The first week of former Fox News anchor Shepard Smith’s new show on CNBC is off to an interesting start.
The program, The News with Shepard Smith, which debuted last Wednesday, a day after the presidential debate, averaged slightly more than 340,000 viewers from the first episode throughout the rest of the week, according to Nielsen Media Research. He also participated in the network’s coverage of President Trump’s departure for Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
The ratings, which are much smaller than the major cable news outlets, are comparable to those of Fox Business Network.
Smith, in accepting a role at CNBC, accepted that he would have a smaller audience than the one he walked away from about a year ago at Fox News. Even though he anchored one of the lowest rated show on Fox News, his show averaged more than 1.2 million viewers during the 2019 third quarter, which was his last one there before abruptly resigning.
CNBC did not have consistent live programming during the time slot Smith now fills. Exactly one year before Smith’s debut, the network had 159,000 viewers during the same time period.
He left Fox News last fall after working there for roughly 23 years since the network’s inception in 1996. Smith began his television career a decade earlier at WJHG-TV in Panama City Beach, Florida.
