David Shepard Smith Jr. is an American broadcast journalist for NBC News and CNBC, where he serves as chief general news anchor and hosts The News with Shepard Smith, a daily evening newscast launched in fall 2020. Smith is best known for his 23-year career at Fox News Channel, which he joined at its 1996 inception and where he served as chief anchor and managing editor of the breaking news division. Smith hosted several programs in his tenure at Fox News, including Fox Report, Studio B and Shepard Smith Reporting. In 2017, Smith came out as gay, prompting homophobic backlash from the conservative Fox viewers, some of whom demanded his show be cancelled. He left the station in 2019. In a 2021 interview with Christiane Amanpour, Smith stated that his presence on Fox had become "untenable" due to the "falsehoods" and "lies" intentionally spread on the network's opinion shows.