Shepard Smith Departs Fox News Amid Increased Tensions With Trump – Forbes

(Updated: 4:31 p.m. EST, 10/11/2019)

Topline:  President Trump’s sudden angry attacks on Fox News—and the sudden departure of his frequent target, longtime anchor Shepard Smith—suggests the protective firewall the network has offered him since before the 2016 election is under increasing pressure.

• Attorney General Bill Barr met with Rupert Murdoch, founder and chairman of Fox Corporation (parent company of Fox News), Thursday night. 
• A Fox News poll that showed 51% of voters supported impeachment prompted Trump to lash out; referring to the Fox’s pollster, he tweeted “they suck,” and called Fox News “much different than it used to be in the good old days.”
• Fox News’ prime-time shows (anchored by Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity), are still resoundingly pro-Trump, according to the Associated Press.
• But journalists on the network who aren’t conservative pundits—like anchor Shepard Smith and reporter Ed Henry—have become Trump targets, with Smith stepping down from role in a sudden Friday announcement from Jay Wallace, president and executive editor of Fox News.
• Clashes between Fox News’ more serious journalists and pundits have grown, with Carlson and Smith publicly butting heads and news anchor Chris Wallace complaining that the aggressive defense of Trump “is not surprising, but it is astonishing, and I think deeply misleading.” (Fox has claimed Wallace wasn’t talking about Fox anchors.)
• Even Carlson recently criticized Trump’s request for Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden in an op-ed for the Daily Caller (though he hasn’t leveled the criticism during his Fox show.)

Tangent: Trump’s taken to promoting the One America News Network (OANN), a right-wing TV channel founded in 2013 that’s been described as “Foxier than Fox” and has been consistently supportive of the president. OANN, however, isn’t as widely available as Fox News. Most U.S. TV providers include Fox News as part of their packages, while OANN can be watched only on a small handful of satellite, cable and streaming outlets.

Surprising fact: Another key conservative media figure, Matt Drudge, has reportedly grown “exasperated” with Trump, and his Drudge Report has been more clearly critical of Trump in recent weeks.

What we don’t know: It’s unclear what Barr and Murdoch discussed in their meeting. House speaker Nancy Pelosi has previously criticized Barr as going “rogue” to protect Trump amid the impeachment inquiry.

Key background: Trump has a history of lashing out at unfavorable coverage of him. An August poll by Fox News showed Trump losing⁠—by a comfortable margin⁠—in head-to-head matchups against Democratic presidential contenders Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris. Trump derided the poll as “Fake News” and insisted “my Poll Numbers are great.” Despite his attacks on the network, by midday Thursday, Trump was retweeting Fox News host Sean Hannity.