Shepard Smith's CNBC struggles have reportedly led to behind-the-scenes turmoil, including "temper tantrums"

The Daily Beast

The News with Shepard Smith has struggled to bring in viewers in the nine months since it launched on  CNBC. "And those struggles have seemingly fostered some turmoil within the network and the show’s staff," reports The Daily Beast's Lachlan Cartwright and Maxwell Tani, who add: "The show has faced its fair share of internal friction, some of which has centered on the host himself. Smith is seen as a pro with high news standards prone to generous gestures—he famously sends his employees several hundred dollars every year as a holiday bonus—but amid a wider re-evaluation of bullying in media workplaces, some staffers have complained that he is difficult to deal with. At least two people with direct knowledge of the situation described Smith as having regular 'temper tantrums.' When CNBC announced Smith was joining the business news channel, it tapped Sandy Cannold, a veteran TV producer, to help helm the show along with co-executive producer Sally Ramirez, a veteran of local television. But according to multiple people familiar with the matter, Cannold departed less than six months in, and clashed at times with Smith in front of staff. Other employees were also frustrated when, in recent weeks, the show laid off two of the few non-white employees on its production team. Smith’s underperformance in the ratings hasn’t come as a surprise to cable-news insiders. For one, much of Smith’s allure in the final years of his Fox News tenure may have come from his status as seemingly the only daily hard-news anchor at the network, where he often provided scathing fact-checks of his conservative colleagues and seemed alien to the network’s editorial focus on right-wing outrages of the day. Without that tension, the veteran news anchor blends in with a crowded field of consummate news reporters."