Stephen A. Smith, the featured commentator and executive producer of First Take and analyst for NBA Countdown on ESPN, was honored with the Joseph M. Quinn Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Los Angeles Press Club in a ceremony over the weekend. Smith, who also owns and operates Mr. SAS Productions and hosts The Stephen A. Smith Show podcast, was on hand to accept the honor and delivered a speech reflecting on the importance of journalistic fundamentals and principles as the media landscape continues to change.
Before hosting radio and television programming, Smith got his start as a reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal and also worked for the Greensboro News and Record and New York Daily News. Smith then joined The Philadelphia Inquirer where he spent 16 years, first starting as a beat writer before being promoted to a general sports columnist. Receiving the Joseph M. Quinn Award for Lifetime Achievement, he explained, is one of the greatest honors of his career because of what the award represents.
“You see, in this day and age where we see so much punditry and commentary, when we see everybody having an opinion, when all of a sudden the standards seem to have been lessened because everybody wants a voice and everybody’s clamoring for a voice,” Smith said. “Integrity, professionalism and the tenets upon which we stood and still stand to this very day has gone by the wayside in a lot of people’s eyes, and it’s created a divide in this country. It ain’t just about right and left; it’s also about right and wrong.”
Smith expressed how it has become easy to spin facts and spread disinformation rather than communicating the genuine truth to the audience. Reflecting on what Joseph Quinn stood for, Smith conveyed that he has prioritized objectivity and the pursuit of the truth, serving the audience without deceit or artifice.
“First Take’s No. 1. My podcast in 14 months has eclipsed over 700,000 subscribers. On average in the digital stratosphere that everybody’s talking about trying to make noise all the time, I reached over 2 billion a year,” Smith said. “In the eyes of other people, that’s something to brag about. To me, it’s something that heightens my awareness of the responsibility that I have to be in tireless pursuit of the truth and to be fair and humane along the way. That’s the difference.
“It matters. That’s why I can walk the streets. It’s why I can sit up there and look adversaries in the face and tell them to kick rocks. It’s why I can ignore a bunch of others. It’s why I can take the level of cynicism and criticism and skepticism that would make most people fold because understand something. In this field that we’re in – in the field of journalism – here’s what people forgot. You’re not supposed to be here to be liked.”
While Smith would like to be universally loved or at the very least liked, he understands that it is not the reason he is in the business. On the contrary, he works in the business to discover the truth and make an impact in society. Even though Smith knows that he is not correct all of the time, he promised the audience that he would never act like he is right when he knows he is wrong. Adhering to his principles and eschewing from insulting his audience, the profession or its luminaries is why he believes that he is the best.
“I’ve always felt that way, and that’s why I’m the best,” Smith said. “I’m not only the best because I know I’m not; I just strive every day to be that way. I’m the best because I’m mission minded.”
Smith explained that the mission comes from the journalism industry and what he was taught it was about, always seeking to exhibit integrity and act in a professional manner. He attributed the establishment of his principles to his late mother, stating that she is still with him every day, and the industry itself. Smith is honored to receive the same award as several pioneers in the journalism, including Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw and Andrea Mitchell, and articulated that he deserved the honor because he never lets go of what he was taught by the industry.
“Other people are on the air trying to get sizzle,” Smith said. “I’m on the air to bring sizzle with facts, with perspectives, and with the kind of content that makes you stop, pause, listen, inhale before you disseminate a perspective. Why? Because if you’re a provocateur of conversation and dialogue, that’s where real change begins. They don’t want to tell you that because that would mean this profession is everything we know it is and more. They want to act like something else is better. It ain’t. Don’t ever let them convince you otherwise.”
