Shepard Smith, One Of Television’s Most Talented News Anchors, Was Never A Good Fit For CNBC

When Shepard Smith announced in 2019 that he was leaving the Fox News Channel, it came as a big surprise. Smith made the announcement at the end of his afternoon newscast Shepard Smith Reporting, and the news clearly surprised his colleague Neil Cavuto, who began his show by saying “whoa,” and then, after pausing for a few seconds—an eternity on live television—said “I’m Neil Cavuto and like you, I’m a little stunned and a little heartbroken,” Cavuto said. A few moments later, John Roberts, reporting from the White House, said hearing the news of Smith’s exit felt like “being hit by a subway train.”

When CNBC announced today that it would cancel Smith’s evening newscast, it didn’t come as a shock. If anything, it felt inevitable. From the moment CNBC announced it had hired Smith to anchor an evening newscast, there was a sense of Shep Smith? At CNBC? Wait, why? How’s that supposed to work? They’re going to shoe-horn him in between Mad Money and Shark Tank?

The problem wasn’t Smith. One of the most talented breaking news anchors in television, Shep Smith could effortlessly cover major news stories, often working live with nothing but his own experience as a journalist and live pictures from a helicopter, as he did when news broke that the FBI had “raided” the Florida home of former President Donald Trump. Smith didn’t have much information, but watching him was riveting nonetheless—few anchors could do this kind of high-wire act as effortlessly:

The problem was this: when huge stories break, who’s going to think to flip to CNBC for live coverage? When CNBC announced it had hired Smith back in 2020, it was clearly a departure. A message that the network was looking to attract viewers beyond Wall Street. CNBC’s chairman at the time, Mark Hoffman, said hiring Smith was basically a no-brainer: “we aim to deliver a nightly program that, in some small way, looks for the signal in all the noise,” Hoffman said. “We’re thrilled that Shep, who’s built a career on an honest fight to find and report the facts, will continue his pursuit of the truth at CNBC.”

CNBC reportedly spent millions on Smith, building him a studio and hiring him a show team. But The News with Shepard Smith didn’t find the “signal in the noise” as much as it was lost amid the continuing noise of Fox News rolling to ratings win after ratings win, and MSNBC and CNBC slugging it out for second place. In the virtual news desert of after-market-hours-CNBC, Smith’s talent was wasted.

Dropping in to watch Smith’s CNBC newscast felt at times confusing: was it a business show stretching to do national news? Or was it a national newscast stretching itself too thin with business news? If you caught one of those moments when Smith was doing live breaking news, you’d think, “this is excellent, I should watch this more often,” but on if you caught the show on a night with less drama, you might think that something just wasn’t clicking.

It’s notoriously hard to get viewers to change their habits in television, and for folks who weren’t already glued to CNBC during market hours, the hurdle of figuring out where CNBC sat on their cable lineup was apparently too much to ask.

Today CNBC’s new leader, KC Sullivan, made it clear that the network would be shifting its focus back to business. “We need to further invest in business news content that provides our audiences actionable understanding of the complex developments in global markets and the implications on institutions, investors and individuals,” Sullivan said. “During times of flux and uncertainty, our place in the lives of those we touch on-air, online and in person becomes even clearer, and more essential.”

When Smith signed off from Fox, he said, “it’s my hope that the facts will win the day, that the truth will always matter, that journalism and journalists will thrive.” In cable news, the jury’s still out on whether journalism is thriving, but one thing is clear: should Smith move to a network like CNN—quickly shifting gears back to hard news and away from opinion—it’d be a safe bet that Smith could once again be where he should’ve been all along: in the center of the big news story, doing what he does best.