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" Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Smith went to Ole Miss, where he reported for the school&amp;#039;s TV station. Oxford is home. And New York is home, too. I feel like if you were here on 9/11, this is home.  My mother could find good in every bad thing we ever did.  I was watching Elvis&amp;#039;s funeral on Channel 5 in Memphis. They had a live camera for the first time locally that I ever knew of. I was fascinated as a thirteen-year-old by the fact that they could do live broadcasts from Memphis that I could see at the same time they were happening -- in my house. The way we elect a president is -- it&amp;#039;s like nothing in the world, it&amp;#039;s spectacular. But I hate the hate. I can&amp;#039;t take it.  I didn&amp;#039;t decide Joe the Plumber was going to go on a tour for John McCain. They decided it. And once they made that decision, then it is my belief as a journalist that he deserves, now, more scrutiny. And one of my senior writers came over to where I sit and said, &amp;quot;Joe the Plumber just agreed with a guy that a vote for Barack Obama is a vote for the death of Israel.&amp;quot; Okay, he needs to be asked why he believes this. Well, he came on and he said it was up to our viewers to find out why it was that he would say such a thing. When a man representing the GOP says what he said and doesn&amp;#039;t know why he said it, or, if he does, won&amp;#039;t let us know, and then tells our audience to go troll the Internet for reasons he might think that, I don&amp;#039;t think it&amp;#039;s the job of a journalist to further that line of thinking.  Smith grills Joe the Plumber on &amp;quot;death of Israel&amp;quot; comment:      We&amp;#039;ve come 180 degrees from a life where Barack Obama, in another time, would have been a slave potentially. That&amp;#039;s bigger than Barack Obama, and it&amp;#039;s bigger than my observations. He won the capital of the Confederacy. That people don&amp;#039;t understand the difference between Fox&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;op-ed page&amp;quot; and our news is not about me, it&amp;#039;s about them.  It is troublesome sometimes when people get up in your face in public, you know? And say, &amp;quot;How could you, how dare you?&amp;quot; Well, they don&amp;#039;t know me.  When I told Sean Hannity, &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s all the perspective you need,&amp;quot; I was aware that thousands of people were living on a freeway in 95-degree weather, that some of them needed insulin, and some of them needed baby formula, and right over that bridge those things existed, and they weren&amp;#039;t allowed to go there. That was my whole world. I did not know that the rest of the world had turned this political. How the fuck could they have done that? I was so astonished to get on one of our opinion programs -- Hannity &amp;amp;amp; Colmes -- and to learn that the rest of the world was apparently thinking of Katrina in terms of left and right, R and D. Poverty is not a new thing to me. Segregation is not a new thing. But that these happen to be the people who are now in need, and no leadership is emerging to give them what they need, was beyond all reason. So that was all the perspective he needed. [Sean] just didn&amp;#039;t know that.  Smith grills Sean Hannity on &amp;quot;perspective&amp;quot; comment:      Oh, I don&amp;#039;t talk about God.  Everybody comes to the journalist with an agenda.  We would save for weeks to go get a beer. And all of a sudden my dad -- my dad didn&amp;#039;t have any money, but he would send in the U. S. mail a hundred-dollar bill, wrapped in aluminum foil, so that we could go do something. And that really changed our lives. So now, I just try to share a lot. That&amp;#039;s how money is fun.  I&amp;#039;m fortunate enough not to be poor, and I&amp;#039;m not a bad tipper.  Facts are good things to have when making decisions. If Sarah Palin didn&amp;#039;t know that Africa was a continent, I think that&amp;#039;s information that people could have used.  Smith grills Carl Cameron on &amp;quot;foibles of Sarah Palin&amp;quot; comment:      Forgive me, but I do feel like there is some level of service that&amp;#039;s provided by journalists. I wouldn&amp;#039;t have gotten into it if I didn&amp;#039;t believe that. I think I am serving, in a way. I do not want to be a politician. Kill me now! I love Faulkner, but even though he was writing about the area where I grew up, I didn&amp;#039;t try to see myself in his books. I never really did that. I was not -- I am not -- intellectual in that way. I don&amp;#039;t look for me anywhere. I know where I am. I&amp;#039;m here. Smith gets blown over by Hurricane Rita:      Interviewed by Mark Warren, November 6, 2008   RELATED STORIES:  MORE VIDEOS: Five YouTube Hits Picked Apart Every Friday on Esquire&amp;#039;s Blog of Lists!  WHAT I&amp;#039;VE LEARNED: Rubert Murdoch Opens Up on the Future of the News  PLUS: More Wisdom and Damn Good Advice from Hundreds of Headliners!  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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