Former Fox News anchor Shepard Smith signed a deal with CNBC to host a one-hour primetime news show, the cable news business network announced on Wednesday.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the 56-year-old anchor will be hosting a program titled “The News With Shepard Smith” beginning in the fall, which will air from 7 to 8 p.m. EST.
CNBC Chairman Mark Hoffman said in a statement:
Information is coming at us from every direction. If we’re not careful life-altering decisions will be made based on half-truth, rumor, misdirection or worse. We aim to deliver a nightly program that, in some small way, looks for the signal in all the noise.
Smith said of his new gig that he is “honored to continue to pursue the truth, both for CNBC’s loyal viewers and for those who have been following my reporting for decades in good times and in bad.” He went on to laud CNBC for having a “vision for a fact-based, hourlong evening news program with the mission to cut through the static to deliver facts, in context and with perspective.”
Smith worked at Fox News for more than two decades, which made his sudden resignation as the anchor of “Shepard Smith Reporting” in October 2019 a surprise to even some of his longtime colleagues.
Today brought about a little shock for us here at #FoxNews as our colleague Shepard Smith announced it would be his last broadcast. We wish him nothing but the best– View his goodbye below: pic.twitter.com/LB9DFZetBb
— Bret Baier (@BretBaier) October 11, 2019
Smith had made headlines in the lead-up to his departure for publicly tussling with the network’s opinion hosts, such as Tucker Carlson, who took flak from Smith last September when he neglected to scold a guest for criticizing a Fox News legal analyst.
“Attacking our colleague who is here to offer legal assessments on our air, in our work home, is repugnant,” Smith said at the time, to which Carlson later responded by blasting Smith as a partisan masquerading as an unbiased news anchor.
“When you dress up news coverage, when you dress up, rather, partisanship as news coverage and pretend that your angry political opinions are news, people tune out. They know dishonesty when they see it,” Carlson said.
Smith was often derided by President Donald Trump, who speculated that Smith left Fox due to poor ratings. “Is he leaving? Oh, that’s a shame,” Trump said when he learned of Smith’s resignation. “If he’s leaving, I assume he’s leaving because he had bad ratings. He had the worst ratings on Fox.” Smith maintained at the time that he left the network of his own volition.
The time slot Smith is assuming at CNBC averages fewer than 250,000 viewers, according to Nielsen, which is a steep drop from the 1.3 million who tuned in to his show on Fox News.