ELEGY: Why didn't she read what it said on the screen?

THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2024

The tyranny of a tough crowd: When Sandra Smith hired on at Fox News, she fell in with a tough crowd.

That would be the principal finding our analysts now report. As background concerning this local culture, they asked us to consider two recent examples:

Judge Jeanine:

In this morning's New York Times, Annie Karni offers this news report about the various fringe-y Republican congressmen who can't stop advancing the idea that the recent assassination attempt was part of a wider conspiracy.

Needless to say, everything is always possible until a full review has occurred. But it's generally felt that sensible people will withhold such (unfounded) musings until some actual evidence supports their fre-floating theories.

Karni's report dealt an array of fringe-y GOP reps. Then too, there's Judge Jeanine, all-knowing loudmouth star of the Fox News Channel's The Five. She recently peddled this:

JUDGE JEANINE (7/30/24): There is no excuse for the multiple failures of this agency [the Secret Service]. And their inability to explain any reasons points to me. or makes me wonder what the hell was going on. 

It appears that there wasn't just a breach of the protocols, but it's almost like these protocol failures were affirmatively ignored, all right? ...You are protecting a former president of the United States and you don't put a counter-sniper on a roof that is flat within 130 yards? There are some actions that are so negligent, so reckless, that they border on intentional. And they did nothing [at that day's hearing] to alleviate our concern that this may be intentional.

To watch the judge's fuller statement, you can start by clicking here. That said, The Loudmouth says such things on a daily basis. According to our analysts, she's part of the "tough crowd" Smith encountered when she hired on at Fox.

The Fox & Friends Three:

On this morning's Fox & Friends, the trio of friends didn't mention Candidate Trump's visit to a certain journalistic convention until 6:15. They then spent ten minutes pretending to discuss what happened.

In the course of that ten minutes, they showed tape of his pitiful statement about Kamala Harris, but they did so only once, quite fleetingly. They made no attempt to fact check Trump's remark, and they didn't cite the reactions to his remarks from the White House or from Harris herself.

Instead, they focused on how rudely Trump had been treated at the event. They repeated his claim that he had been misinformed about the event as if it was an established fact.  "I can under his perspective," the constantly simpering Ainsley Earhardt simperingly said. 

According to the analysts, this trio is also part of the "tough crowd" Smith has been forced to deal with.

Smith's career has come into question due to a recent bizarre event. We refer to her refusal to read the text of a written statement in which Vice President Harris referred to her political party as "the Democratic Party."

That's the actual name of the party, but Smith refused to read it! Instead, she bowed to a long-standing part of local culture in which thought leaders of Red America must never say the actual name of that political party.

Why did Smith behave in such a childish way—in such an insulting way? As an additional part of their report, the analysts cited the recent best-selling book by Fox News crackpot Mark Levin. Comically and tragically, the title of the book is this:

The Democrat Party Hates America

Yes, that's the actual title! With respect to that book title, we call your attention to Levin's refusal to say the actual name of the party in question—but also to his typically crackpot claim about that party's alleged hatred.

For the record, Levin loves to say the words, "Democrat Party." He also loves to live in the distant political past. For example, here's the opening paragraph of his book's second chapter:

CHAPTER TWO / ANTI-BLACK RACISM & ANTI-SEMITISM

The Civil War was not only a breathtakingly bloody dispute between the North and the South, the Union and the Confederacy, and antislavery and proslavery forces, but a battle between the Republican Party and the Democrat Party—the latter conflict of which is rarely mentioned and certainly not emphasized. Indeed, for major elements of the Democrat Party, the Civil War did not end in 1865. It never ended. Despite the best efforts of its party apparatchiks, academic surrogates, and media propagandists to ignore, spin, or obscure the horrendous story of the Democrat Party’s past from the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings to segregation, Jim Crow laws, voter intimidation, etc.—the Democrat Party had a hand in all of it. In fact, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was a Democrat, as were virtually all the leaders and generals of the Confederacy. Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Democrat, became the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War, which he helped found to terrorize the newly freed slaves and gut Reconstruction, and which Republican president Ulysses S. Grant sought to destroy by deploying the U.S. Army. Grant’s efforts were stymied after the Democrat Party won a majority in the House of Representatives, which cut his support.

Levin loves the practice of basing modern-day political judgments on events of the distant past. To an even greater extent, he loves the term, "Democrat Party."

(As you can see for yourself at the link provided, the term appears 139 times in Chapters Two and Three alone.)

In fact, Levin's insistence on repeating that phrase has been diagnosed by medical experts as a localized, highly eccentric offshoot of Tourette's syndrome. His inanity seems to know few bounds. Neither does his love of that term. 

Indeed, when Levin's book appeared last fall, he spoke about it with Pete Hegseth on his weekend Fox News program. After a commercial break, the following exchange occurred. 

We present it as comic relief:

HEGSETH (9/24/23): Welcome back to this special edition of Life, Liberty and Levin with The Great One, Mark Levin, and his new book, The Democrat Party Hates America...We talk a lot about politics, a lot about culture. Now it's getting personal, from the Democrats.

LEVIN: And by the way, for people who have a problem with the title, I'm waiting for somebody to write The Democrat Party Loves America. I'd love to know how? Exactly what about America does the Democrat Party love?

Yes, he actually said it! Yes, it actually gets that stupid as denizens of this peculiar land observe this mandated tic.

For the record, no one is going to write a book called The Democrat Party [sic] Loves America. No one else is dumb enough to slap some such title on an unsuspecting book. 

That said, this degree of verbal inanity is a mandate of local culture within the sacred halls of the Fox News Channel. This is the crowd Smith encountered when she hired on at Fox.

It must have been a shock for Smith when she encountered this crowd. She had grown up in a better place—in suburban Wheaton, Illinois, where her father was a commodities trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Smith graduated from LSU, where she was part of a national championship track team. In this detailed profile for a Louisiana publication, she described the way she moved from Wheaton and the CME to the Fox News Channel:

An LSU Tiger at FOX

[...]

Smith studied business at LSU with concentrations in speech and French. “It’s interesting how I actually chose LSU,” says Smith, who hails from a family thick in the financial industry. Her dad worked both exchanges, primarily the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. “I was the youngest of six [children], with four sisters and a brother growing up in the Chicago area,” Smith says. “My dad introduced us all to the business, and I stayed by his side and learned a lot.”

“I wanted something unique in a college,” Smith says. “I wanted to study business, but I loved French in high school. Then I discovered there was a French-speaking area in the United States, so I thought, ‘That’s it—I’m going down to Baton Rouge, Louisiana!’ I started out at Illinois State University, which had a national student exchange program where you could study at another university, so I went down to LSU. After a semester, I called my parents and said, ‘There’s no way I’m leaving this place!’ I fell completely in love with the area and did another semester. That summer I went back home and just knew in my heart that I belonged in Louisiana, so I transferred to LSU.”

[...]

As an LSU student, Smith experienced Southeast Louisiana culture like a local. “I had friends from Baton Rouge, New Orleans and surrounding towns like Amite,” Smith says. “I’d go home with friends or go to church with their families. It was so neat to experience Louisiana that way, and it greatly affected me. Chicago was home base so I spent holidays in Metairie, which was home to lots of my friends. My husband [John Connolly] hears me tell stories about my time in Louisiana, and the food I ate and the songs we sang or heard. I saw some down-home versions of Mardi Gras parades different from the tourist stuff. I really love the way people live life in Louisiana; whether you’re a guy or a gal, everyone can cook and dance. That was so different from how I grew up in the Midwest. Everybody in Louisiana boils shrimp in their backyard and has a musical instrument in their living room, and I just love the appreciation for life and family there.”

Smith’s career began as a research associate at Aegis Capital before working as a trader at Hermitage Capital in New York City. She then became the Director of Institutional Sales and Trading for Terra Nova Institutional before being wooed into the world of television. “I was the only female at an all-male trade desk at Terra Nova in Chicago, which is actually where I met my husband, when I was asked to be the face of the company and offer commentary from the trading floors to Bloomberg Television and CNBC,” Smith says. “I was nervous but agreed to do it; then producers from Bloomberg were calling and saying, ‘What do you think about doing this as a career?’ They hired me to work in New York, so I packed my bags and the rest is history. I was at Bloomberg for less than a year when FOX called to say they were launching the FOX Business Network in Oct. 2007, and I was there reporting from day one.”

Smith was only 26 when she arrived at Fox. She had loved the local culture at LSU. Now she encountered the local culture which obtains at Fox.

It was at that point that this well-raised young person encountered a rather tough crowd.

The analysts say we should understand how tough it has been for Smith. How tough it must have been when a simple twist of fate—and an obvious error by a producer—deposited her in the situation which has now made her a household name and a figure of nationwide ridicule.

Quite plainly, some inexperienced weekend producer made a rookie mistake! Vice President Harris had issued a statement in which she referred to "the Democratic Party." That's the actual name of the actual party, but it's a formulation you aren't allowed to utter at Fox!

Having said that, so what? Some rookie producer put that part of Harris' statement right up on the screen—and Smith was then charged with reading the statement! 

Smith knew she couldn't say those words, and so she made the obvious choice. She bowed to regional culture.

How much is Smith paid to behave this way? Online, we've seen it said that she's paid $5 million per year.

We know of no reason to believe that's true. We know of no reason to assume that it's false.

As she has mentioned in various profiles, she married a Chicago business guy, as was good and completely appropriate. Before she had any way of knowing what she'd be getting into, her husband had uprooted his career and followed her to New York. 

After that, the reckoning! In this passage from the Louisiana profile, she puts the best possible face on what she had been forced to deal with at her current workplace:

Smith lives in Westchester County in New York with her husband, daughter Cora, son John and a German Shorthaired Pointer named Whiskey, and she feels lucky to have a wonderful family and an amazing career. “You can read some unfortunate things about FOX, but I can sincerely say it’s really a supportive work environment,” Smith says. “I have great relationships with many of my colleagues. Recently, FOX sponsored tables at the Susan G. Komen event in New York City to honor Gerri Willis, an anchor at FBN who had breast cancer and thankfully is now cancer-free. It was so nice for us to all come together for such a great person and a great cause. I’ve got an incredibly impressive group of people when it comes to experience, education and smarts to call my colleagues.”

Also, she has a wonderful group of colleagues who aren't allowed to say certain words on the air. She apparently knew what she had to do when some feckless weekend producer made a dumb rookie mistake

It had nothing to do with the salary she draws, or with her ongoing lifestyle. The analysts say it was most likely related to her love for her colleagues—for people like the vintage loudmouth Judge Jeanine and also the crackpot Levin.

She could have read the actual words which were right there on the screen. That's what a journalist would have done—but who knows where it might have led? And so, she insulted her viewers and played the fool in the way local culture required.

Smith loved the local culture at LSU. She bows to the local culture at Fox—to the ways of a very tough crowd.

A rookie producer made a mistake; she was forced to clean it up. Do we hear an elegy for American political / journalistic culture when we see people like Smith dragged down by such regional practices?

As Sartre once wrote, it was Huis Clos—there was no way out. Whether in English or in French, she refused to read what was there on the screen. Such decisions are made at the Fox News Channel on an everyday, round the clock basis.

Viewers don't know that they're getting played. Employees seem to know what's required. 

Tomorrow: It's time for a change...