OXFORD, Miss. (AP) — Longtime Fox News anchor Shepard Smith has opened up about his sexuality and the impact it has had on his career.
Smith mentioned in a recent speech at the University of Mississippi that he had never stood in front of a group of people to talk about being gay, but added that he has “nothing to hide.”
Smith says he began living his “truth” within the past decade. He says he never “outed” himself because he didn’t think he was “in.” Smith told students he spent many years constantly working, in part because he didn’t want to deal with his sexuality.
Now, Smith says he doesn’t think about his sexuality much. He says he goes to work, covers the news and goes “home to the man I’m in love with.”
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Good for him, but it must be just awful for him at times working for such a homophobic hate-mongering network and knowing how many people his network have tried to destroy (generally through character assassination) simply based on who people choose to love.
In some ways, I wish he would comment on that (though I won’t hold my breath)…nor do I hold him responsible for what his network has done, but it does pose a certain cognitive dissonance at the same time he’s chosen to go public. He probably had to get the OK to go public there from the higher ups at Faux. Nothing happens by accident there. In some ways, it looks like Faux’s effort at rehabilitating their very public image as an intolerant place to work, imo. Maybe someday Smith will help the public understand why he chooses to stay there, and whether he’s been harassed, as so many others have been who’ve come forward in relation to that network. Or maybe that only happens to the women there…because misogyny has a more fertile ground to proliferate than homophobia.
He works for Fox. He knows what’s going on.
He says nothing.
I have no respect for him whatsoever.
Me neither…but then again, I don’t watch any Faux Nooze. My TV’s digital feed cuts out too often on that channel. I take it as a blessing in disguise.
That’s the problem with his pronouncement. It is good that he is finally willing to be open about who he is, but . . . he has been willing to stand by when his employer repeatedly discriminated against and harassed others. That doesn’t make him a hero in my book.