Fox News anchor Shep Smith repeatedly shut down questions posed by the co-hosts of Fox’s “The Five” on Monday evening while covering the riots in Baltimore following the funeral for Freddie Gray.
As Smith updated the hosts on the turmoil in Baltimore, co-host Eric Bolling asked about the presence of civil rights leaders.
“I haven’t heard anything from any civil rights leaders. Have you?” Bolling asked.
Smith said he’d heard from at least one civil rights leader calling for peace.
“But it seems like in the middle of all of this,” Smith said, “to start picking on people for civil rights and what they’re saying and what they’re not saying, we could spend our time watching this and reporting on it—”
Bolling cut in and said it would be “nice timing” for a civil rights leader to call on protesters to remain peaceful.
Co-host Greg Gutfeld later asked, “Where are the parents?”
“Well, you know, I’ve not been on the phone with them,” Smith said. “But if we want to sit here and indict the civil rights community and indict the parents for what we’re watching right now, instead of for now, just covering what happens and then later talk about whose fault it is, because we don’t know whose fault it is.”
“No one’s indicting anyone,” Bolling jumped in to say. “We’re asking the legitimate questions.”
“Bolling, the question was, ‘Where are the parents?'” Smith said. “Surely you don’t expect me to know that.”
Gutfeld replied that he’d asked about a “hypothetical.”
“We’ve got a major American city that has decades of turmoil within this neighborhood,” Smith said. “Clearly there is a big problem. Then, all of a sudden, an African-American man is taken into a vehicle and he comes out of it and dies.”
“It’s what happened between all of that and today that has led to this,” he continued.
Watch the clip via Media Matters:
