After 23 years, Shepard Smith anchored his last newscast and announced his sudden departure from Fox News, effective Friday.

With him goes, really, the last claim that Fox News could honestly make to being “fair and balanced.”

While everyone else at the network seems more or less happy to toe the conservative line, Smith has been willing to be a more independent voice.

Not only has Smith proven willing to challenge Donald Trump’s huge propensity for dishonesty–he called some of Trump’s responses at an early press conference “absolutely crazy–and, egad!, had the temerity to defend rival CNN when Trump attacked it as “fake news.”

“CNN’s reporting was not fake news,” Smith said at the time. “Its journalists follow the same standards to which other news organizations, including Fox News, adhere.”

Moreover, at a time when Trump was falsely telling the nation that the Mueller Report completely exonerated him, Smith encouraged viewers to read the entire report for themselves.

And now, with no real explanation, Smith is gone.

One cannot but think network executives will slide one more Tucker Carlson clone into Shepard’s old time slot, and the pretense of being Fox “News” will finally have come to a final, screeching end.

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