Why Shep Smith finally walked out of Fox News for good

With President Trump actively distorting the truth and many of his own colleagues helping him do it, the Fox News star prided himself on anchoring a newscast that countered the network’s pro-Trump opinion shows.

The way Smith saw it, he was making sure that accurate information was getting on Fox’s air.

“I wonder,” he told a Time magazine reporter last year, “if I stopped delivering the facts, what would go in its place in this place that is most watched, most listened, most viewed, most trusted? I don’t know.”

But he had had enough. In September, according to a well-placed source, he went to Fox News management and asked to be let out of his long-term contract. Tensions with the opinion shows were the breaking point.