TV News Review

Tonight I was watching the last part of The Fox Report with Shepard Smith. As most cable news fans know, Shep has a tendancy to make the occasional misspeak on air. In spite of that he’s so likable it’s hard to hold it against him. Earlier there had been a story about a great dane which had given birth to 15 puppies (8 male and 7 female). Apparently Shep had done the math (8 + 7) and came up with 14 puppies. As you might imagine, thousands of people had written in to inform him of his weak math skills.

Shepard was good natured about the whole thing. He even suggested that O’Reilly might be able to use the video tape of the puppies for something. One can only imagine what O’Reilly might do with such a tape.

The Fox Report is everything an early evening newscast should be. It’s fast paced and keeps the attention of even those with a short attention span. The most important news of the day is first and then he blazes around the world in 80 seconds with a few of the unusual stories of the day.

As easy going and likable as Shepard is, he is at his best on a breaking news story. Last week I was flipping between the channels as they reported the Minnesota bridge collapse. The information was pretty much the same on all the networks because there wasn’t a lot of confirmed facts to report. I think the difference was that Shepard seemed to be comfortable to let the story unfold. He didn’t have the answers and that’s what he told the viewers.

As Shepard said at the end of the broadcast, “If you have puppies, I feel like you should show them”. Here’s a link to the video.       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKEjVUs4Wag