FNC’s Smith anchors morning and afternoon Middle East coverage…
Shepard Smith was all over FNC today as news kept breaking just about every hour. It started a few minutes into Dayside when Smith came on to cover the breaking news of Israeli moves into Lebanon. At 4 pm, Smith popped up again during Your World and The Big Story to cover more news; at one point around the 5pm hour his camera crew helped him put on his flak jacket as fire was heard. Meanwhile, more news was coming into his BlackBerry and Smith managed to get all the news out there almost simultaneously as it was happening. He was tossing to reports in the field from Mike Tobin and Bill Hemmer (being shot through what appeared to me to be a night vision lens which made things seem more edgy to me). Around the 7pm hour Smith was on yet again reporting on the U.N. Security Council vote.
He even anchored the whole hour of Fox News Live at 2:00 p.m.
Comment by SuperNoxic — August 11, 2006 @ 8:12 pm
The Fox Report was commercial free for the entire hour; while MSNBC had a rerun of Hardball; and CNN had Wolf Blitzer covering the same thing, but with about 18 minutes of commercials.
I have mentioned this before. When there’s breaking news, Shep Smith has the power to cancel commercial breaks. Until CNN gives it’s anchors that power, FNC will always dominate. CNN probably had great coverage, but we news viewers surf to the other news networks during the commercials. Then when we surf to FNC, we stay until they have a commercial. Well, FNC didn’t have any! CNN and the Situation Room just lost 100,000 regular viewers today.
Comment by erljr — August 11, 2006 @ 8:38 pm
And we have the snotty remarks from Christiane Amanpour (in a post, below), which I assumed were pointed toward FNC.
Too bad, Christiane, this is war, and the FNC guys give it to us the way we want to see it.
Comment by Missy — August 11, 2006 @ 8:49 pm
I think Amanpour’s remarks were more targeted to a certain gentleman on her own network.
Comment by SuperNoxic — August 11, 2006 @ 8:53 pm
Shep did an awesome job today, and he was especially good at integrating Bill Hemmer, Mike Tobin, and Jennifer Griffin into the reports. And I found the Q&As with the military and political analysts back in the states very interesting too.
Comment by OverHere — August 11, 2006 @ 9:32 pm
See Missy, jumping to conclusions. Who’s clueless?? Man ya’ll fnc ‘fans’ are testy. And 18 minutes of commercials is exaggerating it just a tad. I guess ol Smith is the AC of FNC. Always got to show his head.
Comment by Cable News Watcher — August 11, 2006 @ 9:44 pm
CNW, 18 minutes of commercials is the standard for an hour of television, it’s not an exaggeration at all.
Comment by OverHere — August 11, 2006 @ 10:00 pm
I thought the same thing about Christiane’s remarks, not targeting FNC, but rather that silver-haired anchor on CNN.
Comment by sam — August 11, 2006 @ 10:06 pm
I agree that Christine’s remarks were directed at A.C.
He has been doing these awful musings. Photographs are shown while he, in a low sad voice, reflects on the horror of it all. The worst part is that he writes it, and it is so poorly written.
Also, someone is taking still shots of him while he watches the war. Yikes!
I hate to say these things about Anderson, because I really like him. You can’t help but like him.
And I will continue to watch him much of the time, no matter what.
Comment by cella — August 11, 2006 @ 10:36 pm
I guess you guys are right. I had just read her remarks on another site and then came here, read about the job FNC was doing, and thought she was slamming them! But I guess her description more charactizes AC.
Now if she could only slam a competitor, we could get her a job at MSNBC!
Comment by Missy — August 11, 2006 @ 11:11 pm
Hmm…looks like FNC PR is feeding the ‘animals’ (bloggers). TVN just so accidently posts nearly the same info using the same words that spud did in this blog post. Really pitiful that the blogs are playing right into fnc pr’s hands.
Comment by Cable News Watcher — August 12, 2006 @ 8:46 pm
CNW, I just read the two posts side by side, please show me where they use the same words.
Give it up already, we know you hate FNC. You have nothing constructive to say.
Comment by OverHere — August 12, 2006 @ 9:25 pm
I wrote that up from scratch. Typical CNW…
Comment by Spud — August 13, 2006 @ 12:28 am