‘National Day of Intolerance’: Did Shepard Smith Attack Chick-fil-A?

Posted on August 1, 2012 at 9:45pm by Mytheos Holt

Fox News‘ Shepard Smith is an unconventional broadcaster by his network’s standards. On the one hand, despite being sandwiched between opinion shows, Smith’s sign-off, “Now you know the news,” is more the signature line of a straight news broadcaster. And indeed, Smith’s show tends to follow more the format of his compatriots such as Bret Baier or Chris Wallace.
However, unlike Baier or Wallace, Smith does inject opinions into his shows, and they’re not usually opinions that observers would expect on Fox News. Indeed, at least on social questions, Smith tends to be downright liberal. Take his quote from early May saying that Republicans were “on the wrong side of history” when it comes to gay marriage. Or, for that matter, take a comment he made today that sounds an awful lot like a slam against Mike Huckabee’s “Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day.”
“It’s National Badminton Day,” Smith said. “Forget National Day of Intolerance, let’s just say with Badminton.”

“National Day of Intolerance?” Unless we’re missing some sort of Nazi appreciation day or similar little-known holiday, that would seem to be a clear slam against Chick-fil-A. Quite aside from making water cooler conversations awkward between Huckabee and Smith (who are colleagues at Fox News), one wonders what prompted this apparent outburst from Smith.