Q] Playboy: How did the reporting job lead to Fox?

[A] Smith: Coming out of Panama City, I got jobs at small stations, where I made a lot of mistakes, which was okay because nobody was watching. Then I went to Fox in Miami and Los Angeles. I worked on A Current Affair, something I really didn't want to do. It was the middle of O.J. I liked the story. I still think O.J. was a defining moment in our history. But A Current Affair was pretaped, which I didn't like. I was miserable, and they hated me. Then Fox needed someone to go cover the Montana Freemen standoff for the news service. I was like, "I'll go." Sixty-nine days later I was still there, living in a farmhouse with no heat. There wasn't even talk at the time of a news channel. I'd heard of Roger Ailes but didn't really know much about him. One day he called and said he liked something I had done. He hired me, and it just kept going. One day Fox asked me to go to New York. I think the network saw something in me. Part of it may have been a sort of quirky, poorly dressed, long-haired Southern weirdness.

[Q] Playboy: How long was your hair?

[A] Smith: Not that long, but I was an unkempt kind of guy. I hadn't figured it all out yet.

[Q] Playboy: Are you now comfortable in a suit, with makeup and hair groomed for TV?

[A] Smith: It doesn't bother me. It's a uniform. I wore brown and orange at Hardee's, and here I wear a suit. They fix you up, make you presentable. I don't care.

[Q] Playboy: When Ted Turner owned CNN, he famously said he would squish Fox News Channel like a bug.

[A] Smith: Well, we all know how that turned out.

[Q] Playboy: As Fox News Channel's ratings have grown and CNN's have shrunk, what has Fox done right and CNN done wrong?

[A] Smith: We haven't talked down to our viewers. We recognize there's a center of the country, places outside San Francisco and New York. And we make the screen interesting. We have a good time. We don't hate each other.

[Q] Playboy: You're suggesting they do at CNN? Does CNN talk down to its viewers?

[A] Smith: I think there was a time when some of that may have been absolutely true. CNN was also a little boring. As you can see, it has co-opted some of our ideas. And good for them. I want them to do well because the more competition we have, the more money we spend, the better we are at our craft. CNN is behind, so it's trying things. It's throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks. When you're behind, you can do that.

[Q] Playboy: Do you still consider CNN the only serious competition?

[A] Smith: As I said earlier, I don't look only at cable news as our competition. I look at all the competition in my time slot. Ours is a rough one. My competition is Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight. It's Wheel of Fortune. It's Jeopardy. It's SportsCenter on ESPN. It's movies on TNT. It's SpongeBob SquarePants. But Entertainment Tonight viewers are sometimes going to look for news. They've proved that over time. When there's a big news event, they're going to come, and we want them to come to us. If they find us, we want them to stay with us.

[Q] Playboy:ET viewers can also find celebrity coverage on your shows.

[A] Smith: I've never been much of a celebrity hound. I've never been very interested in celebrities.

[Q] Playboy: But you cover them.

[A] Smith: We've been guilty of reporting on celebrities more than we should, but you make those judgment calls every day.

[Q] Playboy: Who are you tired of? How about Tom Cruise? Would you like to have him on your show to jump on your couch?

[A] Smith: Oh, that's ridiculous sideshowishness. Some people just get too big. He's just pathetic.

[Q] Playboy: Angelina Jolie?

[A] Smith: I don't care.

[Q] Playboy: When Ailes gave you Fox Report, what changes did you make?

[A] Smith: It was a traditional evening newscast with a bunch of packages, pretaped everything. There was no way to update anything. We blew it up.

[Q] Playboy: You have been criticized as being too manic.

[A] Smith: Some people don't like the speed. Some people like Chips Ahoy!, some like Oreos. You can't be everything for everybody. It seems to be working, but, that said, you have to keep reinventing yourself because, like everything else, you get stale. PLAYBOY: Do you worry that quick-bite news is dumbing people down?

