Michael Smerconish Biography
Michael Smerconish is an American political commentator, newspaper columnist, author, Lawyer, and Radio and television presenter working for CNN as a host of the weekly Saturday TV program on CNN fittingly called “Smerconish. He joined the CNN news team in 2014, after previously working for MSNBC.
Michael Smerconish Career
Smerconish grew up in a Republican family. When he was in his early teens, he started writing to Frank L. Rizzo, who was Mayor of Philadelphia at the time and was a Democrat. It was inevitable that they would meet and become close. On the other hand, Smerconish got his start in politics in the spring of 1980, when his father ran unsuccessfully in a Republican primary for the Pennsylvania state house.
Smerconish worked hard on his dad’s campaign during his final year of high school, which was also the year he registered to vote for the first time. Smerconish loved Republican politics, even though his father lost the election. He had met both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush before the Pennsylvania Primary.
Smerconish established Lehigh University Youth for Reagan/Bush in 1980. He ran for the Pennsylvania state assembly while he was a full-time student at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He lost the Republican Primary by 419 votes. After losing his primary, Smerconish kept going to Penn Law while running political campaigns almost full-time. In 1986, he was in charge of the City of Philadelphia during Senator Arlen Specter’s re-election campaign.
In 1987, he was Rizzo’s political director during Rizzo’s failed drive to take back City Hall. It was after he graduated from Penn Law that he and his brother Wally started a title insurance business. When he was 29, President George H.W. Bush chose him to be the Regional Administrator for Philadelphia Region III for the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Secretary Jack Kemp.
Smerconish only backed Republican candidates for president for thirty years. On October 19, 2008, he openly broke with the GOP and backed Barack Obama for president. In a newspaper piece on February 21, 2010, he said that he was no longer a Republican. There may be a common belief that the only way to succeed in the world of talk is to claim one of the poles.
Smerconish’s time at HUD came to an end after Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election. Beginning in 1993, Smerconish worked as a lawyer for ten years with the famous trial lawyer James E. Beasley. Beasley would later become the founder and name of the Temple University Beasley School of Law. He and Smerconish met when Smerconish asked Beasley for legal advice about a possible defamation suit against Steve Lopez, who was a writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer at the time.
People knew Beasley for the defamation cases he won against the press that broke records. Smerconish specialized in complex tort cases and worked closely with Beasley for ten years. He wrote an essay about some of the things he learned working for Beasley and presented it at a law seminar put on by the Pennsylvania Bar Institute in 2015.
Smerconish was able to successfully sue abortion provider Kermit Gosnell for medical malpractice. During his time as a lawyer, Smerconish was on the Board of Directors of The Philadelphia Trial Lawyers Association for one term. He still has his law license, which you can see in the office of the Philadelphia law company Kline & Specter.
As Smerconish became more well-known on the radio, he was asked to appear on more and more TV shows, first locally and then nationally. In Philadelphia, his friend and future boss Larry Kane asked him to be on WCAU Channel 10 to talk about the election night. He then became a regular on Inside Story, a show on the local ABC affiliate (WPVI) that was led by Marc Howard.
Smerconish was also featured on Lynn Doyle’s show It’s Your Call on CN8 a lot of times as a guest. Soon, Smerconish was hired by CNN to be a guest on Arthel Neville’s show TalkBack Live and also to lead the show. CNN hired Smerconish as a legal expert and also used him to fill in for Glenn Beck on CNN’s Headline News. Attorneys at Law, a show on CNN with Smerconish, Jeffrey Toobin, and Lisa Bloom, ran for a short time.
CNN moved to full-time coverage of the Iraq War, and the show was cut off and never came back. Later, Smerconish became a contributor on MSNBC after being asked to do so by Phil Griffin, who would later become the head of MSNBC. There, he started presenting Scarborough Country when former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough wasn’t there. When Don Imus was fired from MSNBC in 2007 for using a racial slur, Smerconish was asked to fill in as a guest host for Imus during the week of April 23–27 as a practice run.
Jon Anderson of Yes and Rudy Giuliani, who used to be mayor of New York City, were guests in the studio. MSNBC finally hired Scarborough to take over the time that Imus had been there, and the show was renamed Morning Joe. At MSNBC, Smerconish’s job changed to appearing every day with Tamron Hall, host of News Nation, and as a guest host of Hardball when Chris Matthews wasn’t there. He did this for five years. At the same time, he was a guest host on The Radio Factor for Bill O’Reilly, even though the media was divided and MSNBC and Fox News were different.
