Esquire has a profile of every liberal's favorite Fox News jockey Shep Smith this month. It's cute-ish and funny, but a bit murky. Just who is this guy? Is he friend or foe?

I'm gonna go ahead and say friend, if only because his going rogue at Fox and deciding to mostly just report the news objectively (albeit while yelling) is a noble (if pointless) effort to steer the cable news net back toward the gummy middle. Plus he's fiery and angry enough while defending his supposed non-bias that he's still got a streak of the occasionally-fun Fox crazy running through him:

"But we are under intense scrutiny because of our opinion shows. Are there people who want the news done a certain way? You bet there are, and some are in this building. But they don't affect what I do. The inner pressure and outer pressure that everyone thinks exists doesn't. When I hear people say that Fox News is right wing, I know that's not true, because I'm the one doing the news. It's my show, and there's no place for opinion on my show. It's uninteresting to me. I don't care what Sean Hannity thinks and I don't care what Alan Colmes thinks and I guarantee they don't care what I think and they don't know, either. You know what's interesting to me? What's interesting to me is that the thing people want to know about is the part on which I spend absolutely no time."

Because They Hate Shepard Smith and They Want Him to Fail [Esquire]