[A] Smith: On Fox News Channel, if you begin at six and get Brit Hume's taped pieces and political analysis, then our headlines of the day's news and something for the water cooler, then Bill O'Reilly bloviating about whatever he bloviates about for the day, you get a pretty good slice of the news. I'm not worried about it. People can always go to the Internet and newspapers. I hope they do.

[Q] Playboy: Supposedly many people, especially young people, get their news not from you or your competitors but from The Daily Show and other comedy broadcasts. Does that concern you?

[A] Smith: I find that silly and disingenuous. I don't disrespect the younger generation to the point where I think it's seriously getting the news from Jon Stewart. I love his show, by the way. We are acquaintances; we live in the same building. But The Daily Show is not a news show.

[Q] Playboy: Who decides what you can and cannot have on your reports regarding violence or sex? Was it your call to display dead bodies on the bridge during Hurricane Katrina?

[A] Smith: We may have been the first. I'm not sure. It's part of the story, but I don't make the ultimate decision. People upstairs do.

[Q] Playboy: How about sex?

[A] Smith: We have nothing against sex here. This is the home of the New York Post, which doesn't shy away from sex. Remember, we have a conservative audience. It doesn't want to see that. Isn't that right? We do try not to show animals having sex, though. It bothers children.

[Q] Playboy: Do you get more irate viewers when you show violence or sex?

[A] Smith: Politics.

[Q] Playboy: What about verbs? You rarely use them.

[Q] Smith: Verbs are optional. Our writers have gotten very good at leaving them out. Sometimes you need them, sometimes you don't. They're just not necessary for communicating. "Two dangerous criminals back behind bars." Sometimes I might say "are back behind bars," depending on what feels right. Next we're going to eliminate the nouns. Adjectives are fine when not overused.

[Q] Playboy: What's your life like outside of work?

[A] Smith: I don't talk about it. I don't talk religion, I don't talk politics, and I don't talk sex. Other than that, we're good to go.

[Q] Playboy: You're not currently married.

[A] Smith: I'm divorced.

[Q] Playboy: Do you date?

[Q] Smith: Sure, whatever. Not much.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have a girlfriend?

[A] Smith: I don't talk about those things. I won't tell you what church I go to or whether I go.

[Q] Playboy: Are you a night owl?

[A] Smith: I like nights. A lot of times I go home and watch baseball. When baseball is over, there are dinners and drinks and sports bars. Occasionally I go to a club.

[Q] Playboy: How about the morning? What's the first news you read?

[A] Smith: I hit the blogs.

[Q] Playboy: Which blogs?

[A] Smith: I move around based on where the news is that day—New Orleans sites, Washington sites. I always go to the Hotline. If you go to the same place every day, you start thinking like everyone else, which is dangerous. I love the industry sites and the newspapers, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times.

[Q] Playboy: What do you look for when you read them?

[A] Smith: I never want to allow any newspaper or any other organization to set the agenda. Everybody knows what's above the fold, so I look for other stories—smaller ones, local ones. You learn a lot from the in-depth reporting happening across the country. Then when I've read enough, I figure out a way to focus the day.

[Q] Playboy: What happens when a story breaks while you're on the air?

[A] Smith: Some days it comes to me through my earpiece; someone will tell me about a breaking story. More often it comes across the computer screen. I like those days best when we throw out the rundown and see if the train's going to come off the track.

[Q] Playboy: How important is it to be first on a breaking story?

[A] Smith: There's a rush to be first, but I don't want to be first and wrong. When a big story comes through, you just go with it, but you try not to get ahead of yourself. We have to be careful because we move quickly around here. We're going full-steam, trying to give you a roundup of what happened today and a little bit of analysis, maybe some food for thought. If I accomplish that, I go home and sleep well.

The blood rushed to my toes just said "blow job" on the air.

I hate to give too many nods to other networks, but I think some stalwarts are out there. I like Jeff Greenfield on GNN. I love watching Bob Schieffer. I trust the man.

I like Jeff Greenfield on CNN. I love watching Bob Schieffer. I trust the man.