Fox News host Shepard Smith regrets suggesting actor and comedian Robin Williams’ apparent death by suicide was cowardly.
Toward the close of a Monday night special report on Williams’ death, Smith read a quote from Williams about his daughter. “One of the children he so loved, one of the children grieving tonight, because their father killed himself in a fit of depression,” Smith said.
“It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? You could love three little things so much, watch them grow, and they’re in their mid-20s and they’re inspiring you and exciting you and they fill you up with a kind of joy you can never have known,” he continued. “Yet something inside you is so horrible, or you’re such a coward, or whatever the reason that you decide have you to end it. Robin Williams, at 63, did that today.”
Smith told Mediaite in a phone interview Tuesday that he was just “wondering aloud what could have made this man want to end it all.”
“But no matter how you process it: Look at what this family is going through,” he said, as quoted by Mediaite. “I would never presume to know anything about his private life. And if any of his family members and friends were to have seen me use the word “coward,” I would be horrified. I would just to apologize to the end of the earth to anyone who might think that I meant to openly call him a coward.”
“To the core of my being, I regret it,” he added.
Watch below:
Probably the only FOX person to ever admit regret for something he/she said.
He thinks depression is just feeling really sad.
Depression is being so far down, you don’t know there is an up.
I’m willing to cut Shep some slack here. He said something he shouldn’t have said. He apologized for it. Fine with me.
And he seems to be about the only human being working at Fox News with even a hint of morality or decency.
Fox should have a segment every day called the Daily Apologies. It would consist of all the things rhey said that day that needed an apology.
In his defense, this sort of reaction might be seen as normal, a normal reaction to addiction. If only addiction made sense. In Smith’s position as a journo he might want to get educated, but he is voicing what a lot of normal people think. Addiction is a great tragedy, in part because of how addicts are judged and how they judge themselves. This is why people kill themselves.
The meetings are anonymous for a reason. One reason famous people are discouraged from identifying publicly is they become poster children if they relapse, spreading the myth that recovery is impossible.