Fox News host Tucker Carlson devoted a segment in which he ridiculed his former colleague Shepard Smith—who now works as a chief general news anchor for CNBC.
Smith left Fox News after 23 years and told Christiane Amanpour in a PBS interview that he had no idea "how some people sleep at night"—a presumptive dig at his former workplace colleagues over their handling of news coverage and "spread of disinformation."
Carlson sarcastically praised Smith's coverage of a grocery store in Naples, Florida, where both shoppers and employees were seen in a video ignoring safety guidelines by refusing to wear masks and social distance.
Carlson said of Smith's reporting:
"If Pulitzer Prizes still mattered, and they don't, this would get a Pulitzer."
Carlson, who aligned with former-President Donald Trump's rhetoric, began Thursday's segment with:
"We spend an awful lot of time beating up on journalists and the sorry state of journalism. But we don't want it to be all negative."
"Of course, we'll hold up the miscreants for abuse, but we also want to celebrate the good guys once in a while."
The Fox firebrand was just warming up.
"Tonight we want to bring you the story of a genuine investigative journalist, a man who's been forgotten, cast aside like an Acosta when he should be an Edward R. Murrow. That's an injustice we plan to rectify right now."
The conservative host mockingly introduced Smith's reporting as one that "broke the story of a lifetime."
"We believed the hype, I guess. Maybe when you spend 30 years reading scripts about car chases everything seems like a car chase."
"The problem is, not everything is a car chase. Sometimes people are just smiling at each other in a grocery store. Sorry, overheated news guy. That's not actually news."
Twitter had plenty to say about Carlson's take on Smith's journalism.
Without naming names in the January 19 interview with Amanpour, Smith insinuated he stayed at Fox for as long as he could as a "counterpoint to Carlson and Sean Hannity's far-right rhetoric," according to Uproxx.
In the same interview, the current CNBC news anchor said of his former workplace colleagues:
"I believe that when people begin with a false premise and lead people to astray, that's injurious to society, and it's the antithesis of what we should be doing."
"I don't know how some people sleep at night, because I know that there are a lot of people who have propagated the lies, and have pushed them forward over and over again who are smart enough and educated enough to know better."
Carlson's ears must have been burning—which could have prompted his denigration of Smith.
Smith has not responded to Carlon's on-air remarks.
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