Fox's Shepard Smith defends CNN against Donald Trump's 'belittling'

(Image credit: YouTube.com/ThePolitiStick)

last updated 12 January 2017

He works for Fox News, but Shepard Smith was firmly on Team CNN Wednesday afternoon when he spoke out against Donald Trump accusing the network of spreading "fake news."

In his first press conference in several months, Trump blasted CNN for reporting on intelligence officials briefing Trump about Russia having blackmail-worthy material on him (the dossier, with unverified claims, was later published on BuzzFeed). Trump denied the allegations, called it "fake news," and refused to take a question from the network's Jim Acosta. "Not you," he snapped. "Your organization is terrible." After again saying CNN reports "fake news," Trump took a question from the right-wing website Breitbart News.

Shepard took umbrage to Trump's attitude, and said so during Shepard Smith Reporting's closing segment. "CNN's exclusive reporting on the Russian matter was separate and distinctly different from the document dump executed by an online news property," he said. "Though we at Fox News cannot confirm CNN's report, it is our observation that its correspondents followed journalistic standards and that neither they nor any other journalists should be subjected to belittling and delegitimizing by the president-elect of the United States."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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