Smerconish had 80 radio stations across the country that were part of his terrestrial radio brand as of 2013. He chose to move to the POTUS Channel 124 on Sirius XM Radio instead. At the time, he said that this showed that he wanted to talk about issues in a “nonpartisan” way since he had left the Republican Party in 2010. He also said that satellite radio would allow him to talk about politics more freely without being tied to a party.
Smerconish quit MSNBC because CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker, asked him to lead his show there in 2014. He airs on CNN every Saturday at 9 a.m. ET. CNN International also showed the show all over the globe. From Larry King Live to The View, Real Time with Bill Maher to The Today Show, The Colbert Report to The O’Reilly Factor, Smerconish has been on almost every TV show that talks about politics.
He also has a Sunday column in The Philadelphia Inquirer, and newspapers across the country have run his work, such as The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post, The Miami Herald, The Boston Herald, The Sacramento Bee, and The Detroit News.
Smerconish showed an autobiographical short called Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Talking on CNN on July 11, 2020, to mark 30 years of being on talk radio. In the movie, Smerconish talks about how he went from always voting Republican to becoming a registered independent. He does this by showing parts of interviews and telling stories from his time as a political analyst on talk radio and TV.
In the end, he says that the main reason the Republican party is different from the one he joined in 1980 is that lawmakers now listen to the media. The movie was bought by Virgil Films in October 2020 and first shown in virtual theaters on December 8, 2020. The movie first showed on Hulu on June 15, 2021.
At CNN, Scholes works alongside; Fareed Zakaria, Fredricka Whitfield, Bill Weir, Amara Walker, John Avlon, Dana Bash, David Axelrod, John Berman, Victor Blackwell, Wolf Blitzer, Kate Bolduan, Pamela Brown, Kim Brunhuber, Erin Burnett, Alisyn Camerota, Julia Chatterley, Rosemary Church, Laura Coates, Anderson Cooper, Audie Cornish, Amanda Davies, Max Foster, Bianna Golodryga, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Laila Harrak, Erica Hill, Michael Holmes, Van Jones, Brianna Keilar, Lynda Kinkade, John King, Melissa Knowles, Christina Macfarlane, John Miller, Veronica Miracle, Bianca Nobilo, Abby Phillip, Brad Parks, Richard Quest, Don Riddell, Andy Scholes, Boris Sanchez, Tom Sater.
Michael Smerconish Education
Smerconish finished his high school education at Doylestown, Pennsylvania’s Central Bucks High School West. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Lehigh University and a Juris Doctor from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has received several honorary degrees, including a Doctor of Humane Letters from Widener University on May 26, 2016, another Doctor of Humane Letters from Delaware Valley College on May 19, 2018, and a Doctor of Science from the University of the Sciences on May 20, 2020.
Michael Smerconish Salary
Smerconish earns a salary of about $100,000-$520,000.
Michael Smerconish Net Worth
Smerconish has an estimated net worth of about $1 Million – $7 Million which he has earned through his career as a news host.
Michael Smerconish Age
Smerconish was born on March 15, 1962, in Edinburgh, United Kingdom. He is 61 years old as of 2023, and he celebrates his birthday on the 15th of March every year.
Michael Smerconish Height and Weight
Smerconish stands at a height of 5 feet 9 inches tall (1.75m) and weighs 61 kgs (134 lbs).
Michael Smerconish Family
Smerconish was born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania to Florence Smerconish (mother) and Walter Smerconish (father) Central Bucks School District educator. He was raised alongside his brother Wally Smerconish. His father died at Doylestown Hospital on October 11, 2018.
Michael Smerconish Wife and Children
Smerconish is married to Lavinia Nardini, a veteran real estate agent who is employed by Compass. They are blessed with four children; Smerconish jr., Simon Smerconish, Wilson Smerconish, and a daughter named Caitlin Chagan from Lavinia’s previous relationship. They currently reside in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
Michael Smerconish First Wife
Smerconish has only married once in his life. He is married to Lavinia Nardini and together they are blessed with four children.
Michael Smerconish Daughter Wedding
Smerconish’s stepdaughter Caitlin Chagan tied the knot with her loving husband in 2019. The wedding ceremony took place in her parent’s home in New Hope, and it was attended by family and close friends.
Michael Smerconish Books
- Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right: American Life in Columns
- Talk: A Novel
- Morning Drive: Things I Wish I Knew Before I
- Instinct: The Man Who Stopped the 20th Hijacker
- Murdered by Mumia: A Life Sentence of Loss, Pain, and Injustice
- Flying Blind: How Political Correctness Continues to Compromise Airline Safety
Michael Smerconish Social Media Platforms
Smerconish is very active on his Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook pages. He has 240.3k followers on Twitter 38k followers on Instagram, and 121k followers on Facebook.