Tucker Carlson Callously Attacked Ex-Fox News Colleague Shep Smith Over His Coverage Of Maskless Floridians

There’s no love lost between Shepard Smith and his old stomping ground, Fox News. The current CNBC anchor spent 23 years there, mostly out of loyalty to Roger Ailes, who he paid tribute to as a “complicated” person following the ousted news network head’s death. A little while later — and after he’d continued to slam his colleagues’ handling of almost everything from the NFL to a Clinton controversy — Shep left the building. Fast forward a few years, and Shep began anchoring at CNBC while declaring that he has no idea “how some people sleep at night.” That was a statement to Christiane Amanpour, to whom Shep also stated that he’d hung at Fox News for as long as he could to provide a counterpoint to Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity’s far-right rhetoric.

Well, Tucker was listening, and he’s salty. After Shep covered a story of a Florida grocery store that was almost completely full of maskless patrons (during a pandemic), Tucker turned on his sarcasm faucet and let it flow. “Tonight we bring you the story of a genuine investigative journalist,” Tucker began. “A man who’s been forgotten. Cast aside like an Acosta when he should be an Edward R. Murrow. That’s an injustice we plan to rectify right now.” Yikes.

That was only the beginning. “Last night, this same investigative journalist (now an anchor at CNBC) broke the story of a lifetime. If Pulitzer Prizes still mattered, and they don’t, this would get a Pulitzer,” Carlson said while comparing the clip to the Zapruder film and the moon landing. “We believed the hype, I guess. Maybe when you spend 30 years reading scripts about car chases everything seems like a car chase.”

Tucker then threw down his verdict: “The problem is, not everything is a car chase. Sometimes people are just smiling at each other in a grocery store. Sorry, overheated news guy. That’s not actually news.” So far, there’s been no reply from Shep Smith. Let’s hope he’s not listening anymore.